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Apple announced they plan on challenging Google in the mobile advertising space with a new iAds advertising platform.

By Laurence Knight

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has placed himself head-to-head with rival Google in the budding mobile advertising market, by announcing a new iAd advertising platform to be rolled out this summer.

The announcement follows Apple’s purchase in January of mobile advertising network Quattro Wireless for $300m (£196m), demonstrating that Mr Jobs is happy to put his money where his mouth is.  Read More

People often think that if you pay more per click that guarantees you a higher position in the search results.  This may have been the case years ago however now Google factors in two things when determining your Ad Rank.  One being the amount your bid and the other is your “Quality Score.” Maintaining a good quality score allows your ads to be in top postitions at a lower cost per click.

What is Quality Score?
Quality Score for Google and the Search Network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.

Here are 8 steps to improve your Adwords Quality Score

1. Generate a Relevant Keyword List
Generate a list of your business’s products and services.  Then use a keyword tool to research exactly how people search online for these products and services.  There may be many different variations for each product or service.  Start by picking the keywords that users search on the most.  And then test these keywords accordingly overtime to determine which ones perform best in your Adwords Campaign.

2. Separate Keywords into Groups
It is important to keep a very targeted list of keywords in each Adgroup. Focus on one product and service and group all related keywords to that product or service in one Adgroup. Driving traffic is important but it’s more important to drive the most qualified traffic to your website.  So keep your keyword lists very specific and focus on the goals you are trying to achieve from this traffic.

3. Create Relevant and Compelling Ads for Each Group
Create Ad Copy that is relevant to the list of keywords in each Ad Group.  Again the more specific and relevant the Ad copy is to your group of keywords the higher your quality score will be.  Also create ads that stand out above your competition.  Intrigue the user and make them want to find out more about what you are offering so they will then click on to your website and potentially become a new customer.

4. Split Test Your Ads
It’s important to run two or more ads at the same time to determine which ad will perform better.  You will want to monitor the performance.  If you notice that one ad is performing the best allow that one to display more frequently to improve overall quality score.

5. Make Your Landing Page Relevant
When you create your landing page, you want to make sure that your content is consistent with both your keywords and ad copy. Make sure that keywords are carried through to title tags, headers and body content.

6. Don’t Mislead a User
Make sure to deliver on the content people expect to find. Even if all of your keywords, ad copy and landing page content is relevant, if people don’t see what they thought they were getting, they will leave. A high bounce rate is another factor that will erode a high quality score.

7. Make it Clear and Easy
When you drive people to a landing page make sure the call to action is obvious.  Don’t display too much text.  Users don’t typically read all the text on a page they just scan through it.  Also having too many graphics will slow down the load time of the page and people will leave your site.

8. Constantly Monitor
It is very important to implement analytics and keep an eye on your campaign performance. Getting in the habit of monitoring key metrics will help identify problem areas quickly. Continuous improvement will improve your quality score, lower your campaign costs and increase conversions.

By MG Siegler

Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who recently participated in our Realtime Crunchup) took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime.

“It’s Google’s relevance technology meeting the realtime web,” is how Singhal described it.

As we’ve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to making realtime search a pillar of the web. Google seems to believe it has cracked the code for this, and has been internally testing it for a while now. But starting today it’s going live for everyone.

Singhal showed off the new feature by doing a query for “Obama.” The results page shows results coming in in realtime. And yes, it works with Twitter. For example, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted something from the audience, and in popped in the results immediately. This is the first time any search engine has integrated realtime results into a standard page, Google says. Obviously, this is huge. Read More

By John Gaffney

Consolidation. Excitement. Game-changer. Dominance. Welcome to the Google-ized world of mobile advertising. As the rest of the world was watching the company’s expected court filing on its digital book case, Google stepped out and bought AdMob for $750 million in stock. In the process, the landscape for mobile marketing is different than the one that existed Monday morning.

“This is the kind of game-changing event I’ve been predicting for more than a year,” says Jordan Greene, principal of mobile advisory firm Mella Media. “The entry of Google in a dramatic fashion makes this a whole different ecosphere.”

The details: Google buys AdMob for $750 million in stock. According to Google, the company is getting AdMob at a critical early stage of its growth, after it has proven its viability and customer base. “Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time,” said Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management at Google. AdMob stakeholders get a considerable payday from a company that could have become a fierce competitor within a year or less. “Our goal all along at AdMob has been to make it possible for developers and publishers to bring their products and ideas to mobile with the same business model,” said Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob. “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made towards accomplishing this goal, and joining Google will only accelerate this process, ultimately leading to very real benefits for end users around the world. As publishers and developers generate more revenue from their mobile products, they will invest more, and their mobile offerings will become richer, more creative and more robust.”

The Google statement used the word “ecosystem” frequently. “The deal will help Google in its efforts to develop more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats. As this ecosystem continues to grow, the company expects these new marketing media,” it said. It promised the new venture would help advertisers engage mobile users with AdMob’s ad formats, help publishers and developers monetize their content more effectively, and help users will see more relevant ads and ultimately get access to more ad-supported content and applications – improving their mobile experience.

Greene and other experts brought up several short-term ramifications of the deal. First and foremost, it creates a new 800 pound gorilla on the mobile ad block. That’s undeniable and changes the ad pitch of every other company in this space immediately. The other point mentioned frequently is viability. Greene believes some brands that were on the fence about mobile ads and budgets might be more comfortable ramping up now that Google is pushing the market.

“The announcement is causing tremendous excitement as it validates the enormous potential of mobile advertising. We predicted consolidation in the industry and Admob’s broad high volume business model is highly synergistic for Google. The industry front runner will be determined by who can deliver the most advanced targeting capabilities for better ROI for advertisers and publishers,” said Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap, which will now have to compete with the AdMob/Google combination.

I found this article interesting.  It’s a great article comparing Google and Microsoft.

By Ryan Singel  July 13  2009 

In less than a week, Google announced an operating system to compete with Windows, while Microsoft announced that Office 10 will include free, online versions of its four most popular software programs - a shot at Google’s suite of web-based office applications.

And not more than a month and a half ago, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine Bing which it hopes will steal market share from Google and finally make it real money online.

From the news of it, it’s a full-blown tech battle, complete with behind-the-scenes machinations to sic government regulators on each other.

It is, however, not a death match — it’s more of an fight to see who will be the King of Technology, since both companies pull in their billions through completely different siphons and are unlikely to severely wound one another any time soon.

Google pulled in $22 billion in revenue in 2008, 97 percent of which came tiny text ads bought by the keyword and placed next to search results or on pages around the web. Google makes a negligible amount of money bundling its online apps for businesses, charging $50 a head annually — but mostly it just gives its online text editor, email and spreadsheet programs away.

By contrast, Microsoft sold $14.3 billion worth of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and other business applications over the last nine months, making a profit of $9.3 billion. It made a further $16 billion in revenue in 2008 through sales of its operating systems, which range from XP installations on netbooks, to Vista, to Windows Mobile to its server software.

Google now plans its own range of operating systems, starting with Android, an open-source OS for small devices like smartphones, and Chrome OS, a browser-focused, open-source OS that will run on notebooks and desktops.

Clearly top executives at each company look over at the others’ pots of gold and dream of ways to steal them, or at least make it harder for the other guy to make money. Read More