You may have heard the saying “He who controls the gold, makes the rules.” Or some such variation. Well for some time the new rule has been “He who controls the traffic, makes the rules.” And in the online world, that means that Google can do pretty much anything it wants.

Case in point:

Earlier today Mashable announced the launch of Google’s new financial advisory site Google Advisor.

After taking a look at the site and the sign up process visitors are encouraged to go through to apply for credit cards and bank accounts and mortgages, I realized this site is simply a competitor to sites like creditcards.com which is a very well known affiliate site. So essentially Google has setup its own affiliate site and has become an affiliate of several credit card companies, banks and mortgage providers.

For those of you who do not know what affiliate marketing is, it refers to an independent marketer who sells a company’s products and services for a commission. Affiliate marketing is a huge business and there are very few well known brand names that don’t have some kind of affiliate program. (Amazon is well known for paying  a commission every time you sell one of their books for example.)

The affiliate marketing game has stirred much controversy over the years as many affiliate sites and affiliate programs have been deemed shady, spammy, and of low quality. Google has, in the past, banned tens of thousands of affiliates from using Google Adwords, removed their sites from its organic listings and basically made it difficult for many of them to do business.

So it’s interesting to see them jumping into the space and going head to head with the very people they seem to vilify.

But that’s what you can do when you control massive amounts of traffic. You can make your own rules.

Main take away: Don’t be naive about Google.

It’s not a good thing or a bad thing that Google has launched an affiliate site in my mind. It just is. But don’t think for a second that your favorite search engine might not come after your industry or even your own website if it sees you are making good money. Using Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, Google Adwords, the Google Toolbar, and Google.com among other services , Google amasses huge amounts of data it can then analyse and use any way it pleases. So be aware.

Here’s my reply to Mashables post:

Ben, this is a Google version of credtcard dot com which is an affiliate site. So while this looks like a simple “comparison” site, really Google is in fact earning commission for any account that you sign up for through this site whether it be a mortgage, credit card or other service. Just about anyone can sign up to be an affiliate of a credit card company and Google (who happens to own their own affiliate network for those of you who don’t know) is simply copying a business model that has been highly profitable for some of their own partners. So don’t be fooled people: this is a “make money when our visitors apply” business, an affiliate business. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a valuable service. I do find it ironic that Google battles with affiliates that use its search engines, banning groups of them and what not, and then they turn around and use the model themselves. But that’s what you can do when you control the traffic! It’s not about gold anymore, it’s “he who controls the traffic makes the rules.”

- AK

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The new service allows advertisers to publish text messages on blimps that will circle major events such as the super bowl.

If you have an Adwords account, you should see a notice like this one:

If you follow the link, you’ll be taken to the following page where you can sign up for Blimps:

And if you sign up, you get presented with a screen that says:

It’s been a few minutes since I signed up and still no blimp in site flying over Vancouver like I requested. Perhaps there’s a time delay?

- Adam

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However, the service is not yet available in Canada as far as I can tell, at least not as of today. In the mean time, you can.. Update: As Oana pointed out in the comment below, you need to be using Google.com NOT Google.ca in order to use Google Instant.

Check out Google’s promo video on Youtube which gives you an overview of the new interface:

Personally what I will be interested to see is how Instant affects Google Adwords impressions and results.

Will there be a huge increase in impressions as pages and pages of ads get shown rapidly to users as they flip through search results? When I have some answers to these and other questions, I’ll be sure to post them here.

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According to Google, if your content network campaign is opted in to show ads on mobile devices, this is the domain name that shows up for those visitors who see and click on your ad via a mobile app.

For one of our client’s campaigns a lot of clicks were being generated without any conversions, so I added this to the excluded placements list to stop any more wasted clicks.

If you pull reports regularly, you can catch this kind of thing.

Take a look at your own content network reports (e.g check your automatic placements) regularly to see if domains like adsenseformobileapps.com are generating clicks and therefore costs, without conversions. If so, get rid of them!

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If you’re new to the Google Display Network, in a nutshell it is the network of websites owned by Google and sites owned by third party publishers that show Google text and banner ads to their visitors.

Before the re-brand, Google had been placing more emphasis on the Content Network with the launch of multiple new features like ad re-targeting or re-marketing as Google calls it, and a push to get advertisers to try banner ads using its display ad builder.

When you do a search in Google, you’re seeing ads on the search network. When you see an ad on your favorite website and you see the “Ads by Google” image at the bottom of the ad, the website you are viewing is part of the Display Network (Formerly the Google Content Network. The launch of the Display Network website and renaming the content network is really just a PR play to make something that already existed look new again: a classic marketing tactic.)

Here’s a quote from Google that summarizes where you can show your ads using the Display Network:

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads). The Google Display Network offers all ad formats –  text, image, rich media, and video ads – enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web.

A few of the benefits of the Display Network include:

• Clicks and Conversions can be much cheaper than the Google search network
• You can target the websites you want your ads to show on
• You can use re-targeting to show your ads to people who have visited your site in the past
• You can often generate far more traffic than is possible on the search network, even for niche terms
• You don’t need to use keywords to show your ads if you choose
• You can show image ads, text, ads, video ads, interactive flash ads, and mobile ads

Our clients have known about the content network for quite some time and some have been taking advantage of the power of image ads for a while now to drive traffic and conversions at a lower cost than traditional search traffic.

If you’d like to learn more or want to test driving and conversions using the Display Network, get in touch or give me a call 778.899.4523.

PS: I almost forgot. Google released a study on

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In 2010 so far we’ve seen some great new feature editions. Here’s a snapshot of a few that you should take note of.

Video Targeting on YouTube

Google recently introduced a new tool called the Youtube Video Targeting Tool to help advertisers target and display ads within popular videos. The idea behind this tool is that it helps you find popular videos in categories related to your products or services and then export a list of these videos. You can then upload the list into Google Adwords in order to show your ads within the video as it’s playing.

Here’s a quick 1:01 minute video explanation from Google.

Here’s a screen shot of the new tool (click to enlarge):

American Apparel’s recent YouTube campaign is an interesting example of how an advertiser might take advantage of this new feature. In this example, American Apparel’s in-video overlay ads run on videos such as the Skateboarding Dog, and other equally catchy, quirky clips.

The idea of cute puppies wearing American Apparel jumpers and hoodies displaying below cute pet videos caught on at American Apparel. The result was a cute and memorable advertising campaign that targeted viewers with ads that were visually relevant to the videos they were watching.

Upcoming Webinars

Google has recently made some new developments in display advertising, and is hosting a webinar May 20th at 11am to show off the benefits to advertisers – and how real companies are using the new developments to their advantage. Want to learn more? Sign up for the webinar here.

Local Business Ads and Location Extensions

Google is transitioning its local business ads feature and to be known as “location extension ads”. Local business ads have been used by all sorts of businesses to get under the nose of people searching in a given area. If you typed in ‘coffee shop’, for example, Google would determine your location and return a selection of coffee shops nearby. If you are a company with multiple locations, setting up and running individual ads targeted at each location quickly becomes a pain, and a waste of time. Enter Google’s location extensions.

Location extensions makes the location in your ad dynamic. This means that your business’ address and phone number will change, based on which of your locations is closest to where the customer is while searching. Local extensions has been around for awhile (Google introduced it in July 2009), but now all local business ads will be switched over to be compatible with the service. For those who don’t update their own ads, Google will automatically switch them over in coming weeks.

A New Way To Target Keywords

Several days ago, Google released a new keyword match modifier in the UK and Canada. The “+”, also known as “modified broad match”, is a way to match a given keyword to its most closely-related variants. Such variants could be alternate spellings, typos, or pluralizations/singularizations of the keyword. This is a good modifier to use if you’re targeting a campaign very specifically. This way, your ads display only for this keyword – plus similar variants that you now won’t have to brainstorm and add to your target list (especially typos – not fun or easy to brainstorm).

*click here to see a larger view of the image

Honorable Mentions

• Google Adwords for Mobiles
• New Adwords reports in Google Analytics
• iPad targeting now available

Google Adwords is an ideal channel for businesses looking quickly generate leads and sales online or who need to directly target a specific audience. It looks like it’s going to be maintaining its momentum as Google continually finds new ways to bring advertisers closer to their potential customers.

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To access the new tool, visit the old keyword research tool (located at https://adwords.google.ca/select/KeywordToolExternal) and click the link at the top of the page, shown here:

The new tool has a cleaner interface than the old keyword tool and comes with some added benefits:

1. You can now easily do research on mobile searches only. Before this option as a nicely kept “secret” only available with the internal Adwords keyword tool. This means you can tell what people are searching for using mobile phones in your area. As you may or may not be aware, the number of people on the planet who use mobile phones is in the range of 50% of the world’s population- far, far larger than the number of people who access the web right now from desktop computers. In time, mobile use of the web will likely dwarf all other forms of web access so getting a handle on what terms and phrases your customers are searching for on their mobiles is going to be a necessity as a web marketer/business owner.

To conduct a mobile keyword search only, click Advanced options and then check off the mobile box as seen below.

*click to enlarge

2. You can more accurately target your own country or a specific country from a list of countries Google provides data for. This is helpful for a number of reasons and the most obvious one to me is that using the old tool, Google told us the difference between local searches and global monthly searches but it never specified what local meant! It was impossible to tell if local meant Vancouver, or North America etc. Now, we can hone in on one of several different countries and get more targeted results. This is important for local and national advertisers alike.

Here’s a snapshot of the new tool’s interface with some keyword data populated:

*click to enlarge.

3. The final benefit I can see to this tool at first glance is your ability to add in useful metrics like approximate cost per click, competition levels, and your ad share or the percentage of time your ads are shown compared to total number of ads being shown (available if you’re logged into Adwords).

So all in all I like the new look.

There is one serious drawback that I didn’t see a resolution for at first glance, the old keyword tool separates keywords into groups for you which is very handy when setting up Adwords accounts or analyzing a site to see what Google understands it is all about. If that feature’s available in this version I missed it at first glance. If not, I’ll continue using the old tool for now.

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What’s your pick?

Also: if you need a laugh, check out Arnold carrying the Olympic torch today in Stanley Park.

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Learning the ins and outs of Google’s content network and improving the results one can achieve with Adwords are still important. But my gut feeling is that advertisers and marketers who, in the coming years, learn to generate and profit from traffic outside of Google’s domain are going to be more successful than those who do not.

Just like Microsoft in its early days, Google has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. However, there’s a growing discontent building, at least in the web marketing industry, with the power Google now wields and its ability to completely kill off, shut down and pretty much put out of business those marketers who it deems as not fitting its interests.

Any time a person, company or country rises to a place of dominance, detractors spring up; it’s a given. People have been crying foul for some time about Google’s business practices and its philosophy of doing no evil is admittedly suspect (I mean why not focus on “doing good” instead?). Detractors and the doubtful aside (of which I am one…I mean I use a lot of Google’s services and only recently realized that if they closed my account on a whim, it would be hugely detrimental to my business) it just makes sense to diversify your traffic sources if you have the means to do so.

So what does that look like?

For one, there are only three ways of getting traffic to a website that I know of:

1. Direct type ins, where people type in your domain name into their browsers. (Typically 10-15% of a sites traffic coming from direct type ins would not be uncommon. In special cases, where a marketer owns a domain such as fish.com or money.com, direct type ins might be the sole means of traffic. How powerful!)
2. Paid advertising: Pay-Per-Click is by and far the method of paid advertising most of us are familiar with. This includes banner advertising and the increasingly popular interactive ads we see on our favorite news sites.
3. Traffic from links: this includes links from Google. Yes, Google does link to your site remember? It links to you in its search results! We don’t tend to think of traffic from search engines like this, we tend to classify it as it’s own type of traffic: search traffic (and links from other websites are generally known as referrals). But really, traffic from search engines boils down to getting traffic from links.

To simplify things even further, I’ll go as far as saying there are only two ways to get people to a website:

You can pay for it or you can work (hard) for it. Plain and simple.

Search engines continue to play a major role in directing traffic to websites for the time being. Social media and social networks are also rapidly growing in their influence and ability to drive targeted traffic to sites. Then there’s the opportunity the mobile web presents.

For my purposes here though, my primary interest is in buying traffic.

Some things I will be looking at:

• Ad networks other than those offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Link brokers
• Affiliate networks
• And others

Really I’m just getting started in my research and already I’ve been digging up all sorts of opportunities to drive traffic, leads and sales by other means than though Google.

The web is a big place. Moving ahead into 2010, keep your eyes open for new ways of bringing people to your site and generating the results you’re after. There’s a ton of opportunity out there.

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Social search is an experiment whereby Google shows you relevant content from your social network(s) inside its search results. To sign up for this experiment, head over to Google Labs and click the “Join this experiment” button.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, for one, it’s another indication of the importance of real time search or our ability to do a search for something and come up with the latest, up to the second information on a given topic. No doubt services like Twitter and Facebook have convinced Google that more and more people want information that’s as timely as possible and this is an effort on their part to give this to people inside their search results.

The takeaway is that it’s going to become more and more important for your business to be active in social networks and in posting content to your company blog for example. The more content you produce, the more often you do it, the more likely your chances will be of showing up at the right time when someone’s looking for you.

Stay tuned for more updates on social search and real time search as this is a fascinating and relatively new area / concept that will likely have huge impacts on SEO and online marketing in general in the months to come.

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