Google has recently announced a significant change to AdWords.

Advertisements on AdWords will now be limited to thirty days. Before this announcement, advertisements could stay on a site for an indefinite amount of time. As the recent Panda and Penguin updates suggest, Google is making a strong push to get rid of spam and to encourage fresh and unique pages. It is only logical to assume that fresh advertisements would be next; fresh advertisements that reflect the fresh content on a page.

After the thirty-day period, AdWords will keep and optimize the best performing advertisements. Advertisements that are doing well are ones with high conversion percentages and ones that are receiving the most clicks.

According to the official announcement on the Google AdWords blog “Every time a creative is enable or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of thirty days.” Advertisements that are already on a website will automatically auto-optimize.

The new ad rotation is seen by Google as “a preference that determines which ad in your ad group should show (when you have multiple ads).” However, the new update does give advertisers some control. For instance, they can request to have their best performing advertisements appear more. They can also request that the advertisements be distributed more evenly.

AdWords users will also be able to control the settings. They will be able to choose one of the three advanced settings:

• Optimize for Clicks: this is the default setting of the rotation. This setting bases advertisements off of previously successful clickthrough rates (CTRs).
• Optimize for Conversions: Instead of relying on clicks, this setting factors in advertisements that will yield the most purchases and opt-ins.
• Rotate evenly: setting is performance-blind; it will showcase each advertisement equally.

The goals of this new update are supposed to benefit the consumer, advertisers and to optimize AdWords itself. The first goal of this change is that website readers will get to see more relevant advertisements. The second goal is that websites will get more clicks. The final goal is that it will improve the functionality of AdWords.

However, this announcement has not been met with much enthusiasm. Many advertisers do not appreciate the loss of control over the length of time that their advertisements will be available; other advertisers call the change a waste of time.

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Here’s something new from Yahoo: a centralized location where business owners can get quick overviews of the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.

Dubbed The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, it’s a one-stop-shop for small businesses to track their marketing and includes the following features:

• Reputation Tracker: This feature scans over 8000 sites across the web to see what customers are saying about a business. Since social media and social proof are fundamental to a marketing plan, the tool pays close attention to Facebook and Twitter. The tool looks at online reviews, customer ratings and mentions.

 

• Local Visibility: Gives a small business owner a snapshot of where and how a brand appears in search engines. This allows a business owner to correct any errors. Incorrect information can deter and confuse potential customers. The tool can also find new places to add listing information about a business.

 

• Site Traffic: Using tools, like Google Analytics, this feature reports the number of visits to a company’s website, the number of page views and the average time a customer spends on a website. The site traffic feature simultaneously compares data from the previous week while also providing a breakdown of the types of traffic including direct traffic, traffic generated from search engines and traffic from referring sites.

 

• Campaigns: Gives an overview of a brand’s email marketing, SEO and efforts through a partnership with ConstantContact and Orange Soda. The tool highlights the total conversions that occur during a one-week period. This tool also conveniently breaks down conversion distribution by campaign types. It also gives you new marketing opportunities that you may not considered before. This user-friendly feature uses pie charts, bar graphs and other graphics to guide business owners.

 

Best of all, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard is free and pretty easy to use, although some of the features are only available under the paid version. You will no longer have to waste money and time in marketing strategies that are not producing results.

It’s currently only offered to US small businesses, but fingers crossed this spreads world-wide soon. You can sign-up for the dashboard here.

Late last Friday, Google announced over 50 new changes that are set to change how search results are displayed in some big ways.

The big topics of focus with this update are on how Google handles spelling errors, classifies keyword stuffing, focuses more on freshness being factored into SERPs and adding a larger website index size. Other features that have been added and upgraded in this month’s list of updates include tweaking results for images and video, altering how local search results are displayed and fixing some minor bugs.

You might recall that April saw the release of Penguin, Google’s latest ranking algorithm update (not to be confused with Panda).

More spelling corrections are to be added globally to the search engine. The same type of autocomplete spelling correction already available in English is to be added to over 60 different international languages. On the other hand, there are supposed to be less unproductive spelling changes, such as those for phrases like “mint tea”.

On a related note, the “did you mean?” feature will now be suppressed in non-English search results. This is meant to happen when an auto correction to a search term is found that a user doesn’t find helpful.

The flags Google use to classify a page as stuffing for a keyword have been altered and improved. This should further encourage the use of keyword variations and synonyms. It should also bring a marked decrease to pages that are solely spam. Ranking has been altered for fresh results and for search terms to better display relevant results.

Freshness is a major focus for this month’s update. The algorithms that detect freshness have been tweaked to be able to better detect fresh results. Another modifier has been added that will prevent freshness from being added to low-quality content and therefore keep it from flooding result pages by taking advantage of the freshness signal.

The base index size for Google’s searches is to be increased by 15%. This means that the very same index that is used to search for results when a query is entered is meant to become much, much larger. Indexing will also have another “tier” added. This latter update will change how often pages are indexed.

SafeSearch is to be improved for both image and video results. This improvement will also spread to over 40 different languages.

The likelihood that a user will find search results from a local region’s website will also be increased when compared to finding a global site.

So, as you can see, April was a busy month for the team at Google. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that May is going to be just as hectic. You can see the full list of changes here.

Google recently announced that AdWords for Video is out of Beta and has been given its very own platform in YouTube for anyone who wishes to cash in on their video.

For those who are unaware, AdWords for Video follows in the footsteps of its counterpart on Google search, the only difference here being that you pay only when someone clicks to view your video and watches the entire ad (also known as True View Pricing). For example, if someone clicked ‘skip’ in the first thirty seconds, the advertisers doesn’t pay anything. But if the ad runs it’s full course (30 seconds), the advertiser will be charged a cost-per-view (just like cost-per-click).

Four types of True View ad formats have been made available for advertisers to choose from and determine exactly where they would want their ads to appear on YouTube and the Google Display Network (GDN). These ad formats are:

• In-stream – ads play like a TV-style ad before, during or after another video from a YouTube partner
• In-search – ad appears in a special promoted section of the video search results pages on YouTube and Google video results
• In-slate – ads show before YouTube partner videos that are 10 minutes or longer
• In-display – ads appear alongside other YouTube videos, or on websites on the Google Display Network that match your target audience

To keep things simple, Google is allowing advertisers to create and manage video campaigns from the very same platform as their search and display ads.

Advertisers with some experience in video advertising can now look forward to targetting their ads to the right audience of YouTube users because AdWords for Video gives an option to promote a video ad by specific keywords so that they appear in YouTube search results. Advertisers can also choose to show their ad against content their target market are most interested in. For example for a business selling sporting equipments, it would make sense to have their ads appear in sport-themed videos.

To sweeten the deal, Google is giving away a total of $50 million in free advertising credits worth $75 to the first 500,00 new Google Adwords account holders.

Here’s a quick look at how Google AdWords for Video works

Last week Matt Cutts released a video titled “How Does Google Search Work?″ that explains how Google crawls, uses page rank, sets priorities, indexes, and filters in just 8 mins.

Part history lesson, part education lesson; Cutts kicks off by explaining the journey that crawling has taken since he first started at Google. Actually when he first began working at Google, they only crawled website’s every three or four months. Imagine if that was the case now; webmasters and SEO’s would be up in arms!

Stating Page Rank as a crucial parameter for deciding your website’s ranking in Google, Cutts explained

We basically take page rank as the primary determinant. And the more page rank you have– that is, the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are– the more likely it is we’re going to discover your page relatively early in the crawl.

Among other topics Cutts covered in his video included how Google is laying great emphasis on the freshness of a website (hint hint, webmasters!), although he does not go into explaining how the freshness of a site actually affects the overall ranking in the SERPs. But basically, a website with fresh, up-to-date relevant content surely stands a better chance of being crawled and indexed faster than sites with old content.

Cutts’ attempt to provide an overview of how Google works within just 8 minutes is commendable but don’t expect to hear any new groundbreaking info. This really is a video targeted at marketers who are relatively new to search however the video’s can be helpful for understanding the basics. However, it is good to get an explanation of how the Google search engine works from someone who really knows what he’s talking about and who has been there from the start.

For those who want to take a look, enjoy!

Research shows that 97% of website visitors do not convert the first time they visit. With this in mind, Google is now offering you a new way to re-market and re-engage with your potential customers and bring them back to your website.

Just days after introducing zip code targeting to Google AdWords, Google announced another set of changes to the AdWords property, this time an update that will improve matching behavior for keyword or phrase in search queries.

Following this update the traditional “keyword or phrase” and [exact] match rules will now include misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, abbreviations and other variants.

According to Google:

Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.

Advertisers who already have misspellings, variants, abbreviations, etc in their AdWords campaign will not be affected significantly by this change. However for those who do not have these variants already included; Google’s new Matching Behaviour could prove to be a beneficial tool to tap into the pool of potential traffic that might have gone unnoticed due to keyword misspellings, variants, and abbreviations usage.

Google warns that advertisers must be aware of two things:

1. The new “Matching Behavior” will be automatically activated and set as the default behavior to all AdWords accounts unless advertisers decide to ‘opt-out’ an option Google will offer to advertisers in this controlled feature. If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, Google will begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options”.
2. It is important, that advertisers are careful while assigning acronyms, misspellings (that are relevant to their ads) etc to their ad campaigns as it will have a direct impact on their ad performance and campaign budgets.

The actual matching won’t start until mid-May to give users a chance to opt out if they’d like.

Many people dream of starting their very own online store. The chance to make $1000’s by becoming the next big online retailer.

That dream quickly evaporates when they start looking into the complexities of setting up an online store. With website design, ecommerce platforms, merchant accounts and payment gateways to sort out – it quickly becomes too hard and too expensive.

The following 8 sites are changing all that. These companies have totally changed the e-commernce model offering online retailing as a software as a service! That means:

- No expensive start-up costs
- No complex IT infrastructure
- Minimal ongoing platform management
- Almost INSTANT online stores

So welcome to the new breed of online store builders:

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution that allows you to set up and run your own online store. List your products, customize your store’s design, accept credit card orders, and ship your goods — all with a few clicks of the mouse. Shopify is easy to use and there’s no software to download or maintain.

Goodsie

Make a branded storefront without any of the traditional hassles of setting up shop online. Click to design. No code. Customize layout, product display, background, fonts and colors in real-time. It’s simple, but the possibilities are endless.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel provides you with your own independent store to sell your stuff online. We provide clothing designers, bands, jewelry makers, crafters, and other artists with their own customizable store to sell their stuff online.

Spiffy Stores

Setting up an ecommerce website has never been easier! Spiffy Stores is popular for its easy-to-use interface, reliable 256 bit SSL security and low entry cost – you can start your own online store for less than a dollar a day.

Jumpseller

With JumpSeller creating an online store has never been easier. Sign up and start selling online in minutes. No technical knowledge needed, Multiple payment methods available and the option to sell in multiple languages.

Volusion

Build and manage your online store with a shopping cart software that’s full of easy-to-use tools – no programming skills required. It’s used by over 35,000 online stores.

Magento Go

A hosted eCommerce solution for small businesses with big ambitions. Magento Go offers the power and flexibility of Magento – the platform chosen by many of the world’s most respected brands – at a price that every business can afford.

Storeenvy

Storenvy is a marketplace and store platform for the world’s most unique businesses. Shop thousands of indie merchants or open your own store for free.

These great new SaaS online store builders make building your dream online store more of a reality. They’ve eliminated the infrastructure hassles, removed the costly barriers of entry and made web updating simple as pie.

Wannabe online retailing moguls should definitely check these and fellow “new breed” e-commerce solution sites out.

If you use a solution that’s worthy of the list – share it via the comments below.

Google recently made a big announcement on changes to the way brands can advertise with the search giant.

It’s being dubbed as the ‘Brand Activate’ advertising program and will integrate useful brand metrics into the online marketing tools that advertisers use to manage and evaluate their online ad campaigns.

Big brands currently spend over $190 billion per year on television advertisements, so this move by Google could be a very lucrative one by attracting these brands to re-allocate their budget from traditional advertising methods to more modern online advertising methods.

The first Brand Activate solutions to be rolled out for advertisers are:

• Active View:  measures if the ad was seen by the user, the percentage of the ad that was seen, and the duration of ad exposure. Google will only count the ad as “viewed” if the advertisement was “at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second.”
• Active GRP metrics: similar to the Gross Rating Point metric used by the television industry. However, since the metrics are delivered in real-time, Active GRP will allow advertisers to quickly measure the effectiveness of a campaign and adjust accordingly.

Active View is expected to make its first appearance within the Google Display network in a few weeks time and will eventually be available within the Double-Click network. Active View data will be immediately actionable; meaning advertisers will be able to pay only for viewed impressions.

Here’s how Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising, explains the service:

The objective is [to] make it easier for more and more brand dollars to come online.

One of the biggest opportunities to crack the nut as it relates to brand advertising is in the area of measurement.

We think that a new generation of measurement solutions will help brands quantify the benefits of investing online and will help to fund the next generation of great online content and services.

If you want to know more about “Brand Active” advertising, check out the video below or read the official announcement here.

Last week the Webmaster World Forum was abuzz with complaints from many people who noticed a sudden drop in their Google rankings, loss in traffic and revenue.

However, it only took Google’s Matt Cutts 24 hours to clear-up any confusion.

What was initially thought to be a result of a penalty for over-optimization of sites, actually turned out to be the after affects of a Google classifier for parked domains (domains that generally lack any content other than ads) .

As posted by Matt Cutts on his Google+ page:

I saw a recent post where several sites were asking about their search rankings. The short explanation is that it turns out that our classifier for parked domains was reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty. As a result, we classified some sites as parked when they weren’t.

I apologize for this; it looks like the issue is fixed now, and we’ll look into how to prevent this from happening again.

However, some webmasters remain unconvinced that this sudden drop in rankings happened just because of a bug. One theory is that this was a planned test of the over optimization penalty by Google and the bug in the classifier just happened to happen around the same time.

The reason behind this speculations is that had it just been a bug many of the sites affected should have regained their original rankings by now, however that is not the case. Also the classifier bug problem is not a new one – this same thing happened back in June 2010 and however only a small number of sites were affected.

So, I’m not sure if there is more to this story, Google certainly doesnt seem to think so, but if you’re site has been impacted we would love to hear your experience. Feel free to leave details in the comments box below.