Interesting CNN article that address some points outlined below:

• · Why are some people leaving the utopist work environment Google provides in order to start their own projects?
• · Does Google need to worry when they’re netting $1 billion (billion with a B) each quarter (quarter with a Q)?
• · What does Marc Benioff mean when he says “They have a fantastic cash cow.  They need a goat and a chicken.”
• · Will Google retain it’s quirkiness despite having become a huge corporation?  Is that even possible?
• · With so many side projects going on inside Google, aren’t some people working in parallel on the same thing with no collaboration?
• · Is Google’s next big success going to be Google Apps (MS Office competitor) or Android (open source cell phone)?
• · Is Google recession proof or recession resistant?
• · Did a Microsoft executive actually compliment Google with this quote? “They could be such pioneers that no one will know for years.”

Bottom line…we still won’t know what to expect next from Google.  Google is a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma.  Apparently that’s all you need to create in order to net $1 billion (with a B) each quarter (with a Q).

Do you have a lot of traffic coming through your PPC campaigns?

Do you want to know not only what headline/call to action works best, but in what combination?

If  you said yes to either one of those questions then this tool can help you out.  If you’re not familiar with Taguchi methods then check out Wikipedia’s long explanation or read the next sentence.  It’s a way to test out a butt load of variables and how those variables interact with each other.

How does this apply to PPC campaigns?

That’s where AdComparator comes in.  Despite disappearing for a while, this useful script is back and will help you determine which lines of ad copy are most effective but more importantly how they interact with each other to create an invincible, CTR increasing, ad position boosting SUPER AD!

This doesn’t just apply to PPC campaigns, it can be used for email or any other campaign that involves the testing of various variables.  Yes, I just said various variables.

Go ahead, give it a shot!

Ad Comparator

Okay, so maybe Flickr has had this feature for a while…but whenever Google seems to integrate something into their user interface it all of a sudden becomes popular; remember MapQuest before Google Maps? I just think Google makes things better all around.

So I did a search for an address in Tempe and found that there were random pictures popping up nearby:

I guess Flickr has had the same feature for a while…but even as a Flickr user I wasn’t very well aware of it, therefore it’s not important

Right now I”m probably going to waste about a half hour just exploring different areas and seeing what pictures are up, because I LOVE playing with Google Maps and making up for having never taken a geography class (it was never included in my curriculum much to my dismay).

Here’s Google’s quick little YouTube video that explains what it is…but not how they find the pictures. I’d be interested to know how they select them, possibly Picasa?

The holy grail of search marketing!

If you ask a search marketing professional what the number one thing that needs to be improved in the industry is…they’ll most likely say analytics.

Not just analytics, but being able to attribute value to each online marketing tactic.  This means the broad terms you’re bidding on, which actually triggered the beginning of a sale/conversion, will finally prove their value.  Currently it’s either a guessing game or crude testing process that will show the drop in conversions/traffic when broader terms are turned off in a PPC campaign, banner campaigns stop running or branded terms are removed from a PPC campaign (thus reducing overall site traffic).

We all know that in most cases banner ads provide an incremental lift in ROI when paired with PPC campaigns, and that running branded terms on a PPC campaign provide an incremental lift in overall search traffic (the running of the two provides more traffic than each separately brings in), but until Coremetrix came out with this product we haven’t been able to prove how effective advertising dollars really are.

For those who thought they had online marketing figured out and a long term plan by implementing Google Arbitrage…the outlook might become bleak very quickly.

It seems like they could have done this a while ago and not implemented a ton of various “upgrades” and “fixes” that in the end resulted in regular advertisers paying much more…even for big brand terms (thanks to landing page quality being so heavily weighted now).

I’m actually surprised to see they’re still pursuing this…it seems to me that this would be a great source of revenue for their program…hitting people on the Google search results page as well as the page their landing on through AdSense ads.  The only reason I can see them cracking down, unless they’ve had a lot of complaints from end users, is because advertisers are still making a fuss about advertising on the content (AdSense) network.

Either way, people are still going to find a way to work the system, that is after all the main reason Google must continually update it’s algorithm.