Blog

According to an article in the New York Times published on Monday, the amount of businesses being falsely reported as closed on Google Places has started to increase in prevalence since June. For small, local businesses, the effects can prove to be damaging to profits. Business owners are starting to become frustrated with the process which seemingly works against them.

In order to report a business as closed, Google says that a certain (undisclosed) amount of visitors have to report the establishment as closed. Once that number of reports has been reached, Google will flag the business as “reportedly closed” and then eventually “permanently closed.” Once a business has been marked as “permanently closed,” the business owner has the option to contest the status, however, most business owners are complaining the process takes an excess amount of time resulting in losing customers and sales.

Speculation has begun that competitors are contributing to these false reports; continually reporting a business as closed until they are flagged as such. Another theory is that certain online marketing agencies are offering the service of closing competing businesses as a way to drive sales for their clients; however dishonest the practice may be. Whatever the cause of the counterfeit closings may be, business owners are struggling to fight back. One blogger, who felt Google wasn’t taking the complaints of wronged business owners seriously enough, flagged Google’s offices as closed hoping to show the search giant what business owners have to go through to reverse the stigma.

Recently, Google has made some changes to the way the system works. Businesses that are newly flagged as closed will receive an e-mail alerting them of the change to their status. However, it’s unclear how that alone will make the process of closing a business on Google Places more accurate. The e-mail should ask for confirmation from the business owner that their establishment is, in fact, closed. While the database for Google Places is expansive and would take a dedicated staff to manage it on a regular basis, they should be spending a little more time on automated ways to make the service more beneficial all the way around.

U.S. online advertising revenue at sports sites has increased by at least 12% for each of the last 5 years from $407 million in 2006 to $985 million in 2010.  The buying power of this sports crazed market segment is astounding, but are you positioned to take advantage of this opportunity?  More than likely, fantasy sports enthusiasts don’t even know the name of your company or what services you offer. Fortunately, you have come to the right place, because we can position companies to take advantage of the enormous buying power of fantasy sports enthusiasts.

The majority of individuals that participate in fantasy sports are college educated males and some of them even have an income of $80,000 to $100,000.  We can effectively utilize your hard earned advertising dollars to target these individuals through geo targeted banner ad placements, which do not waste impressions.  Email campaigns are also an option, and due to the nature of fantasy sports, participants are extremely likely to open campaigns from their governing league.  As a result of this fact, the open rate of these particular campaigns tends to be exceptional, consequently the click thru rate of the campaign is positively affected as well.

Clients with larger budgets that really would like to make their presence felt in the market place can combine banner ads and e-mail campaigns with custom branded pages.  Having a page on a fantasy sports website such as CBS or ESPN that is completely dedicated to your brand and the products you are selling is a sure way to improve sales and increase ROI on your marketing and advertising dollars.

Combining people’s passion for sports with the incredible reach of the internet is a marketing opportunity that should not be missed.  Exults is the internet marketing agency that can create a winning strategy for you.

Google Toolbar, available for Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, offers the user direct instant Google search capability along with unique options including custom buttons and display options. Also included with the toolbar is Google Related, a tool that offers the searcher information closely related to what they are searching.

Google Related works by analyzing the information it can find about the current website you are exploring and presenting you with information it has determined as relevant to what you are looking for. Google Related currently has the ability to present the user with video content, news, maps, reviews, images and similar websites. For example, if you are looking at a certain restaurant’s website Google Related will show you customer reviews, a map of where that restaurant is located, and some other similar restaurants in the same area; all of which, if I were researching a new restaurant, I would essentially be looking for.

According to Google Related’s Help page, the tool will “look for interesting related content.” But- how can a search engine determine what is going to be interesting to me? While certain searches may be easier to find content deemed “interesting,” like the restaurant example stated above, others may prove to be more difficult. I see a possible parody blog in Google Related’s future showcasing off the wall suggestions that the search giant feels would be “interesting” to users.

Facebook announced this past week that they are scrapping their Deals initiative. During its four month test phase, the program didn’t prove to be a successful endeavor. The project had the potential to be great seeing as Facebook has nearly 20 times the amount of users as Groupon.

We are categorized by our “Network” on Facebook, which is essentially your geographic location, and “Deals” focused on a highly specific region in which these offers were presented with a goal of attracting users to local businesses. What is still being promoted, however, is Facebook’s “Check-In Deals.” Much like FourSquare, users will “check in” to places and will be able to see a list of “deals” or coupons available to them at the establishment.

With all of the potential backing this idea, why did it fail? There are several factors involved in this test that present potentially flawed results. First, Facebook chose select locations to test the “Deals” program in including San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Louis, Austin, Atlanta and Charlotte. I’m sure that Facebook didn’t invest their money and resources into this project without researching their test cities, but are these cities really the best choice for this kind of program? Maybe cities with a higher cost of living would have been more successful; maybe cities with higher population density would have produced better results. It’s even possible that cities with a larger amount of people in the age demographic of 18-30 could have produced better results.

Also, the offers that were marketed on Facebook Deals were reportedly several of the same deals that were being marketed on Groupon and LivingSocial at the same time. This overlap of deals makes for a lot of cloudy research. LivingSocial and Groupon both have apps in which you can purchase the deal directly on your mobile device and these apps save your credit card information so you can purchase their deals with just one push of a button. Facebook did not offer that kind of integration which could have contributed to poor participation.

Yet another factor working against Facebook was the fact that some local business owners reported staggering losses after participating in a Social Coupon program. Being the “Deals” program was focused on local businesses, after one bad experience with a Social Coupon provider, business owners are left with a bad taste in their mouth. While the business model designed by Social Coupon giants works for some businesses, for others it can be financially devastating.

Several factors have could have contributed to the downfall of Facebook Deals and unless Facebook decides to release more specific information about what caused the program to fail, we’ll never know for sure. However, Social Media remains an effective way of marketing your business to relevant audiences- as long as it’s done with a well thought out game plan.

Google has decided to cut ties with their side project, Google Labs. If you aren’t sure exactly what Google Labs is, it’s a place where Google engineers can showcase some of their ideas and where users can try them out and offer feedback. To the general public, Google Labs is probably not very popular. So why should you care about a Google project you haven’t heard of before?

If you like Google Maps, Google Desktop, Google Suggest, iGoogle and Google Docs, then you are using the end result of an idea that made its debut in Google Labs. Several really useful applications have come out of this project and there are still others that are being tested and cultivated.  With all of these great features that were made possible through Google Labs, it has come as a shock to frequent users that have been part of the feedback process.

As stated on the Google Labs website, “Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them.” There has been speculation that Google will simply replace the Labs project with something even more revolutionary. However, CEO Larry Page told employees in a recent memo that “…in many cases this will mean ending Labs experiments…” but in others, experiments may move on to bigger and better projects in different areas.

If you’re interested in finding out what Google Labs is all about, you’d better hurry. Funding will be cut and “streamlining” will begin soon so make your way over to the website and test the experiments while you still can. Maybe your feedback on the experiment you find most entertaining or useful will help it move on to Google’s next phase- whatever it may be.

Does your website promote brand recognition and loyalty? Does it engage your audience and help turn visitors into customers? If not, it may be a bigger deal that you thought. While your ad in the yellow pages may bring in calls from the pre-internet generation, it’s time to start shifting focus. They key to ensuring growth in any business is to bring in new customers.

More and more businesses are being found through their website than any other medium. After all, this is the age where you can type “dry cleaners” into the Google search bar and all the work will be done for you- sorting dry cleaners in your area by distance, even displaying reviews and contact information. A well designed and implemented website creates credibility and can help filter out strictly informational calls which in turn can increase productivity.

As a dry cleaner, if you have a website that displays rates, hours of operation, a map of your location, all of your contact information and services offered in a visually appealing and organized manner, you can confidently direct new and existing customers to your website and know that it will answer their questions. It can attract new customers by giving them all of the information they would be looking for in one place, without having to pick up the phone or wait for normal business hours to get answers. They may even decide on your services based solely on the fact that your website made it easy for them to find out everything they needed to know.

The way consumers shop for services has changed drastically in the last 10 years and if you haven’t changed the way you try to reach consumers, your business could be suffering. Whether you have an ineffective website or no website at all, it’s important to understand the weight this intangible extension of your brand has in the decision making process for new consumers. While a fully-loaded website may not change the fact that Ethel has been coming to your shop for 20 years and you’re the only dry cleaner she trusts, it may entice Shawn, a recent college graduate looking for his first dry cleaner, to start bringing his suits to you (and telling all of his new co-workers, too).

3rd party automation software has always been available.  The practicality of the 3rd party software has been hindered by extensive setup processes needed for the software to access AdWords along with licensing fees.  Now AdWords is offering these tools within there platform.

Adword has given advertisers new account management tools.  Automated rules are available for Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords, Ads.  Multiple criteria can be used when defining a rule.  Automation rules can be applied for individual campaigns.  Rules can run daily, weekly monthly at a specific hour.  Maximums can bet set for budgets and keyword bid rules.

Campaign level

Change Budget When

Automated rules raise and lower campaigns budgets by percentages or dollar amounts.  Using date requirement budget can be adjusted to seasonality or any industry specific trends.

Available Requirements:

Date and Time
Cost
Average CPC
Average CPM
CTR
Average. Position
Clicks
Impressions
Invalid Clicks
Invalid Click Rate
Relative CTR
Campaign Name (Text match)
Campaign (Select from current campaigns)
Status
Budget

Keyword level

Change Keyword Bid When
Automate keyword max CPC bid management lowers bids by percentage or dollar amounts, based on CTR or conversion rates.  Managing keyword max CPC bids on performance is at the core of PPC management.  Automated rules will save time over manual adjusting bids with tools as AdWords editor and Excel.

Available Requirements:

Cost
Average CPC
Average CPM
CTR
Average. Position
Clicks
Impressions
Ad Group (Select from current Ad Groups)
Campaign (Select from current campaigns)
Max CPC
Destination URL
Keyword Text
Status
Quality Score
Match Type

Ad Level

Pause/Enable Ads When
Enable and Pause ads for time sensitive ad text.  Schedule ads to run only during times offer is valid.

Available Requirements:

Cost
Average CPC
Average CPM
CTR
Average. Position
Clicks
Impressions
Ad Text
Display URL
Destination URL
Approval Status
Ad Group (Select from current Ad Groups)
Campaign (Select from current campaigns)
Ad Type

In case you haven’t heard, tablets are a pretty big deal. Perhaps an even bigger deal is the fact that Apple’s ubiquitous iPads make up 97% of the U.S. tablet market and 89% worldwide. Among the many awesome things you can do with an iPad, there is one glaring omission – no support for Flash. Sure it caused quite an outrage a couple years ago, but people eventually discovered they really didn’t miss Flash all that much after all. HTML5 seems to do the job just fine on its own.

Google has even ditched Flash in favor of HTML5 as their go-to source for everything cool. Remember “Google PAC-MAN” and the more recent “Google Guitar” doodles? You can pat HTML5 on the back for giving you those creations in addition to a whole slew of more productive utilities.

Now that Apple and Google have officially made Flash the creepy guy in the staircase you avoid eye-contact with, Google just introduced a new Flash-to-HTML5 converter called “Swiffy.” This means you can take your old Flash animations and convert them to a format that is easily viewable on all modern browsers, including mobile devices, free of charge! Sounds cool, right?

We here at Exults couldn’t help but test a few Flash files we had lying around to see how it did. The results are in, and they are dead-on!

Alright so Swiffy didn’t help us out too much in our case, but there are plenty of examples over on the Google Labs page that will show you the power of HTML5 and how you can apply it to your websites. They reproduced a complex Flash animation almost perfectly and even have a pretty fun game of pong too!

Of course, Swiffy is still in beta testing so bugs are to be expected, but at the very least it gives us an exciting  look into the future of web development as tools like this are further refined.

Head over to Google Swiffy to try it out for yourself!

What if backlinks took a backseat to site design and useful content?  The current SEO world is dominated by backlinks.  Combine great content and onsite SEO with high quality relevant backlinks on a consistent basis and your site is destined to rank well on Google.  But what if all that changed?

Yandex, the #1 search engine in Russia, continues to beat out Google for Russian searches.  Google is struggling to produce results as good as Yandex for Russian websites.  But why is that?  It used to be because Google had a difficult time grasping the distinctiveness of the language and displayed bad results.  However, in 2006 Google worked out their issues with the Russian language but the results are still not as good as Yandex’s.

The answer lies within machine learning.  The Yandex algorithm is mainly created by what human assessors think makes a good webpage.  Those data points are set as targets and the algorithm is created based on what the human assessors say a top ranked website design look like.  Historically, Google has been opposed to this approach but when Yandex took a significant chunk of the Russian search market share from Google due to implementing machine learning… Google couldn’t ignore it.

So what exactly did the Panda update do?  Well, a Google engineer with the last name Panda came up with a scalable machine learning technique.  While it is similar to what Yandex uses, it is on a much smaller scale.  The Panda update implemented this technique and rankings are currently being affected by it.

The new Google +1 button that appears in the search results next to websites you’ve visited before is basically giving Google their own team of “assessors” that rates what makes a good website.  Someone or something will be evaluating common characteristics between all of the websites with high Google +1 ratings and those characteristics will play a role in ranking well.  Is Google changing their algorithm entirely like Yandex?  Probably not, but it appears to be inevitable that Google will be relying on machine learning for at least a small portion of their current algorithm.

What do you think?  Will Google heavily devalue links and move towards machine learning like Yandex?  Leave a comment below!

Google has recently launched a system in which you can recommend something you found interesting or useful in the Google search engine results page. This system is run off of the “+1” button. To illustrate, when you initiate a search for “best chocolate chip cookies recipes” and you find one that looks delicious, you can click the +1 button. If one of your friends linked in to your Google Profile searches for the same thing, they will see that you (and possibly several others) liked this recipe and have “recommended” it to them.

The system has been compared to the Facebook “like” system, only without the strong social backdrop. The premise is that sharing interesting or relevant content helps users engage their audience (either personally or professionally). The +1’s are public, however, annotations will only show up to people you are linked to.

The +1 button is optional; websites must implement a code to get the button to show up. It can be added to several, or all, pages on a website and it can also be added to Pay-Per-Click ads. The word that is all over Google’s +1 dedicated page (http://www.google.com/+1/) is “relevance.” According to Google, content is more relevant if someone else thinks it is. Therefore, websites or ads that friends or acquaintances find valuable will probably be valuable to you as well.

Google will use this feature to help produce more relevant searches to users who are signed in. As for right now, there is no clear-cut answer as to how Google will use these results to determine relevancy or how this will affect website rankings. The introduction of a system like this could be somewhat scary to websites that already rank high on Google’s search engine results pages. However, this advancement could prove to be a welcome change for websites that aren’t currently on the first page of results. What could this new ranking system do (or undo) for your business?