Google has turned on a new property Google Insights for Search, which is essentially a more granular and powerful Google Trends tool that enables you to see search data, not only as it trends over time, but also search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. They offer a sample use for the car manufacture industry to see what features are most important for consumers:
I have also been using the tool to see popular trend data in comparative years over time of searches for Marijuana in the United States, a more relivant search for my own job purposes. Overall there’s been a decrease in search for marijuana year over year since 2004, suggesting a decrease in interest in popular culture, and ideally reflecting a decrease in the use of marijuana overall.
A link to this tool is now provided in the Media Tools section of this site.
As video becomes more and more a focal point on the web, countless players are working to find ways to best monetize video without ruining the user-experience, while providing advertisers with worthwhile ROI. This month Yahoo and Google released information on new video advertising executions; Yahoo Video and Google’s YouTube are two of the highest volume video stream hubs, so it’s worth learning more about the options.
Yahoo has a while now sold :30 second non-clickable pre-roll adjacent to an accompanying 300×250 banner; their newly launched products move towards more progressive video advertising models. The first does away with the accompanying banner and creates a clickable call-to-action over the :30 second pre-roll video. The second advertising option creates an overlay banner bar along the top of the video, which can be clicked to pause the video content and drop to a full overlay that offers additional ad content (a game, a form, a :30 sec spot, etc).
Google now has several videos that discuss advertising opportunities across their YouTube property, including targeted banner ads and video-overlays that function similarly to the dynamic content on Yahoo. Google runs a teaser overlay at the bottom of video content, that can be initiated to expand and provide additional content while the original video is paused. Google Operating System provides video and descriptions of Google’s options, and discussion of content concerns (they can restrict to professionally produced content, and safe environments).
Here is an interesting way to see the timeline history of your brand. Google News Archive Search lets you view a timeline history of the news about a particular topic. By appending the parameters in the search string and choosing timeline view you can display a specific set of years to illustrate a story of your brand at a particular period of events. You can display the trend of quantity of news about the subject, as well as organized captions commenting on each significant time period.
This graph represents a survey of people who have already stated that they would buy an Apple iPhone. That said, what factors weigh in on the quickness of executing that decision? 60% say that switching carriers isn’t an issue; 6% say they would pay over $400. So it will take some time, and it will take a price drop, for Cingular to capture the approximately 20% of iPod shoppers that said they’d buy an Apple iPhone. From a media landscape perspective, what does this mean? Early on, adoption could be low. Over time, features from the iPhone will spill into other models, and apple will lower their pricing structure, so the innovation will be adopted widespread. Possible media impact points will be the full web browsing rather than WAP (so you can view normal web banners), the push email brought to the phone by Yahoo (is there a deal there), mobile search by Google, and more.
Media site Adotas has a feature article discussing how relevancy between AdWords ads and site landing pages matters for your Quality Score. During the Google AdWords bidding process, your Quality Score helps you improve your ranking to do relevancy, which is a key ingredient in Google’s targeted ad business model. So if your looking for a way to save money in bidding, make sure you link your ads to a page that fits well.
“Publishers will be paid when when their visitors perform specific
actions, like generating a lead or buying a product. The CPA (cost per
action) system was revealed today …The ads won’t compete wilth existing contextual ads – instead they’ll be rolled out on a new network, the Content Referral network.” [via Mashable]
If you are doing a Google AdWords campaign, and want to stay aprised of any new competition in the ad space, you can sign up for free alerts here. You will receive e-mail notification whenever new ads are detected for the keywords you list.
Google has a few new additions to their advertising programs up their sleeves. They have begun contacting publishers about running rich media and interstitial ads along with their text and standard banner ads. They are also in beta with a desktop AdWords editor, as shown below:
At this time, I am publishing my marketing insights as a contributing author at UsableClicks. UsableClicks is a joint effort to dive deeper into marketing for actionable results.
For questions or comments, write me: kskobac at yahoo dot com
Yahoo has a while now sold :30 second non-clickable pre-roll adjacent to an accompanying 300×250 banner; their 
This marketing blog has been published by Kevin Skobac 
View Kevin Skobac's profile
At this time, I am publishing my marketing insights as a contributing author at 
