Home: Message List - Event: Search Marketing with Google

Event: Search Marketing with Google

CommunityTeam — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:34:24 GMT

Community Members,

Please join us in welcoming Jon Kaplan to your Small Business Online Community. Jon is here to answer questions related to search marketing. Today, Jon will be using the screen name GoogleKaplan.

About Jon:
Jon Kaplan is the Industry Director of Financial Services at Google. He oversees sales and operations for the Financial Services industry in North America. Jon has been with Google for over 4 years and previously worked at the Economist Group/Economist.com.

To all Community Members
If you have questions for Jon, post it here by simply hitting reply and then refresh your browsers often to view Jon's responses. Jon will try to answer as many of your questions as possible; however he may not get to all of them. You must be a registered user of the site to particpate.

Join Now - http://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com/create-account.jspa

The event will be moderated to queue the questions for our guest. After a question is posted it may be delayed and/or moved into a queue. You do not need to repost. Your question has been received but is in a queue waiting for the guest response. Please note, Jon will first answer the pre-event questions that community members were kind enough to ask in advance.

Remember the community guidelines; stay on topic and be professional.

So, what's your question?

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

SBOCTeam — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:05:21 GMT

Jon,

On behalf of the SBOC Team and the members of the Small Business Online Community, we wanted to say we truly appreciated your time today and your professional responses to user questions.

Community members, while our session with Jon has now concluded, please feel free to discuss today's session and the questions answered. Again, if you'd like more information about Jon and Google, visit:

http://www.google.com

Thanks again,
The SBOC Team

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

GoogleKaplan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:03:17 GMT

A great question to end my session on! The future looks bright and Google is preparing for the next generation of advertising and information. Front and center is the mobile revolution and what potential that has for both users and advertiser. There will be roughly 3 times as many phones sold in the world than computers in 2008 -- and in many countries around the world (including Japan and South Korea), more people access the internet from there mobile phone than from their computer. In fact, 80% of web traffic in South Korea comes over the phone! So Google is not thinking about information wrt computers, but rather device agnostic.

From an advertiser POV, you can see how mobile phones could revolutionize advertising. Most new phones are GPS enabled, which allows us (and anyone on the network) to know exactly where someone physically is. Imagine a scenerio where, if you opted in (of course), Google could serve you a targeted, geo-specific ad on you mobile phone when you started walking towards a particular business. Let's say I opt in for restaurant information and ads. If I'm walking down the street in NYC and approaching a top-rated pizza place - that happens to also advertise with Google Mobile - that business could serve an ad when I'm approaching 100 feet of their location for instance ... and then send me a text alerting me to that fact with a $1 off coupon! Talk about precision marketing! That's the power of mobile ....

It's going to be fun watching how this plays out, but rest assured, Google will always do it's best to be relevant to users and a must-buy for advertisers -- by providing precision, scale and accountability.

Thanks for having me today and best of luck with your businesses!!

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

SBOCTeam — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:48:43 GMT

Very helpful response Jon!

akgold asks:

Hi Jon, Thanks for all of your helpful answers. Here is my question: what do you see as being some of the biggest internet trends for the next 10 years? Google is clearly changing the way the whole world thinks about advertising and finding information *on *the internet. I was just wondering what neat things may be *on *the horizon that you can share with the Community. Thanks in advance! Andrew

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

GoogleKaplan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:46:45 GMT

No problem - happy to do it! One of the most interesting areas of development for small businesses is in our applications. Recently, Google changed our 2 core areas of focus (Search and Ads) to 3 areas of focus (Search, Ads and Applications). Over the last several years, we have been busy buying companies and partnering with companies that can help us with this mission. Today, we offer a suite of productivity software that is either free or nearly free (depending on the program you select) and that allows you to focus on running your business -- not running your IT department! We offer corporate versions of GMail; spreadsheets, word processing and presentation software that allows you to collaborate online w/ multiple people working on a doc at one time; Google Calendar and Google Talk. All of this, plus a website creator, free analytics and a free website optimizer that I mentioned previously. It's very compelling to a small business owner who doesn't want to spend a ton of dough, but wants world-class technology along with security and support from Google. Of course, all of this is accessible over the internet, so no need for costly software installs on your decktop -- and your information/software is accessible from anywhere and with any device! It's really exciting ... lots of small businesses are signing up daily.

Check it out at: www.google.com/a

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

SBOCTeam — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:33:33 GMT

xenopod would like to know:

What are some offerings from Google that would be particularly useful for small businesses that are just getting started? Aside from the API's are there other offerings specifically for small IT companies?

By the way thank you for your attention to both these and my previous questions. It is most definitely appreciated!

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

GoogleKaplan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:27:52 GMT

Another great question - this time about Maps! Maps is one of most interesting products and continues to evolve. Since buying a company called Keyhole several years ago that allowed you to see satellite imagery, we've now incorporated alot of community aspects into the product. Google Maps API is the key to this (www.code.google.com/apis/maps). We are allowing developer, users and businesses to overlay local information -- from MyMaps, the Starbucks locations to StreetView mapping down to the individual streets! The power is in the depth and breadth of information we have access to and in the community feedback and features we've launched! Our transit information (public transportation) overlay was particularily impressive ...

For a business, it's important to make sure, through the API also, that Google has the most up-to-date information about your business. Often times, to generate natural search results, we use a third-party information provider (Yellow Page type of providers) who may or may not have the most updated info. It's best if you take a little time to update that info yourself. The ratings and reviews you mention don't measure into the natural search results, but is important as users consider transacting with your business -- think of it as CitySearch for Businesses.

I could go on - but check out www.googlemapsmania.com to see all of the interesting 'mash-ups' that have been created using Google Maps. The open API is fully in effect on this product!

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

SBOCTeam — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:14:53 GMT

Perfect! Next question is from simon07:

I've heard a lot of info about Google Maps recently. Can you talk about that application? Also, can you give advice on how businesses can increase their chances to appear in those search results? Does it all operate on the same search principles? Or is it partly driven by user interactions too? I noticed that users can submit reviews and ratings on businesses they find via Google Maps. How does that play into the search equation if at all?

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

GoogleKaplan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:12:49 GMT

Keyword prices are an interesting concept. Most of our clients monitor them, but only in the context of how they are affecting their allowable cost per acquisition. If keyword prices go up, but conversion rates on the backend go up by the same percentage, they are less concerned than if kw prices go up and conversion rates go down or stay the same. Several of our customers do use 3rd party companies like keyword spy, although big advertisers will often use a company like Efficient Frontier who will plug kw pricing strategies directly into their account and adjust bids on the fly based on performance.

We plan to bring more transparency to the bidding process in the future, so hang tight -- we know you need that!

Re: Live Now: Google - Search Marketing

SBOCTeam — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:00:16 GMT

Great job with the pre-event questions Jon! We have plenty more in the queue. Let's tacke those next.

amspcs asks:

Re Adwords...How do you suggest we novices go about determining optimal bid amounts? I have found that often, just raising the bid does little or nothing to improve placement or performance. Any tools you can think of to help *us *determine what the competition is biddin for a specific keyword so we know if we're even in the ballpark? What about "www.keywordspy.com"---any comments *on *that service? AMSPCS