Google “City Guide” type searches are being promoted at Google.com.

Searches by city name at Google.com yield SERPs featuring tourism related search refinement options.

Perhaps Google is considering a Google Tourism vertical or a Google Travel vertical.

Presently, a search on a city such as “Chicago” yields a SERP with a featured link to a Google Map of Chicago and six tourism related “refine results for Chicago” options:

Dining guides
Lodging guides
Attractions
Shopping
Suggested itineraries
Tours & day trips



Clicking on one of the six tourism related search refinement options, such as “Dining guides,” yields a SERP for “Chicago more: dining_guides” and additional refinement options.

The “Chicago more: dining_guides” search results are similar to results from searches such as “Chicago dining guides” or “Chicago restaurants.”

The additional refinement options are categorized by tourism headings under 1) Essentials 2) What to do and 3) Planning.

Presently, the Google tourism related refinement options on city searches provide users with easy, pre-formatted “drill-down” city-related search options.

Google “City Guides” search refinement options may signal a future Google Tourism vertical or a Google Travel vertical.

Mobile: Looking Ahead


eMarketer looks at some of the marketing lessons that can be learned from one of the world’s largest mobile companies.


China will soon have more than 500 million mobile phone subscribers. The country's 1.3 billion people provide a fertile base for huge demand, and its robust electronics manufacturing sector is supplying handsets on a mammoth scale.

This massive and growing market is served by a duopoly of mobile carriers: China Mobile and China Unicom. These two companies are the two largest mobile operators on the planet, by far. And the former company is close to twice the size of the latter.



One advantage of a duopoly is the brand-building associated with high name recognition. China Mobile is not only the largest mobile carrier in the world, it's the fourth most valuable brand worldwide, ahead of such also-rans as Google and Citibank, according to a Millward Brown-led study.



Still, new phones and service offerings will require new advertising. The good news for marketers is that advertising gadgetry online has been successful in China, with IT products, PCs and mobiles getting the most browsing activity among respondents to a Shanghai iResearch Co., Ltd. study published in June 2005.



Although advertising online is not an either/or proposition for most marketers, those who eschew online ads should only do so with a strong word-of-mouth campaign, since that method trumps even budget in terms of influencing purchase decisions, according to a GMI poll of online consumers in November 2005.



As for mobile advertising, much of it is done via China Mobile's Monternet and China Unicom's Uni-Info, making the firms some of the country's largest advertisers. There are many SMS-based ads in particular, with paid SMS services, promotions, broadcasting tie-ins, lotteries and the like. Entire SMS-based industries have sprung up. Mobile users in China sent about 300 billion SMS messages last year, or around 700 per user, according to CNET. CNET's Little Red Blog recently detailed the mobile spam problem which has grown along with advertising on Monternet:

"My company has long experience selling: Guns, roofies, eavesdropping devices, fake Taiwanese currency, multiple use keys, assassins and private detectives, tax receipts and fake diplomas. Contact Ah Qiang," read a recent example of Monternet spam.

Part of the spam problem is the relative anonymity of mobile phone accounts in China. One hundred RMB (about $13) in untraceable cash and five minutes is what it takes to become a China Mobile subscriber. Subscribership has grown faster than the MII can regulate, when it comes to things like spam. MII is now moving to require all subscribers register with an identity card.

Some mobile advertisers are allowing opt-outs to fight the problem. China Mobile and Feituo Wuxian Technology Company partnered in March 2006 to allow domestic firms to advertise on mobile phones. Users opt-in (or out) to the ads using through a special channel on Monternet

James Belcher is a senior analyst at eMarketer. This article is drawn from eMarketer's new report, China Mobile.

TV Is Changing And TV Companies Better Follow

Facts and figures were prevalent in this ad"tech Chicago 2006 TV 2.0 panel with Denuo SVP Tim Hanlon and Points North Partners Founder Peter Storck. Both spoke of the dramatic changes TV is undergoing right now and where they thought it was heading. Storck began with a numbers-heavy presentation that revealed many insights from various studies about the use of TV and the DVR:

1. 33 percent want TV-like features of their PCs
2. 15 percent want them on their cell phone
3. 46 percent use their DVRs to skip commercials
4. 58 percent use their DVR to record programming
5. 35 percent use their DVR to pause live TV
6. 49 percent use their DVR every day
7. 63 percent use it once a week
8. 55 percent fast forward through commercials
9. Interestingly, 15 percent use thir DVRs to rewind and watch commecials
10. 42 percent use free video on demand
11. 59 percent use the DVR to access free local information

Storck then shifted to video ono the web and saif 32 percent watch news videos and 31 percent watch movie previews. In terms of video on mobile phones 32 percent say the screen is too small and 30 percent the content isn't worth watching.

While programming certainly is shifting towards a more on-demand, paid model, 62 percent of people would still rather watch ad-supported content than pay for d-free content. Of those who would pay, 17 percent would pay $1.99 per show.

While Storck believes people are behind the industry in terms of shifting to newer viewing models, Denuo's Hanlon believes the consumer is ahead of the industry. While listening to Hanlon's very vibrant and intellectual presentation, I felt like I had to bring up the thesaurus to aid in my interpretation of his use of several "fancy" words. That aside, Hanlon share the inter-relationship bewteen small and large audiences and the cost models used to price reach to those audiences. The accompanying chart will show how those relationships change as the audience size changes.

Hanlon asserted people want content to be malleable, flexible and viewed on their own terms. Because of the change in viewing habits, he claims metrics such as Nielsen television rating are woefully out of date and do not adequately capture the use of the medium.

He gave a couple examples of companies that are accommodating this shift in consumption citing TiVo's telescoping ads which let viewers dig deeper into advertising content without missing any programming. He also told the audience to, when in a Starbucks, dial 510-653-6473 and hold the phone up to the music. It's the Grace Notes services that provides song information. He says there's no reason this or similar technology couldn't be harnessed to provide a channel to offer people more information on ads of any kind.

People want flexibility in how they access content and Hanlon says "tough shit" to old content companies who are clinging to old models becasue there won't be much to cling to for much longer. As the quantity of content increases and more control is ceded to the viewer, the need for guidance and navigation ill become necessary giving rise to a whole new category of company whose sole purpose is to present choices in an easy to navigate fashion.

While Hanlon does not believe mass media will die, he does believe it will become the exception to the rule. In terms of ad-free, paid content, Hanlon does belive that will continue to increase but not necessarily at the expense of ad-supported media because there's a limit to how much anyone will pay before it starts to hurt.

Source: Ad Watch

Analyzing the Google AdWords Landing Page Algorithm

By Jennifer Slegg
July 25, 2006

Google's pricing for AdWords includes a component that looks at the content of landing pages, and a recent change that has caused price increases is proving controversial in the search marketing community.


The landing page algorithm by Google AdWords has caused quite a bit of controversy amongst advertisers since it first arrived in advertiser's AdWords accounts in December 2005. Since it launched, Google updated the landing page algorithm again in May 2006, often referred to as the April bid hike. However the latest July 10th update by Google has created quite a stir in the forums and the blogosphere for many reasons, particularly how it could impact advertisers making money through click arbitrage.

Before the landing page algorithm was launched, Google used to use click through rate (CTR) as a way to determine not only how quality the ad was, but also how good the overall experience for the visitor was. Unfortunately, advertisers who provided a poor user experiences on the landing page could also write a high quality ad—or a misleading one—to promote it, resulting in an ad with a high CTR but poor user experience.

So what exactly makes for a poor user experience on a landing page? Google seems to be targeting a range of things including such things as excessive advertising or landing pages with little or nothing else but advertising. But when I talked to Nick Fox, Senior Business Product Manager from Google on the new landing page controversy, it isn't just the click arbitragers who are being targeted. He also specifically referred to market areas as well, including scams, work from home ads, and things that are "free but not really free." So not only are they targeting the overall user experience on the landing page, but specifically the actual content on the landing page as well as how it relates to the ad itself.

They also seem to be targeting advertisers who are advertising something similar or identical to other advertisers. This could get into a dangerous game of Google being the one to determine which competitor is the best and which will be required to pay more in order for their ads to continue running. In a discussion on DigitalPoint, a member posts that he asked for a landing page review, and the response from Google seems to imply that not only are they judging based upon his landing page, but also based upon what makes his service different from other site's serivces, effectively picking and choosing the ones who get increased bids, and those who do not.

The AdWords team responded in part with "Thank you for calling in today. You wanted to know the status of your site quality review. I wanted to let you know that our specialist team concluded their review, and maintained the current status of your site. They explained that there are currently a number of people providing free, unfettered instant access to MLS listings. Our goal is to provide a user with the best possible results, and it is not clear from your site what makes your solution one of the best options for the end user". However, the advertiser notes that Google obviously did not read his accompanying advertisement very well, since that was not what he was advertising. His advertisement was:


Anytown MLS Listings
Our Realtors Send Daily Customized
MLS Listings For Anytown, USA

Before Google launched the latest incarnation of the landing page algorithm, Google had human evaluations of ads and their landing pages, to determine what people thought was a good user experience, and what made for a poor one. I asked Michael Mayzel from Google on how this tied in with the end result of the current landing page algorithm. "We first start with human evaluators and end user feedback to determine a sample of landing pages that provide a low quality user experience. We then build computer algorithms to accurately detect similar types of pages, verify the accuracy, and then deploy those algorithms to evaluate all advertiser pages," Mayzel said.

From a business perspective, it obviously makes sense to determine the quality of a landing page by an algorithm than by a human review, especially when dealing with the number of advertisements that Google has in their ad inventory. But an algorithm is never as good as a personal human review, so there is definitely a question of just how many advertisers really are being unfairly penalized by this new change. And unfortunately for affected advertisers, being penalized means they now have their ads disabled or are forced to pay $10 a click in order to keep their ads running. And all this when their landing page could have perfectly acceptable to a human reviewer.

Prior to the new landing page algorithm change, the Inside AdWords blog did state that the number of affected publishers would be small. And Fox reiterated what that blog said and that only a small number of advertisers were being affected by this change. He also said there has been a very low number of "false positives", meaning that very few advertisers tripped this new landing page algorithm that really shouldn't have. When it comes to landing page quality, Fox said it is "pretty black and white."

Fox also stated that while the number of impacted advertisers were low, they also were a group of advertisers that tended to get a lot of impressions and spend a lot of money. It is an interesting business decision to target those advertisers who spend a lot of money, because there had been speculation that perhaps the landing page algorithm would only affect those advertisers who spend under a certain dollar figure per month. But this seems to not be the case, as I asked Fox if spending a certain dollar figure a month would result in an advertiser not being targeted with this new landing page algorithm, and the answer was no. All advertisers and their ads are being affected by this change the same, regardless of whether that advertisers is large or not.

There also is a review system in place for advertisers who feel they have been unfairly impacted with the new algorithm, but success seems to have been limited, at least when viewing advertiser feedback in various forums. Many have asked for reviews, only to be told that they need to improve. Of course, AdWords is not being very specific at what the landing page algorithm is looking for to determine quality.

When I asked for specifics on what could improve landing page quality or what exactly on the landing page was being evaluated, Fox was reluctant to answer. But landing pages are re-evaluated regularly (although Fox would not state just how regularly that is) so there is hope for those who want to make changes in an attempt to drop down their minimum bid prices.

Plenty of speculation abounds at what could be parts of the landing page equation that equals a quality landing page. A thread at WebmasterWorld had some interesting suggestions that an advertiser was given by an AdWords rep after the previous landing page algorithm update in May. The suggestions included an increased amount of content, a separate privacy policy page, a contact page, as well as quality links to external sites.

Source: Search Engine Watch