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Saturday, 25 June 2011

Blog Lessons from Dead Tree Authors and Cereal Boxes

I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

In a way that’s impossible to explain, [...]

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7 tips from PR pros for Internet marketers

Earlier this month I attended the Public Relations Society of America Travel & Tourism conference in San Antonio, Texas. Whether or not people realize it, public relations and Internet marketing go hand in hand . . . I’ve always seen publicists as the original link builders. A lot of great tips came out of the three-day show, some that I think even the most seasoned Internet marketer will find handy.

Here are my seven favorite tips-by-tweet from the event.

I’m not sure if this data applies to business categories and Facebook, but it drives home an important fact: Facebook is not the be-all-end-all of Internet marketing. It’s just one channel, and it deserves to be treated as such. Running a Facebook URL as the only site in a multi-million dollar ad campaign is not respecting the fact above. You can have all of the likes you want, but is Facebook actually sending any traffic to your website and driving conversions? Don’t lose sight of this, especially if a growing percentage of your “fans” are hiding your updates.

If this stat is true, I can imagine every Internet marketer on the planet is going to start producing video for their sites at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. Interesting to think about, but if good content is the driving force of all things rankings, video may be the final frontier of content.

I saw this particular quote get retweeted A LOT. I think it really resonated with the crowd. This is the same mentality I have about fans/followers, but there’s been a lot of talk surrounding page views lately as a throwaway metric. It’ll be interesting to see in the coming months the conversations around page views, what is positive and negative about it as a main metric.

Blogger pitching = link building. I think there’s a huge misconception out there about link building: it isn’t hard, it’s just tedious. There are a lot of ins and outs of link building, and research is a huge component of that. Is the site relevant to the campaign you’re working on? Is the website even worth reaching out to? Raven has many cool research and link building tools, such as the Link Manager and Backlink Explorer. Blogdash looks to be a great resource, too, for folks who need to simplify the research when building links with bloggers.

Another interesting data point . . . this must be 93% of customers who know what social media is believe companies should participate in the space. I guarantee you, however, that my parents could care less if companies are using social media, so there is always that angle to consider. With that being said, just because 93% of your customers think you should have a presence in social media doesn’t mean you should enter into the space haphazardly. Everything is about customer service, and if you open the door for a customer to communicate with you, you have to be ready for it. How are you going to handle the volume? What’s your crisis communications plan?

Content, content, content! When you’re deciding to give your business to someone, wouldn’t you want to see what you’re getting yourself into? Photos, video, articles—it’s all valuable information, and your potential customers are clamoring for it.

What KPIs mean the most to you? Funnels that lead to conversions? Engagement with social media? Time on site? KPIs don’t have to be for one specific purpose, either. You could set various KPIs for different goals throughout your organization. Define what those are for you, and pass that on to others around you. Maybe even use Raven to help you measure and manage them as well.

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Friday, 24 June 2011

From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year

(Cross-posted on the Commerce Blog)

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed.

The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool, I thought long and hard about Google’s offer to acquire us when they came calling in August 2010. Ultimately, we decided to join Google for two reasons: one, we shared the goal of offering consumers and merchants unified online payment solutions, and two, we realized that Google was serious about helping us integrate our technology into their digital tools by providing us with infrastructure and other support. Less than a year later, we’ve already taken a major step to help Google deliver on this vision with Google In-App Payments, which we announced last month at Google I/O. In-App Payments enable web application developers to receive payments for digital and virtual goods without the user ever leaving the application.

Me on stage at Google I/O introducing Google In-App Payments

When we first joined, we expected to spend a lot of time ramping up, meeting people and learning Google’s technology. In reality, our shared vision for the product enabled us to quickly partner with teams across the company to build out our product at scale. As a startup, you spend the majority of your time building teams from scratch to focus on functions like product, sales, marketing, operations and legal. At Jambool, I’d divide my time across operations, raising funds and meeting with outside developers. But at Google, we were able to combine our efforts with teams already in place who could manage those areas while we focused on the core product.

We set an ambitious goal of launching in-app payments nine months later at Google I/O, which motivated us to work quickly. We worked with Google’s established teams—especially Chrome, Android and Google Checkout—to build a simple API and intuitive user interface. During the last few weeks before Google I/O—when we were still working around the clock just to finish the product—we were invited to announce our launch as part of the day two keynote. That gave us even more drive to finish on time. And, thanks to the Chrome team, we found partners like Angry Birds and Graphic.ly, which really demonstrated the product’s usefulness and got developers excited about our broader vision of seamless digital payments.

As a startup, we never imagined we’d stand on a stage like the one at I/O and instantly reach consumers, businesses and developers around the world. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, thousands of developers signed up to use the API. This is something we wouldn’t have been able to do so quickly on our own, and it’s a testament to the big things a startup can accomplish by joining Google. We’re already looking forward to what the next year brings as developers around the world start to build great businesses on our platform.

If you’re interested in integrating your apps into Google’s In-App Payments API, we invite you to sign up and send us feedback.

Posted by Vikas Gupta, Head of Consumer Payments

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World IPv6 Day begins 24 hours from now. Websites, start your engines.

Back in January, we joined the Internet Society and a handful of leading Internet companies to announce World IPv6 Day. The announcement was a rallying call for adoption of the new Internet Protocol; now, less than six months later, participation has grown to more than 400 organizations. We believe this is an important milestone, as IPv6 is the only long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion, and its deployment is crucial to the continued growth of the open Internet.

About 24 hours from now, at midnight UTC on June 8 (Tuesday afternoon in the U.S., Wednesday morning in Asia), all the participants will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. For Google, this will mean virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available over IPv6.

In all likelihood, you won’t even notice the test. The vast majority (99.95%) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they’ll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4. However, as with any next-generation technology, there may be teething pains. We estimate that .05% of systems may fail to fall back to IPv4, so some people may find Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and other participating websites slow or unresponsive on World IPv6 Day. This is often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home networking equipment, such as home routers, that can make a computer think it has IPv6 connectivity when in fact it’s not working.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard with other industry players to prepare. Operating system vendors and browser manufacturers have been releasing updates to resolve IPv6 connectivity issues—for example, Google Chrome now incorporates workarounds for malfunctioning IPv6 networks—and we’ve seen router manufacturers test their devices for robust IPv6 support as well. For our part, we’ve been busy adding IPv6 support to services that didn’t yet have it, and fixing minor issues with those that did. And since the best way to find bugs in your services is to hammer on them yourself, Google employees have been operating in “World IPv6 Day mode” for several months now.

We’ve also been thinking about how best to notify people who may have connectivity issues. To that end, we’ve run a prominent notice in Google Search for people who may not be able to connect, directing them to a new test page and help article. If you’re curious, you can test your connection now at ipv6test.google.com.

Update 5:37 PM: The test flight was a success. World IPv6 Day is over, and IPv6 access to Google services remains enabled only for users in the Google over IPv6 program. We carried about 65% more IPv6 traffic than usual, saw no significant issues and did not have to disable IPv6 access for any networks or services. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working together with the other participants to analyze the data we’ve collected, but, at least on the surface, the first global test of IPv6 passed without incident.

Posted by Lorenzo Colitti, Network Engineer and IPv6 Samurai

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Helping publishers get the most from display advertising with Admeld

(Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog)

It’s now clear that investments in new technologies, new ad formats and improved buying and selling processes are helping to grow the display advertising pie. This benefits publishers who make more money from display ads, users who receive free ad-funded content and marketers who are able to grow their businesses online.

However, we often hear from major website publishers that ad management today is still mind-numbingly complicated and inefficient. We’ve been investing in our publisher tools to try and improve this landscape and have made great progress, but we think we can do even better. To help major publishers get the most out of the rapidly changing and growing display ad landscape, we’ve signed an agreement to acquire Admeld, a New York-based yield optimization firm.

Here’s a basic summary of the display ad industry, from the perspective of major publishers. There are lots of different ways that they can sell their display ad space. Often, they’ll sell space directly to advertisers or agencies, using an ad server to actually deliver and measure the ads (like Microsoft’s Atlas, AOL’s AdTech, DoubleClick's DFP, Yahoo’s APT, OpenX, Zedo, 24/7 Real Media and others). Alternatively, they’ll make their ad space available indirectly—to hundreds of ad networks (like Advertising.com, Specific Media, Collective, 24/7, ValueClick, Vibrant, AdSense, Undertone and others), each with thousands of advertisers, or to various advertising exchanges or technology platforms (like Yahoo’s Right Media, OpenX, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, ContextWeb, AdBrite, AppNexus and others) that match them with ad buyers (like ad networks and demand side platforms) who represent advertisers, in real-time marketplaces.

Some publishers also work with a “yield optimization” provider (such as Rubicon Project, Pubmatic and others) that supplies technology to select ads from across these many indirect options, while providing personalized service and support. In a very complex and rapidly growing display ad landscape, that’s what Admeld does.

Providing better ad management services to publishers is an area that has seen a huge amount of investment in recent months. Formed just over three years ago, the Admeld team is an example of the huge strides the industry is making—it has quickly developed a great service that is helping many major publishers manage their ad space more efficiently and profitably.

By combining Admeld’s services, expertise and technology with Google’s offerings, we’re investing in what we hope will be an improved era of flexible ad management tools for major publishers. Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable, provide improved support and services, and enable publishers to make more informed decisions across all their ad space. These are all things our publisher partners have been asking us to further invest in. Of course, Admeld will continue to support other ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and ad servers, to yield the best possible results for publishers.

We believe that this investment will be an important step to help online publishers, and will further improve and grow the display advertising industry as a whole.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

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