The Official Google Blog doesn’t mention Bing obviously, but describes instant scrolling (Google will load 1000 results organized in “pages”, but you can click to get more at the bottom of the list) and the other key element of Google Images new design: a dense tiled layout that is the result of removing the text that described each image (size, weight, URL) in the old design.

To be able to read information about the image, you just have to hover the mouse cursor over the image and a larger preview with the image description will swiftly appear.

If you like an image but it’s not 100% what you are looking for, clicking on “Similar” will open a new image search page that will show results that Google’s algorithm classified as similar to the one you selected. This is one of the best executed and most useful features of Image Search.

Clicking on an image takes to a landing page that shows the image in a frame on top of the page hosting it, which is shown as a background. From a usability standpoint the interface is better than the old one that used to show a small thumbnail on a frame at the top of the browser window.

Display Ad Builder Tool for Image Search Ads

A cool demo of the Display Ad Builder Tool shows how to create Image Search Ads. You just need to choose a template, customize your ad with a headline, description and click text, load an image (process not shown in the demo), indicate the destination URL and Google will create different display network ad formats for you.

As you can see in the image above, the ad text in the demo is sometimes shown only partially because of the different ad sizes, but this issue doesn’t occur in the actual Display Ad Builder Tool.

Related posts:

1. Google Real Time Search

   By Daniel Peiser - 10 Dec 09 - SEO

2. AdWords introduces View-Through Conversion Trac...

   By Daniel Peiser - 5 Oct 09 - SEM

3. Bing Wave 2: A Move to Social Search

   By Richard Bramer - 23 Oct 09 - Social Media

It’s no surprise, then, that more than half of the internet’s top websites use Flash Cookies to track users and store information about them, as UC Berkeley researchers show in their paper on Flash Cookies and Privacy.

Local Shared Objects usage can be legitimate and beneficial for internet users, by saving information that can improve web surfing, like user names and preferences on audio volume for watching videos on YouTube, or personal highscores on online gaming websites for instance.

However concerns about Behavioral Targeting are rising, and while Adobe explains in a very clear and detailed way what third party Local Shared Objects are and how to eventually delete or disallow them, only internet savvy users who know about their existence and their purpose can actually manage Flash Cookies.

New online information privacy regulations are expected, and educating internet users about tracking activities carried out on websites should begin from explaining how personal information is collected and by making Flash Cookie removal fast and easy.

Flash Cookie image from comiccoverage.typepad.com by Mark Engblom.

Related posts:

1. Americans reject Behavioral Targeting

   By Daniel Peiser - 7 Oct 09 - SEM

2. Google Dashboard is one step towards internet t...

   By Daniel Peiser - 12 Nov 09 - Social Media

3. Facebook Privacy Issues addressed by Mark Zucke...

   By Daniel Peiser - 25 May 10 - Social Media

This statement was made back in May, and since then we have seen Google take many steps towards ensuring their place in the mobile world. The various efforts of Google within mobile are almost too numerous to mention all at once. Google already operates the third largest mobile ad network in the US. It is clear that they see the evolution of the mobile device as synonymous with the evolution of the internet. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Mike Jones continued, “The whole experience of the Internet is becoming not a desktop computer experience, but a personal experience. It’s something you’re going to grow up with and you’re going to live with all your life and I think every handheld device will have all of those experiences.” Google’s place as the internet’s potentate has always been sealed by its ability to monetize it. Its latest move into mobile appears to be on the same path.

With the rapid development and increasing popularity of smartphones, now boasting full HTML browsers, Google has offered up a product to mobile publishers. It is an additional option in Adsense, which allows publishers to run bigger ads on devices like the iPhone, Palm Pre, and other androids. Google also offers the option to select “iPhone and other high-end devices only” rather than “all phones”. Gartner estimates that the sale of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. An article in the New York Times outlines just how hard Google has worked on this development, and just how determined it’s staff appear to be on catering to smartphones. The company’s advertising strategy, ““bet very big on these more sophisticated handsets,” said Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering at Google.

Match this development with the other recent Google advancements into mobile territory and you see a company poised to carry us into a monetized mobile world. Google has just implemented ads and user generated content into iPhone maps, new Adwords options for the iPhone and G1, Adsense for Mobile Applications beta, and a revamped local search service for mobile phones. However, speculators remain sceptical of the earning potential within mobile. Although the use value and inherent scale are beyond doubt, analysts believe “ in 2013, mobile search would bring in less than 2 percent of projected Google revenues for that year” ($650 million). My guess would be that Google is onto the right scent, and although Microsoft are on the case with the 6^th largest US mobile ad network and its own mobile services, I would say that Google’s large bet on mobile is a good one.

Related posts:

1. Google Scoops Up AdMob; Feeds It’s Mobile Presen...

   By Richard Bramer - 11 Nov 09 - Mobile

2. Google phone Nexus One brings competition to th...

   By Daniel Peiser - 8 Jan 10 - Mobile

3. Look Mom, No Keys: Microsoft Ads Mobile Voice S...

   By Richard Bramer - 8 Oct 09 - Mobile

AdWords Conversion Tracking lets you activate the optional View-through conversion reporting column on the Campaigns tab, showing the number of conversions that occurred within 30 days of your display ad appearing on the Google Content Network for which there was no ad click generated.

It’s important to note that only image ads count: search campaigns or text creatives in content campaigns will not be tracked.

View-through reporting data could be very useful in optimizing campaigns and choosing the best suited sites for the ads, but strong criticism has already arisen, pointing out that this new feature could be nothing but a way to cover banner ads’ decreasing effectiveness year after year.

Natural Born Clickers are an endangered species

An interesting study by comScore and Starcom USA shows that in the last two years, the number of internet users who click on display ads halved: from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009.

What could be easily labeled as banner blindness, is actually, from the glass half full perspective, evidence of the strong interaction between online display advertising and consumers’ search behavior: not only new metrics like the Dwell Time are being introduced to measure the effectiveness of rich media ads, but a study from iProspect shows how internet users perform searches related to ads after being exposed to online display advertising

Search and Online Display Advertising

According to iProspect’s Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study, 52 percent of internet users actively respond to online display advertising by clicking on the ad (31%) or performing a search on the search engine (27%).

Wow, impressive numbers. Probably because the numbers themselves don’t add up and need to be taken with a grain of salt, because of the misleading methodology used in the study. Let’s look at the question internet users were asked to answer:

What the results actually show, is that in a 6 month time frame, 31% of the respondents include clicking on ads as one of the possible responses to display advertising (because of the “select all that apply option”).

The study is not actually revealing that “31% of Internet users INITIALLY respond to online display advertising”, because there is no way to measure the times that this particular response occurred compared to the total number of ad impressions in 6 months, therefore it’s impossible to compare the frequency of this particular kind of response against the other options shown in the image below:

Measuring Online Display Advertisement’s power to drive search behavior is an impossible task, let’s be honest about it. IProspect warns marketers that ads on offline channels, as radio and TV, convert online too.

What emerges from all these studies and AdWords View-through conversion tracking, is that SEO, SEM and offline marketing efforts need to be coordinated and harmonic. Not only domain names in display ads need to be intuitive and easily remembered, but offline slogans and online display creatives should be reflected in landing pages’ keywords.

The final lesson in creating Brand awareness through Online Display Advertisement comes from Gene Hackman himself: View-through conversions may not be immediate…

Related posts:

1. Free webinar on AdWords Conversion Products

   By Daniel Peiser - 7 Jun 10 - PPC

2. Facebook Ad Conversion Tracking features Post-I...

   By Daniel Peiser - 16 Mar 10 - PPC

3. DoubleClick Ad Planner Top 1000 sites integrate...

   By Daniel Peiser - 3 Jun 10 - PPC

All jokes aside though, it will be interesting to see, in comparison to Microsoft, where a $100 million campaign gets Yahoo. Although Yahoo’s campaign will most likely not focus on search (alone), it should be centred on Yahoo’s media network and display advertising possibilities. For the consumer, the message would be one of integration and ‘one stop’ hubs for all online needs. For the advertiser, the message would be that the company operates the biggest network of media properties on the Web, with more than 500 million visitors every month around the world.

Yahoo has appeared to stabilize their search market share, remaining level for the month of August after prior loses in June and July. With Bing seeing an average or .45% growth every month since its release, it is tough to say that it was worth $100 million in advertising. Especially considering it was alongside a massive promotional push but also keeping in mind that Live Search was a sinking ship that needed turning around. Bing is a product that has proven a good alternative to Google, and it has had to fight for every inch. What Yahoo is offering up against the internet potentate is somewhat unclear. I hope for their sake that it’s more than, “It’s You!”

Related posts:

1. Yahoo Spruces Up its Search Marketing

   By Richard Bramer - 8 Oct 09 - SEM

2. Microsoft/Yahoo ‘Search Alliance’ Sprouts to Li...

   By Richard Bramer - 9 Mar 10 - SEO

3. Microsoft Counts on Good Advertising

   By Richard Bramer - 9 Mar 10 - SEM