Google

We got an email yesterday from Google Adwords letting us know that now the +1 button will be availble on the PPC results.

In the coming weeks, your search results and ads on Google will include a +1 button, which users can click to recommend your ads. You don’t need to make any changes to your account in order to take advantage of them. The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.

Think of the +1 button as a way for fans of your business to recommend what you offer, for all their friends and contacts to see. By helping searchers see more personal, relevant ads, we believe you’ll see more qualified traffic. You can also add the +1 button to your site to give your customers the opportunity to +1 your site after visiting it.

We started seeing the button a few weeks ago on the search results and now we can see it on almost all our searches. Unfortunately Adwords didnt mention anything about reporting and if we are going to be able to see how many people click on the button or even which ad/which URL.

The last few days we have noticed that Google +1 button appears more often on the search results. We noticed that we can see the button on both Paid and Organic listings. Its still not 100% of the time we started seeing this on a few users.  Google released a few weeks ago the new feature and made it very easy for webmaster to add the code on their websites. You can find out more here.

Google announces a series of  search improvements today on the “Inside Search” event. A few days ago Google emailed journalists inviting them to Inside Search for ”an under-the-hood look at Google Search, share our vision, and demo some of our newest technology and features.”

There where several improvements on the mobile  search improvements but the three main annocuments are the following:

Voice Search

Now you can speak your web searches instead of typing them! A small microphone will appear on the search box, once you click the microphone your results will show up just as they would if you’d typed the query!

Search by Image

You can also search by using an existing image.  Users can drag and drop an image into the search box, or instead choose to upload it or copy and paste it into the field. There is also a very handy Chrome extension where you can right click on an image in order to do a search.

Google Instant Pages

This is by far the best improvement. With Instant Pages, Google will pre-load websites from the search result pages, not only the HTML code but even images.  According to Google this will save seconds off the search process by loading Websites before you even click on them.  Instant pages is currently available only on Google’s Chrome browser. Once more Google proves that really want to speed up the internet!!

A video by Google on the effect of online advertising for offline sales.

We are very impressed with the latest press ads for the opening of the London Corinithia Hotel. Each ads print features a fact about this new luxury hotel such as the location, the rooms even the staff. The ads are minimal and definetely attract the attention.  Last month we saw them in several purblications such as Monocle, GQ and others.

Unfortunately though despite the great print ads the Corinthia Hotels do not run any PPC brand campaigns in order to protect their brand and gain more exposure on the search result pages!! When a user is searching for several brand terms the two PPC ads that come up are from booking.com and Londontown.com

For us it’s very difficult to understand why a company will spend so much money on creating awareness for one of their hotels and not actually spend a few hundred pounds every month on a PPC campaign that will help them to get more traffic and offer more options to the users . The two online travel agencies are definetely gaining  a lot from the print campaigns and currently run some campaigns with a very high ROI.