Online news

The last few weeks I have noticed that two of the major cash back sites started advertising on TV and Radio. Both site Topcashback.com and Quidco have been heavily promoting their products online for the last few years. Also relying on word of mouth and user recommendations by offering £5 to £10 to their users if they recommend their sites to their friends.

The TV ads are very simple (to be honest to simple) and both try to explain their business model and the advantages within 30 seconds.They use logos and mentions to some of the big merchants in order to add trust and the fact that millions users use them already.

For TopCashback the final strapline is very interesting “besides, you’d have bought it anyway”. For the cosnumer this is great, not sure about the merchant. This is something we have been hearing a lot the last few months as merchants start to question the value of a cashback site!

It’s very interesting that both sites use TV but also Radio advertising at the same time. One explanation for this  is that when we look at the traffic volumes we can actually see a drop in traffic for both sites during March-April.  This is when Google released their Panda algorithm updated for their search index.

Topcashback.com

Quidco

Another explanation is that cashback sites are facing a stagnation, there are a few strong players, a few white-label solutions which makes it very difficult to acquire new users. Moreover users are not loyal as they switch websites depending on the best offer available! This makes it very difficult for the site but also for the merchants as they need to offer exclusive offers and as a result lower margins.

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.

Google announced that as of yesterday, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. Interest categories are a good way of exposing your content campaigns to more users within the display network. We always recommend that client set up a re-marketing in order to get more data and understand the creative performance

How interest categories work? According to Google “the system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.”

There are over 1,000 interest categories from very niche to very broad interests/themes.  Once more Google is helping advertisers to use the Google Display Network.

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!!

Google introduced Social Search back in 2009 where you  find more relevant information from your friends through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This was available only on English speaking countries but as of last week it’s now available to all countries.  For example, if you’re looking for information about hotel and one of your friends  has written a blog post about it, that post may show up higher in your results with a clear annotation and picture of your friend.

In more detail:  Social search results are only visible to you and only appear when you choose to log in to your Google Account. If you’re signed in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your results, including people from your Google chat buddy list, your Google Contacts, the people you’re following in Google Reader and Buzz, and the networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. For public networks like Twitter, Google finds your friends and sees who they’re publicly connected to as well. You can see a complete list of the people included in your social search results in your personal Google Dashboard (this display is private). For an overview of Google Social Search, check out the explanatory video

You can watch the full video: Social Search