What’s New?

Google Merchant Center—URL Verification

In March, Google announced that all merchants sending product offer information into Google Merchant Center must verify ownership of their domain by May 18 or risk having product data removed from Google Product Search. The whole process takes less than two minutes and you need to do it in order to keep your product listings on Google Merchant Center live.

Adwords the last few months have tested and released several different ad formats. This is partly due to the fact that the web is changing and having just text ads is not enough. With the new formats they are trying to offer a better user experience and at the same time more appealing that will generate more clicks. The following short video showcases most of the new ad formats.

Available ad formats:

Ad site links, which we covered in our previous post. Ad Sitelinks allow you to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to specific, relevant content deeper within your sitemap.

Location extensions, allow you to extend your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads. In addition to the description lines and URL that appear in your ad text, your ad can also display your business name, address, and phone number.

Video extensions provide a new way to engage potential customers with sight, sound, and motion when you advertise on Google.com. Video extensions play in an expandable plusbox directly beneath your standard text ads.

Product extensions are a way for you to enrich your existing AdWords ads with more relevant and specific information about your retail merchandise. Product extensions allow you to use your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight your products directly in your search ads. (Currently in a closed BETA for the UK).

Click to call,  by adding a click-to-call business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers.

Google Analytics added  a very valuable option: to add Annotations over the time graph. Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. This is a simple note that will appear on the time graph on your main dashboard.

You could use this feature:

• In case the servers went down?
• When did the new display ads campaign launch?
• Increase in your PPC budget
• New website launch
• Redesign of certain pages
• New product launch
  

This is a very useful feature especially within organisations with multiple departments. Annotations can become your central logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business.

Tags: Google Analytics

Google have been the last few months and last week launched a new feature called Real time search. Real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand. Real-time search features are based on the main social netowrks such as Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku ,Identi.ca and Twitter. You have the option to pause the flow of the news and they usually appear under the new section on the search result pages. For example when you search for “war in iraq” you get the following search results.

Tags: Google, google real time search