What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

Phenomenal article of the value of good Google placement here

Even Google Has to Advertise

Google has built the most powerful brand in the world with nary a bit of brand advertising. But as ads for Google Maps crop up on buses in San Francisco and trains in Chicago, it's clear the company is willing to shell out ad dollars to grow a product that's key to both local and mobile search.

The branding push promotes the service's transit features and comes at a time when Google is courting brand advertisers to buy online display ads, TV and radio. Incidentally, its own campaign focuses on the one medium Google hasn't dabbled in selling: outdoor. A quick search on Flickr (sorry, Google Image Search) reveals about a half dozen Google ads uncovered around the country in the past six months, including bus ads and train wraps in the Bay Area, a wrapped El train in the Windy City and street teams in both cities that demonstrate the product for passersby. There was also an ad in San Francisco's AT&T Park. Federated Media's John Battelle spotted that last one and posted it to his blog. "You might call it a non-[cost-per-click] banner display ad in the middle of the website that is AT&T Park," he said, noting that only a year ago,

Google VP-Marketing David Lawee told BusinessWeek that Google does a lot of direct marketing but "not brand marketing." But Mr. Battelle said brand marketing is inevitable for Google (even if you have the best product in the world, you have to tell people about it), and he's not alone in that line of thinking. Getting local"Google was successful initially because it had a search function that was demonstrably better than what it was at the time and people were recommending it," said Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at Millward Brown, which recently named Google the world's most-valuable brand. "But because they've been extending their portfolio of solutions, there's now a mass of things they offer that perhaps many people haven't gotten to know about." Many mapping services today have the same features, making them harder to differentiate.

Google's hoping that offering trip planners and fare information for local mass-transit services will help demonstrate its superiority. Google likes to let its products speak for themselves, said Nate Johnson, product-marketing manager for Google Transit. He describes the ads around the transit features for Google Maps as giving them "a little bit of a nudge." That nudge is important because while revenue is arguably small today, maps are considered key to nabbing the large and growing pot of local-online and mobile-ad dollars that advertise around them. And while Google Maps and its many mash-ups seem ubiquitous, it still trails AOL-owned MapQuest in total usage. However, the mapping sites' momentum has shifted since April 2006: MapQuest's share of U.S. traffic among all websites is down 5%, while Google Maps is up 307%, according to Hitwise.

"This is a popular consumer product and Google is promoting it as part of its long-term strategy to win, grow and maintain usage," said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in local online advertising. It's also, he said, an "early killer app" for mobile as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all have mapping applications delivered to mobile devices. Maps ads lackingThere's not a noticeable volume of advertising on the site: A search for "restaurant" while looking at a map of Brooklyn, for example, displayed one sponsored listing -- for an Italian joint in Jersey City, N.J. A hotel search on a map of downtown San Francisco displays small logos of several major chains in the area.

By contrast, Microsoft's Live mapping product has a deal with Yellowpages.com to deliver local-sponsored links. And AOL's MapQuest is chockfull of sponsored listings; simply pulling up a residential address in Brooklyn revealed more than 10 sponsored offers. Mr. Johnson says the offline stuff is "just the tip of the iceberg" compared to the videos and landing pages Google uses to promote the service. A recently uploaded video promotes Google Maps as a travel-planning service where users can check out the "street view" of the hotel they reserved or chart driving directions. Google Maps has been the company's most successful product launch.

Source: AdAge

Google passes Yahoo as #1 Web Desintation

Google passed Yahoo in its share of monthly visitors in the United States for the first time this April, buoyed by growth in search and YouTube videos, according to ComScore statistics released Thursday.

However, underscoring the variability of this sort of measurement, which extrapolates overall data from the usage of a "panel" of users at home and work, ComScore rival Nielsen Online released its own data as well with some different results. Although it also showed Google as No. 1 in terms of unique users, it said Google passed Yahoo way back in January 2007.
ComScore said Google sites had 141.1 million unique visitors in April, a tad ahead of Yahoo's 140.6 million. Microsoft was in third at 121.2 million, with AOL at 111.3 million.
Nielsen's data showed Google at 128.2 million, Microsoft at 122.1 million, and Yahoo at 117.1 million.

Nielsen also provides information on time spent at the sites, though. There, Yahoo leads its rivals with 3 hours and 9 minutes per month, but AOL owner Time Warner leads Yahoo at 3 hours 40 minutes per month.

Microsoft's usage was 2 hours and 17 minutes, and Google was 1 hour and 47 minutes, Nielsen said.

Google brings display ads to mobile devices

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

As with the company's text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

Google offers a variety of small display ad sizes.(Credit: Google)
Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers' data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.
Apple's iPhone has shown what's possible. Increasingly widespread Wi-Fi makes it possible to bypass mobile-phone network operators. And initiatives such as Intel's Mobile Internet Device and Google's Android could lead to a new generation of devices.

During last week's conference call to discuss quarterly financial results, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was bullish about the opportunity to bring advertising to the mobile Web.
"The mobile ads work very well," Brin said. "There's nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search."

Google's mobile image ads are similar to those appearing on ordinary Web sites, Google said, but are smaller and are limited to one per page. Advertisers will pay only when users click on an ad, as with the company's text ads that appear next to search ads. Google requires only one ad per page, and the ads must link to mobile-specific Web pages.

This pay-per-click model is popular among advertisers who want to match expenses to active expressions of interest in their ads, though "click fraud" can mean some of that activity is bogus.
Google works to identify fraudulent or accidental clicks and doesn't charge for what it deems to be invalid clicks.

Source: MediaPost

Google Rides High On Strong First-Quarter Revenues

Google's stock soared by nearly $80--more than 17%--in after-hours trading after the search giant delivered first-quarter results for revenues, paid-click growth and earnings that exceeded Wall Street's expectations.

"It's clear to us that we're well positioned to thrive, regardless of the business conditions that surround us," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, shrugging off concerns about a sluggish U.S. economy.

Revenues jumped by 42% year-over-year to reach $5.1 billion--trumping Wall Street's consensus of about $3.5 billion. Excluding capital expenditures and other operating costs, the search giant posted a net operating income of more than $1.8 billion, with free cash flow at $938 million. Earnings per share came in at $4.84--beating analysts' expectations that averaged in the $4.50 range.

Part of Schmidt's optimism in the face of what he called "macroeconomic factors" in the U.S. stemmed from the fact that a slight majority of Google's revenues (51%) came from outside of the United States--the first time since the search giant began operating internationally.
Schmidt also scoffed at recent industry apprehension about comScore's reports of paid-click growth deceleration. "Paid-click growth is much higher than has been speculated by third parties," he said, referencing the 20% growth year-over-year in paid clicks, both on Google and AdSense partner sites. Paid clicks were up by a more modest 4% from the previous quarter.
Although the $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition closed toward the end of the quarter, Google CFO George Reyes said that the deal had an "immaterial" effect on revenues and was only "slightly" dilutive to operating and net incomes, as well as earnings per share.

Still, Reyes did note that the acquisition had added more than 1,500 employees to the company's 19,156 headcount--and that roughly 10% of the DoubleClick workforce in the U.S. was in the process of being laid off. Reyes said that Google expects to trim DoubleClick's U.S. headcount by an additional 15% in the "near to intermediate term," not including employees of Performics, DoubleClick's search engine marketing (SEM) division.

Moving forward, Google's top brass expect the DoubleClick buy to positively impact multiple areas of the business. According to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president of product management, the goal is to become "the world's largest display advertiser" while getting publishers and marketers to buy into a Google-centric multichannel ad platform.
"The biggest thing we're seeing is the concept of an advertiser owning a concept across the entire Web," Rosenberg said. Activision, for example, used seven of Google's ad products when it launched Tony Hawk's Proving Ground last year. Rosenberg said the campaign was only possible because publishers were adopting the plethora of new ad formats Google offered--including gadget ads, video and mobile--in addition to search.
Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president of global sales & business development added that DoubleClick was giving the search giant access to clients it otherwise wouldn't have served as effectively.

"In the past quarter, using DoubleClick's sales force, we were able to develop a campaign with Nature Valley that utilized YouTube, Gadgets and Feedburner," Kordestani said. He also cited Forex, Toyota, Dunkin' Donuts and the World Economic Forum in Davos as brands that had become Google clients as a result of the DoubleClick integration.

Both Kordestani and Rosenberg agreed that there were no concerns for advertiser or publisher cannibalization in terms of DoubleClick's DART and AdSense. "Adding more display to the marketplace creates more competition," Rosenberg said.

As for a permanent Yahoo search partnership that had been dubbed "increasingly likely" by Wall Street Journal sources, Schmidt would only allow that the giant was excited to be participating in the test. "It's the beginning of the second week and we can't speculate beyond that, but it's nice to be working with Yahoo," Schmidt said.

Source: MediaPost

Google Search Share at All-Time High - Nearly 60% - in March

In March, Google again extended its share of core searches - to 59.8 percent, an all-time high and up from 59.2 percent in February - according to comScore's qSearch analysis of the US search marketplace in March, MarketingCharts reports.

Yahoo Sites ranked a distant second with 21.3 percent of search queries, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.4 percent), AOL LLC (4.8 percent), and Ask Network (4.7 percent). Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL lost search share from the previous month, comScore said.
(Hitwise, too, reported all-time-high search share for Google in March.)
Search Queries Increase
Americans conducted nearly 10.8 billion searches at the core search engines, up 9 percent from February.

Each of the five core search engines had search-query increases during the month. Google Sites accounted for more than 6.4 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.3 billion, and Microsoft Sites with 1 billion:
Expanded Search Rankings
Among the Top 50 properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 8.3 billion searches.

Yahoo Sites ranked second with 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (more than 1 billion), and AOL LLC (891 million).

Source: ComScore

Sorry Google, Facebook is not for sale

Google is the elephant in nearly every corner of the Internet, from search and advertising to web-based e-mail, online mapping, and home-brewed video. With its share price setting new highs this fall, its market cap ($188 billion) is now large enough to buy the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, and Time Warner - twice. Or Facebook many, many times over.

The problem is, Facebook's not for sale. And that's got Google running scared. It's an open secret in Silicon Valley that the company has been shopping around a nondisclosure agreement outlining its plan to create its own massive social network - and asking anyone with a pulse to sign it.

Google (Charts, Fortune 500) has to do something fast, because some of its best talent is starting to head for the exits. In July, Gideon Yu, finance chief at Google's YouTube, left for Facebook. Now other Google guys, stuck in the Googleplex and smelling a Facebook IPO that could turn early employees into early retirees, are also jumping ship.

The latest defector: Benjamin Ling, the top engineer at Google Checkout, its online payment service. A Stanford comp-sci Ph.D., Ling will be overseeing Facebook's entire software platform. Losing finance types is one thing. But smart engineers are the lifeblood of a great tech company, and Ling was worth a pint, insiders say.

Facebook's threat to Google, of course, is bigger than a talent war. In fact, the stakes here are about as high as they get in the Internet business. Something is going on that we haven't seen since Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) challenged Netscape and helped define the wide-open web.

Now the social networks are trying to do the opposite - to build what I call the Innernet. It's the place you occupy with family and friends and where you exercise almost absolute control, showing the world only as much of your true self as you care to while protecting you and yours from the evil that lurks on the wider web, from spam artists to identity thieves. Whoever builds that walled garden stands to make the next great Internet fortune.

Facebook makes me cringe

Facebook, until recently little more than a student hangout, is the odds-on favorite to win that race. In March founder Mark Zuckerberg opened the site to independent software developers, inviting them to write Facebook applications and reap a share of whatever revenue they generate.

Because creating Facebook applets was so easy, programmers could throw lots of stuff at the wall and quickly see what stuck. Take, for example, Super Wall, a little app that lets users add text, photos, video, or drawings to one another's Facebook pages. It took a couple of developers part of a June weekend to write. Within three weeks, two million people were using it. Today, more than ten million do.

That's a real economy (or could be, if someone figured out how to make money from it), and it explains why Facebook has suddenly pulled out of the slipstream of MySpace, growing from 20 million active users in April to more than 45 million today.

More cool apps mean more reasons for people to hang out there - and more reasons for developers to launch new apps. Worst of all for Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: They can't participate - for privacy reasons Google's search engine is barred at Facebook's door like an unwanted encyclopedia salesman.

How does Google plan to fight back? It's gearing up to do for the web what Facebook did for its network, starting with its social networking site Orkut (which is big in Brazil) and extending it to Gmail, You Tube, iGoogle, and so on.

Imagine Google as the command center for your entire social life; you could chat and read your e-mail there, give your closest friends access to your calendar, and get minute-by-minute updates on their whereabouts. All the big social networks were invited to join the new coalition - even, presumably, Facebook. (No one from Facebook or Google would comment.)

Will it work? Google's effort, I'm told, is being led by Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite. Though he is as Web 2.0 savvy as they come, I think Google's plan may be too little too late. Everyone these days is opening up his network - even MySpace.

Besides, there's no compelling reason for users to leave Facebook now. The developers will stay as long as they can reach a mass audience there. Google's trying to fix something that isn't broken - just as Microsoft has been doing for years with search and IBM tried to do with operating systems for PCs. Maybe Google should stick to organizing the world's information, and let this little mouse roar.

Source: Fortune Magazine

Google skimps on its own advertising

Like a gourmet chef who rarely eats out, Google Inc. feeds advertising services to hordes of other businesses while skimping on its own marketing.

The recipe has been extremely fruitful. While the Internet search leader has sold more than $30 billion in advertising since 2001, Google has become a household name without buying expensive ad campaigns on television or radio or in print.

"It's almost as if they have this cultural allergy to advertising," said Mark Hughes, author of "Buzzmarketing," a book about unconventional ways to build a brand. "It has been an advantage because it has helped keep them cool. They have zigged while everyone else has been zagging."

This advertising aversion has freed up money for engineers, computing hardware and other resources that fuel Google's search engine while leaving plenty of profit to keep shareholders happy and lift the company's stock ever higher.

Some marketing experts view Google as the archetype of an Internet-driven age that has made it possible for startups like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to permeate pop culture with little or no advertising.

That's a change from the dot-com boom era in 1999 and 2000 when Internet entrepreneurs went broke paying for Super Bowl ads and other theatrics in a mostly fruitless effort to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were among the first to break that free-spending mold, deciding that advertising didn't make a lot of sense for a company that started out 1998 with just $100,000 before raising $25 million in venture capital a year later. But they have remained marketing misers even as Google accumulated a cash hoard that now stands at $12.5 billion.

The Mountain View-based company believes its austere approach will become more common as major advertisers learn to deploy technology to target consumers.

"We are at an inflection point that could radically change the way marketing is done," said David Lawee, who became Google's marketing chief a year ago.

More than 300,000 advertisers already rely on Google's online marketing platform, which primarily shows text-based ads on the search engine's results pages and other online destinations.

Google tries to deliver those ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in the messages, making an educated guess based on the words used in a search request as well as information gathered about visitors' past preferences and Web surfing patterns.

Drawing upon some of the same data-mining techniques, Google is developing marketing tools for TV, radio, print and even video games to help advertisers reach potential customers more effectively _ and perhaps less expensively.

Although Google regularly promotes its brand and services on its own online ad network, that soapbox hasn't been the key to its ubiquity.

Instead, Google has relied on word-of-mouth and the media's obsessive coverage of its every move to establish a prized brand just nine years after Page and Brin first set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Consulting firm Millward Brown Optimor estimates Google's brand is worth $66 billion and calls it the world's most valuable. A separate study by Interbrand estimated the brand's value at $17.8 billion and ranked it 20th in the world.

While major rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. pour more than 20 percent of their annual revenue into sales and marketing, Google devoted 8 percent of its revenue to the category in 2006, spending a total of $849.5 million. Microsoft spent $11.5 billion on marketing and sales in its last fiscal year, while Yahoo spent $1.3 billion. On advertising and promotions alone, Google spent $188 million in 2006 _ roughly the same amount Microsoft spends every two months.

Another Internet bellwether, online auctioneer eBay Inc., consistently earmarks 14 percent to 15 percent of its revenue for advertising. Last year, eBay spent $871 million on advertising, with much of the money winding up in Google's wallet. The Coca-Cola Co., the brand ranked first in the Interbrand survey, spent more than $2.5 billion on advertising last year.

When Google does buy ads, it's often to recruit employees (the company has hired more than 11,000 in the past three years). On a few occasions, Google also has bought ads to highlight lesser-known products, such as a free telephone directory service, GOOG-411, recently featured on billboards in the San Francisco Bay area and rural parts of New York.

Some well-known companies are even more frugal advertisers than Google.

Starbucks Corp. spent just $95 million on advertising last year, 49 percent less than Google did. Like Google, Starbucks made a name for itself by developing a distinctive product that quickly resonated with consumers whose enthusiasm became infectious.

Google believes happy users are worth infinitely more than any goodwill advertising might buy, said marketing chief Lawee.

"If our products are great, our reputation soars," he said.

Google's brand also has been bolstered by the media's fixation on the company. Hardly a day goes by without Google's name being splattered across television, radio, magazines, newspapers and, of course, the Internet. That gives the company even more clout with advertisers and even less reason to advertise itself.

"They are at the crest of this wave that gives them a lot of free publicity," said Roland Rust, chairman of the University of Maryland's marketing department.

Google has proven adept at orchestrating stories that have little to do with its day-to-day business.

The company attracted headlines last month by funding a $30 million race to the moon. And it made news last year by investing in solar energy to power its headquarters. Some news outlets even filed stories on Google's 2005 search for a new executive chef.

Not all the coverage has been flattering, but even negative stories build brand recognition. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company benefited from a spike in usage of its search engine after The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Page and Brin engaged in a petty spat about the size of the beds on their personal jet.

Industry experts say Google may have to invest more heavily in advertising as it branches in new directions.

It already is selling a suite of online software applications to businesses and reportedly is mulling lending its name to a line of mobile phones. Ventures like those typically rely on more conventional advertising.

"It's inevitable that they will have to advertise more," said veteran marketing consultant Bob Kahn, who runs his a Darien, Conn., firm. "At some point, the power of the Google brand will cease to support all those extremities."

Although he declined to provide specifics, Lawee also hinted that Google probably will need to increase its marketing budget because many longtime users of the search engine don't know about the company's peripheral products.

"Even with all the attention we get," he said, "that tells me we are still not getting all our messages out."

Source: By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press
Sunday, October 14, 2007; 4:23 PM

Google cell phone rumors gaining momentum

Source: MediaPost

GOOGLE'S LATEST ACQUISITION PUTS IT deeper into SMS territory. The search giant announced that it acquired Helsinki-based Jaiku, a company that lets users keep track of their friends' activities via short SMS and Web messages.

Like Twitter, the service is accessible via mobile phone and posts the instant messages to a central Web site. Users can also choose to send messages to other Web sites, blogs and mobile phones, or connect with established instant messaging services like AOL's AIM and Yahoo Instant Messenger, among others.

Founded by Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, the service launched this February. While financial details of the deal were not disclosed, the move caused some bafflement as to why Google chose Jaiku over the more established Twitter--and whether rivals Yahoo and Microsoft will snap up Twitter or Pownce (a similar service) in the near future.

"Yahoo briefly rolled out a service called Mixd that had some of the same capabilities, but they decided to discontinue it. And Twitter captured a lot of attention when it first came out, but everyone also looked at the service and thought about what value it presented beyond entertainment," said search analyst Greg Sterling. "I think anytime there's an acquisition, competitors will study it and consider whether they should be buying equivalent companies."

Meanwhile, Tech bloggers like Mathew Ingram have debated whether Google chose Jaiku over Twitter because Twitter's founder Evan Williams is a former employee--and other former Google staff have since left to work with Williams as well.

The move comes just two weeks after Google acquired Zingku, a mobile social networking service--and in the midst of its push to bid on chunks of the soon-to-be-available wireless spectrum in the U.S. and U.K. In addition, Google recently extended its AdSense and AdWords advertising programs to the mobile Web and filed a patent (officially in February of 2006, but published this past August) for a text message-based, mobile-friendly payment system called 'GPay.'

Taken together, the search giant's moves have drummed up a firestorm of speculation anticipating a Google-branded mobile phone--complete with an operating system, email, calendaring and social networking applications, and possible ad-supported service.

Recent coverage by mainstream press such as The New York Times noted that the gPhone is not likely to be an actual handset--as the search giant is not in the hardware business, and it would be more costly than necessary. The story credited insider sources for reports that an open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system is the heart of Google's gPhone project.

Whether Google's success will be tied to an actual feature-packed handset remains to be seen--but it's clear that Google's power moves are already impacting the still-evolving mobile space. According to Sterling, the search giant is developing or acquiring all of the pieces--from social networking technology, to search and mapping, to commerce and the overall interface--to ensure that it attains a stronghold on the mobile Web akin to its dominance of the desktop.

"They're diversifying their investments and effectively covering the waterfront," said Sterling. "Google has so many engineers and so much money surrounding mobile that they can work with near equal emphasis on lots of different areas and essentially hedge against risk. While we're not really sure how the mobile Web is going to be fully adopted--whether it's search, email, social networking--Google is quite rightly putting emphasis on the space, and much more aggressively than its competitors."