March, 2008 News:

Google begins use of video ads in search results

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Web users in the US are beginning to see video adverts in paid search links on Google.com, and the search engine plans more ad formats such as maps and images among the paid search results.
At the moment, these video ads are appearing for tech related terms like ‘smart phone’ or ‘laptop’. The video ads aren’t […]

Website owners unhappy about new Google search tool

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Some online retailers and other website owners have expressed their concern over a new Google search tool which is intended to help web users search within sites.
This new search tool is displayed in the search results pages for a number of well known retailers and publishers. By using the tool, Google users perform a keyword […]

Search marketing spend continues to grow – SEMPO

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Despite the gloomy economic situation in the US, spending on search engine marketing continues to grow beyond expectations, reaching $12.2bn in 2007.
This exceeded earlier predictions of $11.5 billion, and represents large rise on 2006’s figure of $9.4bn.
These are preliminary results from the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) 2007 State of the Market Survey, in […]

Google finally completes DoubleClick deal

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

Google’s $3.1bn acquisition of online advertising group DoubleClick has finally gone through, having been approved by the European Union.
The deal was first announced in April 2007, but it has now taken almost a year for the merger to pass the scrutiny of the regulatory bodies.
The US Federal Trade Commission approved the deal three months ago, […]

Google PPC advertisers need to speed up their websites

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Google has announced that it will start taking page load times into account when it assesses Quality Score.
Quality score is used by the search engine which influences a particular ad’s position on the Google network, as well as minimum bids for keywords.
Other factors already taken into account are keyword relevance, the historical clickthrough rates of […]

Big brands fall foul of Google penalties

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

A couple of major UK brands in the insurance sector have recently been penalised by Google for boosting their rankings by buying paid reviews and paid links.
Last week, car insurance aggregator Gocompare.com was dropped from the number one slot for the term ‘car insurance’, and sent to the relative obscurity of page six of Google.
Its […]