Google strengthened its analytics services on June 24th by introducing a new Ad Planner service.   The service provides media planners’ visibility into which Web sites are frequently visited by their target audience.  Ad Planner provides information on a Web sites traffic and demographics, as well as more specific data such as age, gender, education, household income and even keywords used by visitors during searches.

Google’s efforts are targeted directly at media planners that otherwise might not have had access to Web analytics.  Now that the primary roadblock to effective ad targeting has been removed, it is likely that Google will see increased revenue from coming from media planners at smaller agencies.

For eMarketer’s perspective on Google’s new Web analytics service click here.

For information directly from Google regarding their Ad Planner service click here.

I’ve just come off the road from numerous meetings with national and regional advertisers. One common area of interest among advertisers seems to be: how to best communicate to the online audience.

Should a company focus on building their messaging around their brand image, or on driving direct response via their Web site and online media? At the risk of annoying my SEO department, who are happy to pack a keyword into every section of a Web site (no doubt necessary), the answer is both. Branding and direct response messaging can co-exist online, as both are vitally important to short- and long-term sales creation.
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Have you ever wondered how the search engines’ algorithms rank sites within local search? Or better yet, what criteria are the algorithms considering and how important is each? I know my team members and I have talked about it before and have speculated and hypothesized what ranking variables the search engines consider and which the search engines find more important.

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How do national brands take advantage of search at a local level? Join TMP Directional Marketing and Search Marketing Now for a webcast June 25th, 2008 at 12 PM CST and learn how your national brand can take advantage of local search.

Now that the first quarter 2008 numbers are in, one thing is certain: Google owns mobile search. This news comes after Nielson Mobile released its data on the mobile market. With 61% of the mobile search market cornered, Google dominated the mobile search market the first four months of 2008.

So what can we chalk this domination up to? Google is chalking it up to being the factory default on the iPhone. It seems that while smart phones have been around for awhile now, Google’s data indicates people are searching the internet more with their iPhones than any other smart phone. Who would have guessed a fully supported HTML browser would revolutionize the mobile search marketplace?

Google was recently the center of negative attention when it was brought to the publics’ attention that they did not have a link to their Privacy Policy readily available from their homepage. Yahoo! and MSN both implemented the policy on their respective homepages and in an attempt to ride the wave, Ask.com has recently added a link as well.

Click Here to Read Full Article

There is an interesting bit of news floating around that says Google does not index webpages whose URL ends in a zero. This particular type of address typically signals spam and therefore Google does not think highly of these types of pages.

Example of a page with the type of URL in question:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0

For more information, take a look at the article posted on SEOmoz.

As it turns out, this filter appears to be limited to URLs that end in zero. Other numbers have been getting indexed OK.