Entries from Category Google

In December, several members of the Three Deep team attended an event at Google’s offices in Manhattan, NYC.  Google’s offices made for an intimate setting, and compelling presentations from BabyCenter’s Tina Starkey and Google’s Jim Lecinski made for a particularly worthwhile event for our team to attend.  Since many of our clients tend to be in the business of marketing to moms (and we often execute these marketing programs), this event was right in our sweet spot.

Parisian Love

The event started with a quick video that was produced by Google that told a love story through search.  It was a compelling video and told a great story of a long distance relationship where the subjects are brought together through the magic of Google.

Continue Reading Moms Are Searching For YOU →

Sweet - she's on-time...

My wife travels often for work, and by default, I usually act as her own personal car service.  As such, I am found searching for a flight status for whatever airline she may be flying that week.

Somewhere between April’s Delta flight from Monterey and November’s American Airlines flight from Indianapolis, Google has become fantastic at showing me the information I’m looking right on the SERP (search engine results page), above the organic listings without ever having to leave the search engine.  Every bit of information I’m looking for is right there.

Furthermore, if you’re lucky enough to have a Google enabled phone, you just push the Google Voice Search button, say the airline and flight number and, voila, the information you need is at your fingertips – making it very user-friendly while driving as well.

Continue Reading Please Don’t Leave Me – SEO Trends for 2010 →

A few weeks ago, a small group of “Three Deepers” attended Google’s annual Authorized Partner Summit at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. This four-day event provided excellent coverage of their industry-leading marketing products, including Google Website Optimizer (GWO), Google Analytics (GA), and Urchin.

The information presented was an excellent blend of product training, use cases, deep-dives into new capabilities, and breakout sessions with the product managers and engineers themselves. The following is a brief overview of the event and the knowledge that returned to Minnesota with us.

Day One – Google Website Optimizer

Continue Reading 2009 Google Analytics Partner Summit Recap →

I love to read, and in the ever-changing world of Interactive Marketing, constantly reading is imperative to staying fresh and relevant in the marketplace.  While nothing substitutes for real world experience, I have found that maintaining an extensive reading list is the most surefire way to accelerate your career (and your profile within your company).

When I first started with Search Marketing, I found that there were several quality books that were published both in print and in e-book format.  All of these books were highly relevant to the topic of search marketing, and offered a solid background as to how the search engines evolved, which engines were succeeding in the short term, and an outlook for the future of search.  This was exactly what I needed in order to get started in the industry, and it helped me put form to the theories that I had crafted in my head about how to approach the industry.

This worked well for the first several books, but then I started to notice two very distinct and opinion altering trends when it came to reading Interactive Marketing books in print:

1. There is a lot of overlap between the books. While seeing a comprehensive history of how Google became the dominant search engine is very useful on first read, hearing variations of the same story in 3-4 print books becomes quite tedious.

   Continue Reading I Read… A Lot! – RSS Feeds, Amazon Kindle, Hardcovers and more… →

In addition to reverse-engineering Google’s Local Search algorithm, we Three Deeper’s are always looking for more venues for expanding our reach for our local business clients.  I have been particularly intrigued of late by Google’s iPhone search application and how it pertains to local search.

If you haven’t read about it yet, the basic premise is that you open the iPhone app, hold it up to your mouth and say your search term.  Google recognizes what you say and automatically ties what you say to your geographic location (using either triangulation or GPS) and then returns search results based on where you are located.

While evaluating this application, I noticed that there were no advertisements on the search app results, or the Google search results on my phone.  Not having ads on the results pages was great for advertisers with strong organic search rankings (and especially those who had top 3 listing in the onebox), but it was a negative for PPC advertisers who wanted to push their way up to the top of the results.  I knew it was only a matter of time before Google would start allowing advertisers to place AdWords ads on these results pages (remember, it’s AdWords revenue that made the iPhone app FREE to users in the first place).

Continue Reading AdWords on Your Mobile Phone (Google’s G1/Android and the iPhone) →

Google has consolidated several awesome new tracking features into a single view in AdWords over the last week (some features have been there a while, but are now receiving more exposure due to a recent interface update) and we at Three Deep are in the process of putting several of these into action. The first thing that we will talk about today is the call tracking feature that they have recently added.

Ever since Google acquired Grand Central in 2007, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would start adding call tracking into AdWords.  For good reason, as phone calls to local or 1-800 numbers on a landing page can account for a large percentage of leads generated from a PPC landing page.¬† In fact, for some of our clients, phone calls have outnumbered free estimate request forms at a 2 to 1 clip.  Even for those clients where request forms still dominate leads, adding a unique tracking number to a landing page has allowed us to truly track the number of leads that we generate for clients.

Continue Reading New Google AdWords Features – Part 1 – Call Tracking →

Leave it to Google to announce something big on Labor day and keep me working through the night.  I first heard the breaking news on the Minneapolis Star Tribune, then caught wind of it on the Official Google Blog.  After that, the news came from about 20 other sources on my Google Reader, I knew that I had to post about the subject of Google launching their new browser, which is named Chrome.

Several sources have already weighed in on the subject of Google’s new browser, but I thought I’d chime in my $.02 while it’s still fresh on my mind.¬†¬† While most of the feedback I have seen is negative, mine is overwhelmingly positive:

Google Chrome is awesome!

Continue Reading Google Chrome = Greatest Browser Yet? →