Making Search Ads work for businesses with mobile apps

From Google Adwords Blog Post

Mobile search is a powerful channel for businesses to engage with customers that are searching for them or for their application. Last year, we introduced improvements to click-to-download ads, and for publishers, launched Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps. Today we’d like to share several new features that will make it even easier for AdWords advertisers to promote, track and monetize their mobile app. For the first time, businesses can use AdWords mobile search ads as a holistic solution to promote, monetize and track their app downloads.

Promote your app using the new Mobile App Extension

All AdWords advertisers will receive the option to use a new Ad Extension – the Mobile App extension; a new way to promote their mobile apps. Not all mobile users searching for a business may know that the business has an app. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. With this extension, advertisers can promote their mobile app to users who may simply be searching for their brand, product or service.

The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns.

 

The new Mobile App Extension found in the “Ad Extensions” tab. Use its new ‘app picker’ function to easily find your company’s app in Google Play Store or iTunes App Store

GrubHub, a web and mobile service that connects diners to restaurants and simplifies online ordering for delivery and pick up, was an early beta tester of the Mobile App extension. In addition to pointing mobile customers searching for food delivery services to their mobile website, they used the mobile app extension to add an additional link to their app download page. Abby Hunt from the GrubHub team explains the importance of reaching customers on mobile: “GrubHub is dedicated to feeding our diners anytime, anywhere – this is why it is important for us to reach our diners on their mobile devices. Hungry people are checking their mobile devices on the way home from work or walking to class, and where they are.”

 

  

 

GrubHub was an early tester of the Mobile App extension, allowing hungry customers searching for their business the option of accessing information on their mobile site or app via an ad. 

Enriching click-to-download ads with more useful app information
Advertisers running campaigns solely focused on promoting and driving downloads of their app will benefit from recent changes that add more useful information to their click-to-download ads. Last year, we added mobile app icons next to the text ad. We’ve now incorporated richer information about your mobile app right in the ad unit itself. When a user searches and your click-to-download ad appears, they’ll be able to see image previews, a description of your app, and when applicable, pricing and rating information.

All this new information in the click-to-download ad is automatically drawn from the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. We hope that customers will benefit from recent changes that make click-to-download ads more engaging and for users searching on Google.

Quicken Loans Inc., the nation’s largest online home lender and a top five retail lender uses click-to-download ads to promote their Mortgage Calculator App. They’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of customer searching for them on mobile. Greg Broda, Paid Search Partner Manager at Quicken Loans explains: “When it came time to promote the new Quicken Loans Mortgage Calculator app, the decision to utilize Google’s mobile click-to-download ad platform was a no-brainer. The placement has allowed us to share the app with a very targeted and engaged group of users.”

 

 

Quicken Loans runs click-to-download ads, now complete with app previews and pricing information, that point users to their app download page.

Track Android app downloads through AdWords
Businesses will now be able to track downloads of their Android app from their AdWords campaigns as an AdWords conversion. This means that when a user downloads a mobile app from the Google Play store via a click-to-download ad or a mobile app extension, we will count their download as a conversion. For more information on how to set this up, visit this page.

Monetizing your mobile app with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps

We’ve now brought Custom Search Ads to tablet apps via the recent launch of a new AdMob SDK. Tablet and mobile app users will receive ads relevant to what they’re searching for inside an app, and businesses running mobile apps will have a new tool to monetize their content and services.

Mobile apps represent a significant opportunity for businesses to reach their customers, and mobile search is an important channel to reach these customers. We’re looking forward to bringing new products in the coming year that will help businesses grow by promoting, tracking, and monetizing their mobile apps with Google.

8 Gorgeous Nature Blogs for Earth Day: WordPress Weblog New post

Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

 

This Sunday, April 22nd will mark the 42nd observance of Earth Day. According to Earth Day Network, “More than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.”

To inspire you to get in on this year’s celebration, here are eight amazing nature-related blogs on WordPress.com:

Birdlightwind.com

70degreeswest-explore.com

Leahyetter.WordPress.com

Drawandshoot.me

Beingmark.com

Beetlesinthebush.WordPress.com

Theblondecoyote.com

Lookingatthewest.com

So, how will you celebrate Earth Day 2012? Maybe Picnic for the Planet, or plant a tree? Whatever you do, be sure to share it on your blog! And don’t forget to tag your post with Earth Day to make it easier for others to find.

For more cool nature blogs, check out our collection of Recommended Blogs, and add topics like Nature and Earth Day to follow in your Reader.

spark conversation when you find cool stuff: StumbleUpon’s new Facebook Timeline app

Web content discovery service StumbleUpon is rolling out a new Facebook Timeline app today that allow you to share all the cool stuff you find during the day with friends and family.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection. As of October 2011, the service has 20 million active users, and over 1 billion “stumbles” per month.

“What we’re doing with the new app is marrying the best parts of both services, StumbleUpon’s content discovery with Facebook’s socialization,” said StumbleUpon VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that the new app was a logical move for the company because so many of its own users are also constantly on Facebook.

Every time you either discover or give a “thumbs up” (a.k.a. like) to something, the new app will push that activity to your Facebook Timeline as well as the real-time news ticker feed. Adding a new channel, category, or StumbleUpon user also generates a notification within the Timeline. All your likes will get grouped together by category (as shown in the image above), which is probably more effective than the standard list of Facebook “likes” for showing people what you’re into.

Leibowitz said the company plans to add more functionality to the Facebook app as it makes sense based on user behavior, but for now there’s plenty to gain from just integrating activity updates. He pointed out that a person is likely to feel gratification for being the first among their social circle to share the funniest/weirdest/craziest thing from the web — which is something I agree with. The combination of StumbleUpon and the Facebook Timeline app has the potential to make your friends think of you as the foremost connoisseur of web content and curation.

And curating all the best links will naturally spark discussion. StumbleUpon has its own method for commenting on a discovered web page, but its far from the robust conversations that take place through Facebook.

“Each activity update for discoveries, likes, or favorites becomes its own social object that invites people to start talking about it,” Leibowitz told me.

The new Timeline app is specifically designed for current StumbleUpon users, but that doesn’t mean others won’t enjoy it vicariously through friends. And considering how good the service is at finding entertaining/interesting content, its bound to drive new people to sign up for StumbleUpon accounts and boost traffic. It’s also worth noting that community link sharing site Digg, which has content discovery elements similar to StumbleUpon, saw a huge boost in signups and traffic activity after launching its own Facebook app in February.

StumbleUpon’s new Timeline app is available today. However, to enable the app itself, you have to grant the service permission to link with your Facebook account through the StumbleUpon settings page.

Original Article: http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/12/stumbleupon-facebook-timeline-app/

How to get more page views for your blog?

This is a guest post by Kristina Chang, Evan Moore, Tony Xu, and Omer Rabin; students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: ”have you ever done X?”; “do you think Y is acceptable?”. You can read some more thoughts on building a relationship with your audience in this post.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas for this.)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

WordPress.com News: Integrate Cool Applications with WordPress.com

Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

We are happy to announce our new REST Application Programming Interface (API) that lets developers explore, interact, and create great new content with the vast community of sites on the WordPress.com network and, in the near future, Jetpack-enabled sites.

The API gives developers access to posts and comments, as well as the ability to Follow, Like, or…

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