Google Awarded Location Based Ad Patent
W
hen you read headlines like this it sometimes feels like the rich just keep getting richer. That is until you learn that it was a trek that started six years ago and it’s serendipitous timing is a bonus. One would think that Google is rubbing their hands together and giving their best “Boo ha ha ha ha!” mad scientist laughs in Mountain View because it seems like there is just a little interest these days in targeting ads by location and the money that it could represent.
While the blogosphere was buzzing over the patent Facebook won for its news feed last week, Google earned a killer one too. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the search giant a patent for using location in an advertising system last Tuesday, which is the emerging business model for most consumer-facing location startups today.
Filed six years ago, the patent is fairly broad. It covers using location for targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics, and modifying the content of an ad.
This is the kind of news that on the surface looks like it could bring up more of that dirty anti-trust-monopoly talk but it’s far too early to see just how this patent will play out in the market. How Google wields this power is certainly something that remains to be seen but the folks at Digital Beat take a look at what might be brewing.
However, the location-based ad patent may give Google a nice big stick as it goes head-to-head with Apple in the world of mobile advertising. Both companies have acquired or agreed to acquire a mobile ad network in the last three months; Google agreed to buy Admob for $750 million in November, while Apple bought Quattro Wireless in January. Google actually bucked a patent Apple owns last month, when it added multi-touch functionality to its Android operating system. Perhaps this is the card the search giant had up its sleeve.
So as with anything else these days it seems like the battle lines are being drawn in every area of the online space. “Google v. Apple” and “Google v. the Rest of the World and Its Regulatory Bodies” is going to be a common theme for the foreseeable future. I suspect that Google is armed and ready but so is everyone else. It’s starting to feel like the WWE in the Internet space. Maybe there will be a pay-per-view event with Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs in a steel cage death match. I’d pay for that.
If you are into these kinds of things here is the abstract for the patent
The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Finally, tools, such as user interfaces, may be provided to allow a business to enter and/or modify location information, such as location information used for targeting and location-dependent price information. The location information used to target and/or score ads may be, include, or define an area. The area may be defined by at least one geographic reference point (e.g., defined by latitude and longitude coordinates) and perhaps additional information. Thus, the area may be a circle defined by a geographic reference point and a radius, an ellipse defined by two geographic reference points and a distance sum, or a polygon defined by three or more geographic reference points, for example.
So here we go. Patents and lawsuits and egos…..oh my.
What Do I Look At First? Analytics Beyond Revenue Tracking
Over the years, I’ve gone through many iterations of focus as a search marketer. In my first years in seo, traffic seemed to be the primary focus all of online marketing. Increasing the client’s online visits was the number one goal. That thinking evolved into a multi-pronged approach to looking at data – from lowering [...]
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Don’t Let Your Analytics Deceive
If John F. Kennedy were an internet marketer, I think he would say, “Ask not what your marketing can do for your site. Ask what your site can do for your marketing.” Kennedy understood the idea of cause and effect in his original quote: that people make a nation effective, and not the [...]
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Behavioral Targeting Is Easier Than You Think
In a previous post, I discussed the importance of using behavioral targeting to increase your conversion rates. I also wrote about how to use Google Analytics to understand personas of the users who visit your site.
This post will present a fast and easy way to get your behavioral targeting (BT) process up and running. [...]
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How To Segment Google Website Optimizer Tests
It can be important to segement your conversion rate tests to see how they perform for different kinds of users of your site. I’m going to show you a few ways of gathering GWO data in Google Analytics in order to bring the full power of the GA platform to your GWO testing.
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For Google Maps It’s Not the Problem but How You Handle It
How many times have you heard it said in business (or anywhere for that matter) that how you respond to a problem is more important than the problem itself? It’s said over and over again because it’s simply good advice. Well, Google had a chance to practice that principle last night when it began sending out e-mails to those with listings in the Local Business Center.
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reports of the issues that occurred.
Starting last night, Google began sending out the monthly (or so) Google Local Business Center updates. The updates go out via email and contain analytical information about how many times a listing was viewed, clicked on, and other miscellaneous analytics. The analytics are a summary of what they would see in their Google LBC analytics dashboard.
But instead of these emails going to their actual business owners, they went to the wrong business owners.
Schwartz received information for a business that was 1,500 mile from his location and he was not the only one having the experience. To Google’s credit they recognized the error and set things straight as quickly as one might expect. The following was sent to Barry so he could help the rest of us get some clarity on the issue. Of course, it doesn’t hurt your ability to get these kinds of responses when you are the News Editor of Search Engine Land. In other words, not everyone received the following explanation right away.
As you’re aware, we send a monthly newsletter to our Local Business Center users, featuring product news and a glimpse at the Dashboard statistics which show the traffic Google properties drive to their listing. Shortly after sending the newsletter to a small portion of our users last night, we discovered that some emails included incorrect business listing information. We promptly stopped sending any further emails and investigated the cause, which we found to be a human error while pulling together the newsletter content. We’d like to sincerely apologize to all the business owners impacted and assure all our users that we’re working hard to ensure that nothing similar will happen again.
Oh no! It appears that there may be a Googler who is, gulp, human and made a mistake. Of course it would never be one of the thousands of faithful servers around the world, it had to be one of those pesky human thingys. All kidding aside, as Schwartz points out, the data is pretty innocuous. It could even be looked at as a sideways form of advertising to a very small market because now people know about a business somewhere else that they never heard of before.
Google later sent an automated reply to all those impacted by this glitch and it appears that all is well in the world again.
While I would rather not have something like this happen I have to give Google credit for calling themselves on the error and working to make it right. Hopefully, any of the business owners who got the wrong data would treat one of their mistakes with the same approach.
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Google Maps Blunder: Sends Local Listing Reports To Wrong Business Owners
Starting last night, Google began sending out the monthly (or so) Google Local Business Center updates. The updates go out via email and contain analytical information about how many times a listing was viewed, clicked on, and other miscellaneous analytics. The analytics are a summary of what they would see in their Google [...]
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In-House SEO Reporting: Guide To Succeeding Where Others Fail
This being my second in-house seo column for Search Engine Land, I wanted to continue where I left off by giving you some insight into some best practices for in-house seo reporting. The understanding of analytics and reporting, setting up a baseline for your goals, and how to report on those goals and analytics.
If you’ve [...]
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Does Popularity = Social?
The founders of Infegy have used their Social Radar, a social analytics and research platform, to take a look at brands in 2009. They call their report the Top 50 Social Brands of 2009—but I’m not convinced.
On their blog, Infegy says the Social Radar
analyze[d] millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during all of 2008 and 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.
Their top ten shows the brands that we all expect (except maybe Obama—the tech brands we expect, anyway). Twitter edges out Google as for the #1 spot this year. Interestingly, Apple ends up with four brands in the top ten (iPhone, Mac, Apple and iPod), one more than last year (though Mac and Apple are a bit lower in the list this year).
| Rank | Change | Brand |
| 1 | (+2) | |
| 2 | (-1) | |
| 3 | (+6) | |
| 4 | (0) | iPhone |
| 5 | (+2) | YouTube |
| 6 | (-4) | Obama |
| 7 | (-2) | Mac |
| 8 | (-2) | Apple |
| 9 | (+3) | iPod |
| 10 | (-2) | Microsoft |
That all seems in order, right? I agree that these brands probably fit their criteria for their rankings and as long as Social Rank has cast a wide enough net (“billions of messages” they say on their site), they’re probably right for the full population.
So why am I not convinced? Because I don’t think being mentioned by the most people makes a brand “social.” Yes, many of the top 10 and top 50 brands use (or are) social media, but many don’t/aren’t really (TV networks, software/hardware companies, gaming systems, etc.). Many of the top brands are social products, but that doesn’t automatically qualify them. Sure, Twitter is a very social product—but as a brand, are they really social? (Not to mention sentiment analysis—does kvetching about a Microsoft OS make them more popular or social?)
These rankings can be useful when viewed as the most popular brands in the social space—but saying that they’re the most social brands undermines the social efforts brands are making. How many of the top 10 brands are actually making an active effort to engage their fans and users in social spaces? How many of them offer customer service where their users already hang out online? How many of them change their products or policies based on what people are saying to them and about them online?
While I hope many of the top 50 most popular brands are also the brands doing the most to interact with and respond to their users in social media, I think the list would be vastly different if we ranked brands by responsiveness and interactivity online.
What do you think? What makes a brand “social”? What are the most social brands in your opinion?
Google Analytics Adds Annotation Feature
Google Analytics is one of the most robust offerings by the search giant and it manages to fly under the radar a little bit. It has almost become ubiquitous for a large number of companies that are not prospects for other analytics packages like Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends etc. Many will even run it concurrently with these other players that have one distinct and major difference compared to Google’s offering: they cost money.
Now, many people rail against the amount of data that Google has at its disposal as a result of their analytics offering (formerly Urchin). That’s fine and is great fodder for the Google conspiracy theory set, which is a pretty active community. On the street level though it is hard (read: impossible) to find a more robust offering that is free (another bone of contention for Google haters so go ahead and let’er rip).
Well, Google is not resting on its laurels as it has announced a new feature that allows for users of the program to include annotations on reports. Search Engine Land tells us
Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.
The annotations feature basically allows users to make comments on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days.
Here is an example of what can be done with the annotation feature:
The idea here is that there can be real collaboration between those who put together campaigns and those who see the analytics without that important data. There is nothing more dangerous than an upper level executive that sees a spike or a dip on a graph but has no idea that there may have been very good business reasons for why that type of traffic or conversion or whatever pattern exists. A simple note that outlines a “cause and effect” for the data consumer can save a lot of time and trouble.
Daniel Waisberg of Search Engine Land points out some great scenarios where this could be useful
- The PPC team can announce major changes to their campaigns.
- The seo team can annotate changes to the website so that results can be tracked over time.
- The PR team can update dates of events, enabling the tracking of offline activities into Google Analytics more easily.
- The media buying team can provide updates of major banner campaigns.
As per usual Google does a pretty good job on its blog showing how this feature is implemented as well a other additions to the analytics tool.
Here’s to a 2010 full of real communication and good cheer!
