This Week’s Industry News
Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff
Google Expands Sales Force To Sell Places Ads
Google has added 100 sales representatives to focus on selling Google Place Tags and Google Boost. Google Place Tags run at $25 a month and consist of promotional writing to encourage conversions to your site. Google Boost is an easy to use way of setting up an AdWords ad to target local search queries.
Source: Search Engine Land
Mac Apple Store Opens For Desktop Apps
Familiar to iOS users of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the Mac Apple Store allows users to acquire and update programs for their Mac desktop or laptop with the same style interface as the mobile app store.
Source: Mac Apple Store
A Simpler, Better Display Ad Builder
The Google AdWords Display Ad Builder has undergone the latest in a line of improvements since its release in 2008. Here are a few of the new features in a nutshell:
– Ads can be edited and changed in bulk to cater to the searcher’s location, as seen in this graphic for marathons:
– New social and expandable templates include the latest tweets from a Twitter account, help build out a Twitter following, and increase page real estate when an expandable ad is clicked:
– Template customization allows more freedom to resize and relocate text and image boxes:
Source: Google Inside AdWords Blog
Facebook IPO Nearing Imminence Under SEC Rule
Facebook is nearing 500 shareholders and has at least $10 million in assets (read that with a touch of sarcasm), which will soon legally force the company to make its finances and business strategy public by April 2012. Some preliminary numbers that were released revealed that Facebook nets a staggering profit margin of close to 30%.
Facebook is moving closer to an initial public offering by next year as well, at the general reluctance of founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has so far backed away from taking the booming company public.
Source: Yahoo News
Google Search Can Now Be Filtered By Reading Level
While mainly geared towards students of all grade levels, the new Google Advanced Search feature that allows queries to be sorted by readability is usable for just about anyone. The results can be sorted by Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced reading levels, and can be changed by clicking on “Advanced search” and “Reading level.”
Source: Google Student Blog
Patent Approved For Amazon’s Bad Gift System
If you regularly get bad sweaters/ties or other fairly lame gifts for birthdays and holidays, you might want to start telling those friends and relatives to buy from Amazon.com. Amazon has recently patented a system that allows you to stop the shipment of “bad gifts,” and exchange them for something of equal or lesser value.
Obviously this benefits those of us that receive unwearable clothes and unreadable books as gifts, but it also saves Amazon a lot of money when it comes to shipping and receiving simply because that whole process is eliminated before the crap-tastic gift leaves their warehouse.
Source: Los Angeles Times Blog
What’s Yext?
Much like Alexa Woods joining together with the Predator to defeat the Mother Alien in Alien Vs. Predator, a number of the Internet’s top localized Web sites are combining in an attempt to fight back against the Google juggernaut. The end result is Yext, an online advertising site geared towards courting localized ads for businesses. A few of the sites involved include Yelp, MapQuest, Yahoo, White Pages, and YellowBook.
Source: Yext, Wall Street Journal
The Top 50 Gawker Media User Passwords
Hackers that broke into multiple Gawker Media sites posted usernames, email addresses, and passwords Sunday night, and the Wall Street Journal took it upon themselves to graph the most popular passwords in a group of 188,279 users. The winner was “123456” and runner up was “password,” but many of the other 48 passwords are equally as funny and easy to figure out.
Source: Wall Street Journal
‘Sleep In And Get Fired From Your Job? There’s An App For That?’
If you have an iPhone alarm set for a specific time every day, you probably found yourself well rested on the first two days of 2011. Thanks to a software glitch, iPhone alarms ceased working on January 1 and January 2, but the problem has since been fixed. The title used for this post was easily the best quote in the article.
Source: Wall Street Journal
CityVille Now Facebook’s Top Reaper Of Souls
Thanks to 16.8 million daily active users, CityVille now ranks as the most popular Facebook application, edging out fellow Zynga game FarmVille by .4 million users.
Source: CNN
Notable Commentary
To Oil Your Intellectual Gears
Facebook Demographics Data
Everybody loves reading demographic data, especially when it concerns the most popular social network on the Internet. Facebook’s Data Team compiled statistics about word usage and types of status updates, among other things.
Analysis By: Facebook Data Team
More Facebook Demographics…From The Outside
While the first piece of analysis about Facebook demographics focused more on actual site content, this analysis focuses more on the types of people who join and used Facebook regularly over the past year.
Analysis By: Corbet3000, istrategylabs
The Difference Between Google Desktop Vs. Mobile Search Results
The results of a Google search query on your desktop computer and mobile phone have an 86% difference between them. Barry Schwartz outlines a few of those key contrasts.
Analysis By: Barry Schwartz, SEO Roundtable
Social Media Demographics
This post from Flowtown takes a magnifying glass to nearly every social media site on the Internet.
Analysis By: Ethan Bloch, Flowtown
How Tablets Can Help Marketers
eMarketer does a great job of breaking down how tablet devices can benefit marketers, complete with graphs and demographic breakdowns.
Analysis By: Staff, eMarketer
How Groupon Is Besting Google
Groupon is profiting at rates that make Google’s emergence onto the Web scene look pedestrian by comparison. Groupon is doing a few things Google isn’t or can’t to maximize their exposure, and this article takes a good look at that fact.
Analysis By: Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic
