Below is live coverage of the Keynote: Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of the Search Engine Roundtable.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Keynote: Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google | (08/12/2009) |
| 1:05 | Barry Schwartz: Andrew Goodman introduces this keynote event!
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| 1:07 | Barry Schwartz: Here is Nick Fox |
| 1:07 |  |
| 1:07 | Barry Schwartz: Yes, he looks that young |
| 1:07 | Barry Schwartz: He then explans what a search ad is and explains he will talk about the future of search ads |
| 1:09 | Barry Schwartz: He shows what search ads could have been, ie display banner ads, instread they decided to do text ads, he shows some examples... he explained they even tried to run amazon affiliate ads |
| 1:09 | Barry Schwartz: But they went with an auction model for the text based search ads |
| 1:09 | Barry Schwartz: They are running over a billion auctions per day |
| 1:09 | Barry Schwartz: Over the past decade, search ads has evolved into one of the most important ways to market ever |
| 1:10 | Barry Schwartz: They always had a big look at click through rate and Google brought this to the table |
| 1:11 | Barry Schwartz: The second major chnage in search ads was that they werre measurable and accountable |
| 1:11 | Barry Schwartz: The search ad system was dynamic enough to test various creatives quickly, with various targetting. |
| 1:13 | Barry Schwartz:
- 1.5 billion people online via PC
- 3 billion mobile phones
- not just about text, there is images, etc
- 500 billion images online
- 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
- blogs, tweets
- Wikipedia, etc.
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| 1:13 |  |
| 1:14 | Barry Schwartz: He then explains a bit about Google's Universal Search with maps, news, video added to the web results |
| 1:14 | Barry Schwartz: There is wonder wheel, google squared |
| 1:14 | Barry Schwartz: Search ads have evolved also, with new targeting features, a new beta adwords UI and quality has continued to improve |
| 1:15 | Barry Schwartz: They use predictive systems to predict what a CTR might be for a new ad |
| 1:15 | Barry Schwartz: They have hundreds of experiments going on to try to imrove ad quality |
| 1:15 | Barry Schwartz: They are more transparent on the quality score, clicks, CTR and they now have a bid simulator tool |
| 1:16 | Barry Schwartz: Search is about three things: keywords, text ads and cost per click |
| 1:16 | Barry Schwartz: Future.... |
| 1:17 | Who will be main player in search ads in five years?Google Bing Yahoo Ask Someone else |
| 1:18 | Barry Schwartz: Keywords, billions of queries come into Google, and matching them is key and it doesnt have to be limited to keywords and limited to text and it is about driving sales
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| 1:18 | Barry Schwartz: Keywords targeting business is a bit of a game, he said. |
| 1:19 | Barry Schwartz: There are about 30 million keywords in Google's ad database |
| 1:19 | Barry Schwartz: 20% of the queries they see per day, they havent seen before
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| 1:20 | Barry Schwartz: Users are getting more creative in expressing their queries and it makes it harder for google |
| 1:21 | Barry Schwartz: They also are trying approaches to using no keywords at all
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| 1:22 | Barry Schwartz: Matching quries to keywords is first step |
| 1:22 | Barry Schwartz: Next they need to know what ads to show |
| 1:22 | Barry Schwartz: He compares the search ads to the Ford T (one color) |
| 1:23 | Barry Schwartz: The one size fits all approach doesnt work in all cases. |
| 1:24 | Barry Schwartz: There is a lot of experimentation going on with the search ads, rich media ads, video ads, image ads, etc in the web search ad space |
| 1:25 | Barry Schwartz: Google's challenge is to do this in a way that is unobtrusive and not flashing, but useful to users |
| 1:25 | Barry Schwartz: The ads need to be useful |
| 1:25 | Barry Schwartz: Next after, we go the right ad, the user/searcher clicks on the ad |
| 1:25 | Barry Schwartz: But is Google done there? No. The advertiser wants to convert on that sale or lead. |
| 1:26 | Barry Schwartz: It is not just about traffic to a web site |
| 1:26 | Barry Schwartz: What if Google charged only for conversions. |
| 1:26 | Barry Schwartz: CPA is not new, it is an affiliate model. but it is new to search. Conversion optimizer lets you bid on a CPA model, and Google converts the CPA values back into a CPC to put into the auction model.
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| 1:27 | Barry Schwartz: Google and advertisers are seeing great results with this. |
| 1:27 | Barry Schwartz: There are a lot of tools to measure this:
- Google Analytics
- Google Conversion Tracking
- Website Optimizer
- etc.
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| 1:28 | Barry Schwartz: This is just a start... |
| 1:29 | Barry Schwartz: He is saying that they will do Q&A and follow up via a forum model to test out ideas and they want our feedback.
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| 1:29 |  |
| 1:30 | Barry Schwartz: Participate in the beta and give Google feedback |
| 1:30 | Barry Schwartz: Now Q&A time.... |
| 1:31 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Conflict of interest: How do you referrer the difference between two advertisers who go after the same meat, using conversion optimizer... How do you decide which ad to show? |
| 1:32 | Barry Schwartz: (A) Google is objective as possible. They use algorithms to associate a price with the CPA to come up with a CPC and then use predictive algorithms to rank the ads. |
| 1:32 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Is the "wave" going to present opportunity for advertisers? |
| 1:33 | Barry Schwartz: (A) i.e. Google Wave, he doesn't know if ads will go in there yet. He just doesnt know yet. |
| 1:33 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) CPA is more advanced on display than search. Why? |
| 1:34 | Barry Schwartz: (A) A large part of that is related to the targetability of search over display. It is easier to know intent on search, vs search. But conversions do happen on the CPA side. |
| 1:34 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) What is the future of search based on image recognition? |
| 1:35 | Barry Schwartz: (A) There is a "similar images" feature on Google Image search currently. http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/ take this to take a pic of a product and show ads from advertisers. lots of potential |
| 1:36 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) How do they compare two ads with similar quality score, etc but only difference is exact vs match... |
| 1:36 | Barry Schwartz: (A) if same advertiser with two ads, they use exact but if it is two different advertisers they ignore the match type |
| 1:37 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Biggest mistakes Google has made in search? |
| 1:37 | Barry Schwartz: (A) Innovate more with universal search and their ad formats have not progressed as quickly as others. with they were faster at innovating their on the UI. |
| 1:38 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Mobile Q: |
| 1:38 | Barry Schwartz: (A) iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, Android -- they had a constraint in the past with mobile, but with these new phones, there is less of a challnege with ad space and constraints. Phones unlock a lot of additional potental, like location, cameras, mics, speakers, etc. |
| 1:39 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Where is the largest volume for mobile search? |
| 1:40 | Barry Schwartz: (A) Fair amount of volumn from Japan, alot in US, etc. In terms of verticals, we see a lot of local queries, lots of product queries and a lot of porn |
| 1:40 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) What do you mean an approach without keyword searchs? |
| 1:41 | Barry Schwartz: (A) So an advertiser wouldn't plug in keywords, they would just give google their job description or a product catalog and google will figure it out themselves automatically. |
| 1:41 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) why is there a difference in clicks between AdWords and Analytics? |
| 1:41 | Barry Schwartz: (A) Ideally, they shouldn't but it boils down to how they both filter out spam. |
| 1:43 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) Plan to integrate Analytics and AdWords in one system?
(A) He wants to be careful about pre-announcing features (um, by saying that, doesnt that announce something???) |
| 1:45 | Barry Schwartz: (Q) What point will the CPA price (with optimizer) be as regulated as the CPC model? When will this happen? CPC you know what you are paying, with CPA you can pay more. |
| 1:45 | Barry Schwartz: (A) If Google mispredicts your conversion rate, they can miss. But it is rare for this to happen these days. |
| 1:46 | Barry Schwartz: That is all the Qs |
| 1:46 | 
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