Google has updated  the interface for AdWords Express, Google’s AdWords product designed for small businesses.

Among the interface updates are a redesigned dashboard to show an at-a-glance look at ad views (impressions), clicks and calls generated as well as a pie chart that tracks monthly budget expenditures.  A new performance graph allows advertisers to compare results over time.

A real-time ad creator tool now lets users see how their ad will look as they write their copy. Hovering over the icons at the bottom of the window allows advertisers to see a preview of the ad in the different ad formats available.

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google+ Blimps:

Source: Google+

Danny Sullivan’s Kid At Google LA:

Source: Google+

Android Statue Placing Android Signage At Google I/O:

Source: Google+

Google Kitchen Displays Cola In A Cube:

Source: Google+

Google’s Brett Crosby With A Mohawk:

Source: Google+

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

Yandex has presented what it claims is a new concept in search engine results pages to a Russian audience at an online industry conference in Moscow. They’ve nicknamed the new concept “Islands,” but are describing it functionally as “Interactive Snippets” and the next step on from rich snippets.

To be launched in a few weeks in Turkey, followed by Russia, the new interactive snippets enable webmasters and publishers to coordinate their own on-SERPS interactions with users which are fully controlled by their own sites.

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To Display Movie Titles. Source:Yandex

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google’s search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed.

Matt said that Google is launching “soon” a new change that will make it less likely to see results from the same domain name, if you already have been shown that domain name in previous results three or four times before. Matt explained that once you’ve seen a cluster of about four results from a specific domain name, the subsequent pages are going to be less likely to show you results from that domain name.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Less Results From Same Domain

  Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google’s search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed. Matt said that Google is launching “soon” a new change that will make it less likely to see results from the same domain name, if you [...]

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Knowledge Graph Gets More Stats and 4 New Languages

  At Google I/O today, Amit Singhal, Google VP of Search, announced that statistics and four new languages are being added to the Google Knowledge Graph. Knowledge Graph is already supported English and eight other languages — French, Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Korean. Now Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are the [...]

At the Google Developer conference keynote this morning in San Francisco one of the clear highlights was the introduction of a redesigned Google Maps experience for the PC and mobile. The New Google Maps are available now with an invitation.

Already the leading digital and mobile mapping service, the various feature and UI improvements put more distance between Mountain View and its competitors. While Microsoft, Nokia and Apple offer some or even many of the same mapping capabilities no one offers “the complete package” that Google does.

Six shiny new cards are coming for Google Now, the assistive app for Android and recently iOS devices that offers predictive information tailored to your needs.  The new cards, announced at Google I/O today, are for reminders, music, TV shows, public transit, books and video games.

Photo credit: Danny Sullivan

Reminders is an interactive feature that can be set using voice commands.  Johanna Wright, VP of Search and Assist, gave a live demonstration of a Google Now “Voice Action Reminder”. Using simple voice commands, users can set reminders that then show up and activate in the Google Now interface. Reminders work on times, dates and locations, including home and work.

Bing’s U.S. search market share has hit another all-time high, passing 17 percent for the first time. It gained at Google’s expense, as the search giant slipped six-tenths of a percentage point last month. That’s from comScore’s April 2013 qSearch report, just out today.

For the month, comScore says there were slightly more than 20 billion “core” searches (mobile not included), a small decline from 20.4 billion in March.

Want to have your company logo appear in Google search results similar to how authors get to have their pictures displayed? Google’s now announced support for that through “organization markup.” But it’s not quite the “publishership” that some have been expecting.

Google explains its post today that Schema.org organization markup can be used to do this to have a preferred logo appear in its results, saying:

A business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage:

div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"
  a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/"Home/a
  img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" /
/div

 

According to Bing, people searches account for roughly 10 percent of all searches on Bing, second only to navigational queries. Today, the company announced updates to Bing Snapshot with people autosuggest which provides a thumbnail image and brief description of individuals related to people searches. The screenshot below shows suggestions on a search for Michelle Williams.

The people autosuggest also works for colleagues that have public LinkedIn profiles.

Bing says that they’ll be adding autosuggest enhancements for places and things to Snapshot.

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Snapshot

Perhaps in response to reports that Yahoo is unhappy with its search deal with Microsoft and looking for a way out, David Pann, GM, Microsoft Advertising Search Group, has written a post on the Bing Ads blog ahead of  ”state of the state” meetings with clients in Europe that aims to reassure advertisers that the relationship is sound and the partnership is making progress.

In his post, Pann writes,

We are pleased with our partnership with Yahoo! and very encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in terms of revenue per thousand searches (RPM), ad relevance and the growth trajectory of Bing Ads.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that Dylan Casey has joined Yahoo as a senior director in the platform organization. According to Casey’s Linkedin profile, the new Yahoo senior director was head of project management at Path for the last year and five months after serving as a product manager at Google for nearly eight years. During his time at Google, Casey was responsible for launching the Google bar, as well as developing and launching Google Realtime Search.

A one-time professional cyclist, Casey led the development of Path’s product strategies in 2012 and 2013, while recruiting Path’s product management team. According to an article today on All Things D, Casey worked closely with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer while they both were at Google.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google’s Matt Cutts: Next Generation Of The Penguin Update “Few Weeks” Away

  In March, Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts promised that the Penguin Update designed to fight spam would get a big refresh later this year. Today, Cutts gave an update — keep waiting. It’s still a few weeks off. Along the way, there’s some confusion about whether the next Penguin Update will be Penguin [...]

Add this to the big list of Google easter eggs: Do an image search for “atari breakout,” and you’ll be able to play the classic video game online, right in your search results.

In fact, the image search results become the bricks that you have to eliminate as you play the game. Google is calling the game “Image Breakout.” You can use your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard to control your paddle, and when you’ve used up all five chances, you can share your score on Google+.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Time Inc. Launch Timelapse: See How Any Part Of The World Has Changed Over Time
  The new Timelapse site, created by Time Inc. and Google, is a pretty amazing way to see how any part of the world has changed since 1984 through 2012. The site offers amazing animations such as the growth of Las Vegas and the shrinking of the Columbia Glacier, and you can point it at any [...]

Google announced new changes to the AdWords terms and conditions for all countries and territories in the Asian Pacific region except China, Korea, Taiwan and India.

Among the changes to the terms is the accommodation of new advertising products and services, including third-party ad serving. AdWords has added new policies around resolving ad serving issues.

Advertisers will have 45 days to review and accept the new TC. Your ads will be paused if you fail to accept them within the time period. Affected advertisers will see the new terms and conditions when signing in and can accept the new terms from that page.  A full list of countries is here.

Over the past few days, the Webmaster and SEO community have been discussing significant shifts, fluctuations and updates in both the Google rankings and traffic patterns they have seen from Google’s organic search.

I’ve asked Google if there was, indeed, an update, and Google would not confirm. Instead, they gave me the boilerplate response, “We have nothing to announce at this time.” They of course added, “We make over 500 changes to our algorithms a year, so there will always be fluctuations in our rankings in addition to normal crawling and indexing.” This is nothing new; Google often will use this response when discussing matters of algorithmic changes or updates to their index.

In my previous post, From 3rd Party To 1st Party: The Evolution Of The Google Advertising Toolset, I wrote about the evolution of AdWords data and how recent changes have constricted the incremental value presented by third-party paid search tools. I wrote in loose terms about using internal analytics to calculate average profit per conversion to use in AdWords Conversion Optimizer.

In this post, I will detail the logic behind and process of incorporating margins into bidding at the CPA and CPC level, in case you prefer manual bid management to cost-per-acquisition based management.

Today on the Google home page is a special Mother’s Day logo for all moms out there.

This logo, or Google Doodle, as Google calls them, has a little more detail than the previous years. The logo is completely interactive allowing users to create up to 27 different pieces of art with 3 border types.

The logo itself takes you through a series of options, asking you the following questions:

• Do you want to draw Mom, flowers, or maybe create some kind of gift, gesture, or way of spending time together?