Yes it's true. Google's offices really do have rooms given over to fluffy beanbags and garden tables. And table football positively abounds. And the canteen is sensational. And there really is a free beer fridge that gets unlocked on a friday dinner time to help thirsty Googlers warm up for the weekend. Despite all these (and other) distractions, The Big G are somehow finding out the time to roll out a few big initiatives over the next few months. In between snacks and beers in Google's European headquarters in Dublin, I found out a little bit more.
It's still in Beta (and it's been available for a while), but Insights for Search is a useful tool if you're looking for seasonality in your online marketing - perfect for long term campaigns where strategic use of a budget will be important. It's essentially a tooled up Google Trends, bursting with options for you to discover patterns in search behaviour from as far back as 2004, right up to the last 24 hours.
To see it in action, look at this comparative measure of the major political party leaders in the UK over the last 4 years. Apparently almost no-one searched for poor old Iain Duncan Smith, while Tony Blair continues to cast a long shadow in the search market despite having left office over a year ago.
Or, less politically, this measure shows that holidays in Spain are far more popular than skiiing holidays, but that both markets have been on a gentle decline since 2004. You can also easily see the big spike in interest in skiing trips around the new year.
Some searches are also contextualised by news stories that sit alongside peaks. Interest in knickers, to pick an entirely random example, is largely driven by what Liz Hurley is up to it seems...
All the numbers are comparative to the highest volume of searches, which sets the '100' topline so you can't see absolute volumes. But if you're in a market and are looking when exactly to go big with your advertising you can use this to sketch out a spending strategy for across the year.
Mobile internet has been The Next Big Thing almost as long as a I can remember. In fact, me and Dan Mowbray from All Response were laughing when he told me about how his agency were the first company in the UK to run a WAP campaign. Remember WAP? It was basically the internet for phones before phones could show pictures (or be carried in your pocket). It was rubbish, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the mobile internet hasn't really grown or changed since then.
Google, in association with a lot of the big mobile telecom carriers are pushed the .mobi domain extension and creating a platform for developing mobile content and applications. There was a mixed response to this from the floor - some of the guys arguing that iPhone style technology will mean you'll be able to deliver your normal website to phone users. Despite that there were a couple of cool examples pointed to during the talk - among them Zagat's mobile offering which uses GPS to serve hungry mobile users with a list of the nearest restaurants, along with reviews and other custom content.
Naturally Google were talking up their mobile advertising (which works in exactly the same way as AdWords) and claiming higher click through and action rates than for normal web searches.
This is more of a sit up take notice tool and there was a lot of hand-rubbing in the auditorium. Advertisers are always keen to know what their competition is up to but of course, no-one wants to release their figures. Google have been working on a product - which is nearly ready for limited rollout to select agencies - which aggregates the figures from all AdWords campaigns. That's a lot of data.
To make it manageable, the database is split into a huge number of verticals and further divided into three classes of advertisers - the high, middle and low ends of the market. If you want to know what the industry average clickthrough rates and costs are for your sector this could have a major impact on how you judge your campaign's success (or failure).
For it's vaunted technology and wealth, Google has never quite seemed to make much headway in the realms of display advertising (that's basically banner ads, if you're common like what I am). Although it's content/site targeting systems have improved by about 44 million percent over the last year they still felt compelled to acquire Double Click but the implications of all that still aren't that clear.
YouTube will be rolling out embedded advertising this year, which inserts overlays into video content that can be activated through a click and deliver either another video, a Flash application or a different website. As a technology demonstration, it was undoubtedly cool, but as for whether users are really that interested in clicking ads will probably be the most interesting thing to come out of this, and it seemed like a big leap to most of the guys on the floor.
Google are still innovating. The key word they used was 'platform'. They see themselves as creating platforms for people to create and find content - whether that be video, websites, blogs or whatever. This means that there'll be no shortage of new opportunities for forward-thinking advertisers to get ahead of the game and that the online advertising landscape will look very different a couple of years from now.
