Google became a service provider Thursday with the official launch of Google Fiber. The service initially rolls out to support television and Internet access in Kansas City, but a company Web page lets consumers enter their street address to request access in their area. The company's intention is to compete with Verizon FIOS and AT&T U-verse, giving consumers another option for TV and Internet service. Cloud services will play an important role, along with devices the company will build through the acquisition of Motorola Mobility and its patents. For now, Google's package for both Internet and television costs $120 monthly, and consumers willing to sign a two-year service agreement will have their construction fee waived. Internet service alone will cost $70 monthly, with the construction fee waived if users sign a one-year service agreement. Google Fiber customers get 1 terabyte of data storage space on Google Drive. The service, a Gigabit Internet connection, supports 1000 megabits per seconds, about 100 times faster than today's average broadband speeds. The Nexus 7 tablet comes free with the service, becoming the remote. Through apps, the tablet aims to take consumers beyond a standard remote's search, allowing viewers to watch content on the device in any room in the house. Google has yet to announce a "Google-Fiber specific ad model," but it will likely encompass Google+, YouTube, search and display, as well as retargeting and real-time bidding for programmatic ad buying cross-platform and device. The package doesn't include a specific voice offering, but the broadband service allows consumers to use numerous voice services (VOIP) that operate across broadband connections. Google Voice remains one of several examples. With Gigabit Google Fiber TV, Google promises hundreds of on-demand shows and channels, such as Animal Planet, CNBC, CBS Sports, Discover, as well as DVR storage, access to movies through Netflix and YouTube. While the focus is Kansas City in Kansas and Missouri for now, a source says Google will work to bring ultra high-speeds to other communities.
An oft-quoted line is “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This is just as true for digital marketing and search as it is for the lowly BLT. Marketers who understand the interdependence between digital channels (paid search, organic search, display, social, etc.) can optimize their efforts based on holistic data instead of siloed sets of data. By looking at the whole picture, marketers can benefit from more scalable, sustainable and profitable results. Holistic Search While there is much industry buzz around media convergence and integrated marketing, it’s still common to see different agencies and even different teams within the client or agency managing media with different technologies. This happens even within search marketing. A holistic approach to search marketing brings paid search, SEO and site optimization together to improve overall results for all SEM. To do this correctly for the first time, there will likely be structural and organizational challenges to overcome, as I discussed in an earlier column “Integrated Marketing Is Made Of People.” For the purpose of this article, let’s assume that your teams are aligned and we can focus on strategies. PPC and SEO PPC and SEO are like peanut butter and jelly. They are illustrative of how channels work in concert. Often the question comes up, “If I am getting great placement for an organic term, should I spend money on paid search for that term?” While a valid and thoughtful question, our research consistently shows that on terms with a high organic ranking it is better to bid more aggressively on paid search than you would otherwise. This is especially true with brand terms. Paid search ads associated with organic results show higher click-through rate than terms that are not associated with organic rankings. When you pause paid campaigns, the clicks on paid + organic are not made up by organic clicks alone. Additionally, organic click-through rates increase when the paid ads are active, driving incremental clicks to the natural results. Click-through rates are not the only metrics that improve by coordinating PPC and SEO. Conversions and profitability are also positively influenced. Our research shows that when paid search is run alongside organic listings, conversion rates are also significantly higher. In this study, profitability of the combined search programs also increased during times when paid listings ran. You have two opportunities to present your message for each query. By taking full advantage of both, you increase your chances of being associated with the need of the searcher, which means brand awareness and conversion. You also eliminate one possibility for a competitor to show his wares. Bacon + Lettuce + Tomato = Bliss There is equally tantalizing data for the interactions between search and display, Facebook and email. Let’s save the data for another day, but suffice it to say that search marketers will do best when collaborating with practitioners from other digital media disciplines, including website content. This teamwork also applies to reporting on search metrics. These should include landing page metrics, including bounce and conversion rates, cost-per-action and engagement metrics. Remember, a click only gets you so far; the landing page brings the conversion home. When looked at holistically with attributed data, metrics from natural search, paid search and engagement can work together to give insights to bidding strategies and improve all of your search efforts. And search is just the start. Once you get a taste of the improvements possible, you’ll want to start to add all of your marketing channels to your holistic approach.
There is not a lot of overlap between the universes of Gord Hotchkiss and Marissa Mayer, but our orbits have intersected on a few occasions in the past. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Mayer about various aspects of search on a handful of occasions, so it was with some interest that I watched the announcement and subsequent buzz about her appointment as Yahoo CEO. Much has been said about Mayer’s personal qualifications for the job, and the general consensus is that this is a good thing for Yahoo. If this were a movie, I’m thinking she would score an 82% on the Tomatometer, handily qualifying as “fresh.” Personally, I would agree. Mayer has a razor-sharp (and somewhat intimidating) intellect, a core love for search and an innate sense of what’s right for the user. All of these things will be big plusses for Yahoo. What she hasn’t been tested on is her ability to run a big company. And that’s where things could get interesting. No doubt Google still imparts its own “halo” effect on anyone who has spent time at the “Plex” in a leadership position. And few have spent as much time there as Mayer, who, as hire number 20, was Google’s first female engineer, logging 13 years with bosses (and hopefully still friends) Page and Brin. These three tied a tight little knot in the early days of Google, but from the outside, that knot seems to have frayed just a little in the past few years. Mayer’s recent moves in the company have been more lateral than vertical, as later additions to the Google team were promoted above her. Undoubtedly, this was a contributing factor to the parting of the ways with Google. But how much value does Mayer’s vast inside knowledge of Google and its past successes bring to Yahoo? It must have played a major role in her selection as the new chief Yahooligan. But was she instrumental in the streak of seemingly picture-perfect management calls in the early days of the Internet’s Golden Child? And, even if she were, does it really matter? Earlier this year, I took part in an open forum on search at an industry conference. Our moderator tossed a ticking time bomb at the panel, in the form of this delicately stated question: “What the #%^&$ is Google doing lately? Have they gone insane?” We each offered our opinions, which ranged in the degree of madness ascribed to Google’s executives. I started my response with this, “I think we tend to downplay the role luck played in the early days of Google. Maybe their luck is just running out.” There is a much fancier name for the hypothetical situation I described, which is called “regression to the mean.” In his recent book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” (a HIGHLY recommended read) psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explores how this can lead us to overvalue executive talent when it’s combined with the halo effect. Kahneman even uses Google as an example: “Of course there was a great deal of skill in the Google story, but luck played a more important role in the actual event than it does in the telling of it. And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.” Regression to the mean simply means that when you take a snapshot in time that represents either exceptionally good or bad performance, subsequent snapshots tend to move closer to the average. And those highs and lows generally involve luck to some extent. So you can poach talent from a company on a hot streak, only to find that it wasn’t the executives responsible for the performance, but simply the planets aligning in a favorable way. As an ex-CEO of a company, albeit a tiny one, I find it hard to swallow that leadership might not be as important as we think in the fortunes of a company. But I generally find Kahneman to be an incredibly astute observer of human errors in judgment, so I have to resist the urge to go with my own cognitive biases here and trust Kahneman’s research. He doesn’t say leadership is inconsequential, but he does caution against ignoring the role of timing and sheer luck. This is also not to downplay the role Marissa Mayer will play in the future of Yahoo. Somebody has to lead the company, and Mayer is at least as good a choice as anyone else I can think of. Who knows? Maybe Yahoo’s luck is due to change. In their case, “regression to the mean” means there’s no place to go but up.
Think about a connected car, malls and supermarkets, building with 3D images where you take a printer along with and create the product when you arrive. The new user interface, Google Glasses. Everything in the world will become potential inventory, according to Ben Fox, Executive Vice President, Adconion Media Group.