Google Says Average AdWords CTR at 2%

Google seldom comments on click through rates on its flagship AdWords product. It is, after all, where they get most of their income. With millions of searches performed every day, however, the rate doesn’t have to be very high for them to clean up.

And, as it turns out, it’s not. In a thread on the Google AdWords Help forum, Google employee AdWordsPro responded to a question on what a “general” guideline for expected clicks might be. While naturally, there’s a lot of variation among industries and specific keywords, it’s interesting to see a Google employee comment (albeit vaguely) on an average CTR.

Behind China’s Search Engine Market

Mathew McDougall tells me it will become “disastrous” for American firms to reach a Chinese audience once Google.cn shuts down.

[....]

Different search engines in China attract specific types of consumers. Without Google, the audience segments become blurred, McDougall says. He explains that Google might be a better choice for advertisers wanting to reach educated, professional and “upwardly” mobile user groups. On the other hand, Baidu dominates in cities where the average Chinese consumer resides.

Yahoo Adds Feature to Import Google Adwords Campaigns

Yahoo is set to release two search advertising tools in Sponsored Search next week before the company reports earnings on Jan. 26.

Despite the agreement with Microsoft to power the search engine’s backend infrastructure, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo continues to invest in advertising and consumer search tools. This time the company is releasing Network Distribution, and Import Campaigns.

[....]

The Import Campaigns feature provides an easy way to convert campaigns from Google AdWords into Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Advertisers that are ready to convert Google AdWords campaigns into Yahoo Search Marketing simply select the browse button to upload files. Select the “Import File” button to start the process. The feature provides a summary of the information being converted.

How Google Ranks Twitter Tweets

Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithms to keep Twitter tweets indexing and serving up in real time. David Talbot tells us the technique relies on PageRank technology, which helps to index and find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search.

Details in Technology Review, published by MIT, explain that relevance and authority play a key role. The more pages that link to a page—and the more pages linking to the linker—the more relevant the original pages rank. Talbot details the process.