Here’s a round-up of recent developments in Google that I found interesting:
1. Analyze Competition Feature In Adwords
Adwords will have a new Analyze Competition feature under the Opportunities tab. This allows you to compare your campaign performance to those of your competitors, based on your account’s activity in the last 2 weeks. Depending on your chosen metric, you’ll be shown a bar graph comparing yours to the competition averages (see sample). The data is anonymous and you’ll be able to export this information to a .csv file for further analysis. The Analyze Competition feature is now available only to a small number of advertisers - I don’t see it in my account yet.
As a MAS Facebook fan, I was notified of their new marketing campaign, which aims to make customers think about the value they’re getting when flying with Malaysia Airlines. Judging from the response on the Facebook page, it looks like the campaign (sorta) backfired - a case of customers not always thinking at the same frequency as the marketers.
Here’s an interesting compilation that shows Google Facts and Figures in a single file, from historical timeline to search statistics and business data. The numbers were compiled by Pingdom, which provides website uptime and performance services, based on information from Google, Comscore, Wikipedia and Google’s SEC filings, amongst others. Image available after the jump.
Twitter have announced that they’ll be rolling out their own URL shortener this summer. So instead of the common bit.ly, you’re going to see your links wrapped with a t.co URL like http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMSes and maybe a descriptive anchortext like amazon.com/Delivering for web users.
