Clickbanktalk

Google’s top advertising executive, Susan Wojcicki, said on Wednesday that Google’s biggest innovations over the next several
years will be in personalized search results and ads.

Her remarks, made at a presentation at the Search Marketing Expo conference, come amidst substantial controversy about the
consolidated privacy policy the company will officially adopt March 1.

In fact, both Wojcicki and Jack Menzel, a Google director of product management who addressed the conference on Tuesday, acknowledged
that the Internet giant is still figuring out how exactly to handle personalized search queries and advertising content.

Asked what big innovations users could expect from Google in the next three to five years, Wojcicki recounted her own personal-best
Google advertising experience. When her 3-year-old daughter announced she wanted to take Chinese lessons, Wojcicki asked all
of her friends who the best teacher might be. After talking to several people, she got a name. She then realized that on the
very page displaying her initial email request, the same teacher’s name appeared.

“If this happened all the time, I wouldn’t have to go ask my friends. I could just have Google magically tell me,” Wojcicki
said. “To do that, we’ll have to do some of the work that we’re doing now” in terms of personalization and “getting to know
our users better.”

Wojcicki made the same point when she discussed Google+, which earned just three minutes a month of its users’ Web time in
January, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article citing comScore figures.

She suggested that Google+ was the gateway to “the next generation of Google products,” although users may not understand
that yet. Those products will be “different because our users are logged in and are telling us something about themselves.”

Wojcicki envisioned a positive user experience resulting from different users typing in the same “best vacations” search.
Her results might be more family friendly, she said, describing precisely the kind of controversial type of conclusion about
a user that the Internet giant could make by analyzing the combined usage data it will have on that person when the new privacy
policy kicks in.

She described ads as just more information, and said she hopes Google will reach a point where it provides only ads that users
“want to see.”

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer
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30 minutes ago 

NEW YORK (AP) — New, potentially lucrative advertising opportunities are coming to Facebook as a prelude to its initial public offering of stock. The idea is to lure big brands with the promise of effective, precisely targeted ads that reach the social network’s 845 million users.

Facebook has invited marketers and journalists to an event Wednesday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It’s a rare East Coast appearance for the Silicon Valley social-networking company.

Though Facebook hasn’t said exactly what will be discussed, it is widely expected to release new ways to advertise on its website and possibly on mobile devices.

Facebook has a vast trove of information about its users’ lives, hobbies, likes and dislikes, yet the company has kept advertising fairly unobtrusive to date. Ads for teeth-whitening, wineries and laundry detergent and the like are relegated to the right side of users’ Facebook pages.

“Facebook is making serious money from ads right now, but they are not making serious money from major brand advertisers, and that’s where the ad money is,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “They currently have rather low-rent, shoddy ads on Facebook.”

With an IPO looming, however, there is pressure to prove that Facebook is worth the $75 million to $100 million that will be demanded once it goes public this spring. That’s where the big brands come in. Nestle, Procter Gamble and other big brands don’t want to be relegated to the sidelines, Lieb said.

Facebook will try to integrate ads into people’s experience, so that friends’ posts about brands are showing up alongside their news links and puppy photos.

“Consumers are really tuning out advertising,” Lieb said.

According to research firm eMarketer, Facebook has a 14 percent share of the $12.4 billion display advertising market in the U.S. last year. This year, it’s expected to grow to 16.8 percent, surpassing Google’s 16.5 percent. In all, eMarketer estimates that Facebook’s advertising revenue will hit $5.06 billion this year, accounting for 83 percent of its total revenue.

To ensure it doesn’t alienate users with sudden new, obtrusive advertisements, the company will likely collect feedback and test out how its users respond to the changes.

“Facebook has certainly backed down on things,” Lieb said. “But they are not just going on what people say. They are going on what they do.”

Other changes from Facebook include Timeline for brands. The company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., has been nudging its users to switch over to this new profile format, which emphasizes photos and reveals more prominently posts and updates from a user’s entire Facebook history. Now, brands can create their own Timelines, too. On Wednesday, Walmart’s Timeline was available, beginning with the opening of the first Wal-Mart Discount Center in 1964.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

It was recently revealed that Google and a number of advertisers had found a way to bypass some privacy features in modern web browsers, allowing them to forgo third-party cookie policies and serve targeted ads regardless of a user’s privacy settings. The report caused a stir among privacy advocates and consumers alike, and it prompted Google and other companies to agree to honor browsers’ do-not-track policy by the end of the year. Some users may not want to wait up to nine months to know they’re not being tracked, however, and Google has a solution for privacy-conscious web users who don’t want to be followed. Read on for more.

Google has an extension called “Keep My Opt-Outs” available for Chrome browser users that will block all cookies related to personalized ads. The cookies in question track a user’s path across various websites and then use that history to serve relevant advertisements. Web browsers all include a setting to block this process but a number of advertisers such as Google use a special code to circumvent this setting in browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer.

“Keep My Opt-Outs is an extension for users who are not comfortable with personalization of the ads they see on the web,” Google noted on the extension’s Chrome Web Store page. “It’s a one-step, persistent opt-out of personalized advertising and related data tracking performed by companies adopting the industry privacy standards for online advertising.”

Keep My Opt-Outs will work on OS X and Windows computers, but only in the Chrome browser.

Tags: Advertising, chrome, cookies, do-not-track, google, third-party cookies, tracking, Web Browser

If everything goes as planned, today’s announcement of GraphScience’s official launch may soon mean that Facebook has a viable competitor to Google AdWords, and the companies already signed up include some of the biggest retailers in the United States, by no accident.

Of the two main types of advertising offered on Facebook—those that drive traffic to a company’s page with the hopes of accumulating “likes” and those that drive traffic off of Facebook to make purchases—GraphScience focuses primarily on the later.

“What we focus on is actually driving traffic off of Facebook,” Raymond Rouf, CEO of GraphScience, told Portfolio.com. GraphScience’s SocialEngine uses Facebook’s ads API to identify consumers who share social interests and have already demonstrated the intent to purchase the customer’s brand. The technology then tracks the customer as she moves from Facebook to the customer’s site or makes a purchase on a Facebook store. “For us, dollars equals data, and if we can’t get as many data points as possible, we’re not doing the best for the customer.”

Unlike other companies that offer similar services, Rouf said that GraphScience is one of the few built explicitly for Facebook.

At 31 years old, Rouf is already a serial entrepreneur, having founded three companies, and he says that although each company is driven by a different problem, his underlying motive is the same: increased freedom. In this case, the problems he wanted to solve was the huge influx of social data and figuring out a way to leverage the advantage the company’s SocialEngine provides. In other words, creating a provable cash stream using Facebook marketing.

“I think if we really want to think long-term with these [corporate] budgets, we have to show that Facebook isn’t just a viable cash stream, but a necessary one,” said Rouf.

And although the company only officially launched today, it already claims to have a proven business model, garnering an average of four to eight times return on investment (ROI), according to the site. And to Rouf, this proven revenue stream is exactly what big businesses need to make it worth their time to invest.

“When I see a company spending $30 million to $40 million per year on Facebook, a good portion of that will be branding dollars, but another good portion will be advertising,” said Rouf. “And $15 million to $20 million into a four to eight times ROI is a good return for them: It can generate $60 million in revenue.

Founded in 2010, and in stealth mode since 2011, GraphScience has already signed nearly 30 clients, making for a pretty solid foundation on its official day of launch. But what stands out on this list of clients is a preponderance of legacy companies. This startup is going after the big fish—and getting them.

“We aim to work with the top retailers. So if you look at the top retailer list, most of those guys are our targets—most are our customers,” said Rouf. And that list of clients isn’t restricted to established companies such as Williams-Sonoma, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Zales, but also includes highly successful fashion startup HauteLook and jewelry startup Ice.

“What we’ve seen throughout the [social-marketing] ecosystem is a lot of companies will compare this to Google AdWords,” said Rouf. “They’ve seen Google be very successful at this, they haven’t those same expectations from Facebook.”

(Which is better for you? Facebook or Google?)

But if success post-launch mirrors the company’s stealth achievement, that may soon change.