Google is the Most Improved Brand for 2007

Google 'the most improved brand' from the BBC covers an Interbrand report which found out that Google's brand value had risen in value by 44% over the past 12 months to $17.8bn putting it in 20th place.

The top 10 global brands for the year 2007 are as:
1. Coca Cola
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Nokia
6. Toyota
7. Intel
8. McDonald’s
9. Disney
10. Mercedes-Benz

In an interview with BusinessWeek, David Lawee. Google's VP of Marketing said:
"The challenge for us is to continue to outdo ourselves. That's a challenge for a lot of brands. Brands aren't static things. They're like people. They grow, they learn, they evolve. Now we're almost 10 years old. We know we have a lot to learn. But we're trying to be our own person. That's a little bit different from the way branding used to be done."

Click Fraud Reaches 15.8% In Q2 2007

A press release from the Click Fraud Network showing the figures for the second quarter of this year, has revealed that the click fraud has increase to 15.8% from 14.8% in the previous quarter.

One of the reasons for the increase, according to The Click Fraud Network, is a noticeable increase in botnets, parked domain sites and sites specifically made for the AdSense. This data comes from 4,000 online advertisers and agencies.

The overall industry average click fraud rate for Q2 2007 was 15.8 percent. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.

Traffic from botnets which was doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates. In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud which originated from countries outside North America came from France (5.1%), China (3.2%) and Australia (3%).

Google Planning To Add New "Unavailable After" META Tag

Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, has said that Google is releasing a new META tag named "unavailable_after."

The "unavailable_after" tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page. This tag comes in handy when you have a limited time offer promotional page, and on this page, the promotion will expire on a specific date. By using the "unavailable_after" tag, you can tell Google that they should not crawl this page, after the promotion expires.

But Google has not yet revealed the date for the actual implementation of this tag.

Google AdWords Adds Impression Share Metric

Impression Share, a new AdWords metric, represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings.

For example, say you own a small web design company and you're using AdWords to sell your services. You're curious to know if you're missing out on potential sales by not appearing every time users search on your keywords. To compare how often your ads are showing to the total opportunities they have to show, run a campaign- or account-level performance report that includes the new Impression Share columns. The report below is a sample of what you'll see:



Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.