Salesforce.com, Google Collaborate on Ads
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In an effort to better compete with rival Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com said Tuesday that they would collaborate on several services aimed at small business.
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InfoWorld - NEW YORK - Hosted CRM (customer relationship management) evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer-service support functionality, launching a new Web site at Supportforce.com and announcing a batch of partnerships with top call center infrastructure vendors.
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Plays nice with Oracle Salesforce.com is today expected to take its latest step towards improving integration with third-parties' software, including business rival Oracle.â¦
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Ad agencies are in the brand-building business, but sometimes their efforts transcend the kind of process automation that intermediaries such as Google and MSN introduce to Web advertising. How can online creativity be bottled and distributed?
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Google Inc  will supply  eBay Inc  with Web search advertising outside the  United States, and the two will join forces on "click-to-call"  ads that link online shoppers to customer service operators,  the companies said on Monday.
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Google Adwords And The Lost Art Of Copywriting  Tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, use Google Adwords and Overture Match (from Yahoo!) to advertise their products and services on the Internet. An entire industry, loosely known as "Search Engine Marketing" (SEM for short) has grown up to support this ...
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Software maker Salesforce.com Inc.  said it reached an agreement with Google  to make Web-based software applications that help businesses improve sales and marketing.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is ramping up its efforts to help specific vertical markets create more effective online advertising using its technology to help clients highlight as many of their assets as possible to drive not only online but also offline sales. At its New York office Thursday, the directors of Google's vertical industry practices discussed some of the ways Google is changing its advertising strategies to be more industry-specific, something that the company hasn't traditionally done, said Tim Armstrong, president of advertising and commerce, North America, for Google. Armstrong said Google wants its advertising practices to be so vertical-specific that in the future, the specialists in those markets will be driving the company's advertising strategy --Â so much so that he joked the he would be out of a job. "The vertical people will be running Google," Armstrong said. "I'll be the least useful person in the room.... If you were to come into Google for a day, you'd actually see the industry groups have become the most specific connection point with customer." Most companies don't have a quantitative view of all of the assets they have for sale, and part of what Google is helping vertical industry customers do is take stock of all of their offerings so they create better ways to constantly reach customers, he said. As part of this strategy, Google's retail advertising practice is working on new technology that will help companies in that space assess all of the resources on their Web sites so they can more carefully choose keywords for targeted advertising. Currently, Google is working internally with customers to help them do this, but the company is still handing hard-copy results to customers, said John McAteer, director of Google's retail practice. In the future, however, Google wants to provide an automated way to crawl and index an entire Web site so companies can electronically compile all of its assets and generate keywords on their own, he said. Eventually, Google will offer the technology as a public tool, similar to one it already includes in its AdWords platform that helps customers crawl their Web sites to come up with relevant keywords for ads, said Brett Goffin, industry sales manager at Google. Neither McAteer nor Goffin could provide a time frame for when this tool would be made available. As part of a presentation Thursday, McAteer and Goffin outlined a case study in which Google teamed up with Rooms to Go Furniture, a company whose top executive was skeptical that online advertising could drive offline sales. Google worked with the furniture company to place online banner ads in local markets, targeting several U.S. metropolitan areas to drive customers to local stores. When the campaign was over, Rooms to Go saw a return of more than seven times its investment, and customer average order size 20 percent larger than the retailer's average sale. Moreover, retail stores accounted for 86 percent of sales, while only 14 percent came from e-commerce sales, McAteer said. In addition to its retail work, Google also has been doing market research to help other verticals, such as the automotive industry. The company's automotive market team plans to hold a Webinar on Oct. 11 to reveal the results of a study it conducted with Compete Inc. to discover buying habits of customers in the automotive space. Bonita Coleman Stewart, Google's industry director for automotive, said the two companies found that the time to market for automotive shoppers has shortened to one month, reducing the amount of time companies in this market have to reach customers with campaigns. She said that Google has not identified how it will use this information to serve its advertising customers but that will be part of the discussion on next month's Webinar.
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Google is beta testing a new type of ad with a select number of its clients that allows them to take advantage of the rise in popularity of the widget.
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TechWeb - Salesforce.com introduced tools to integrate its customer relationship management service with enterprise resource planning systems, Oracle 11i, and technology from 25 partners.
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Google's AdSense is in the clear, but two patents related to the AutoLink piece of the Google toolbar are to be re-examined.
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WashingtonPost.com (Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive &#038; separate company than the Washington Post newspaper) and Google have extended their contract to serve Google AdSense and Google search results on WashingtonPost.com.   AdSense ads are served along with WashingtonPost.com stories while Google is still powering the search functionality on the site. Information was not disclosed on the terms of [...]
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will not try to block Google&#39;s acquisition of online ad-serving vendor DoubleClick, the agency said Thursday.The commission voted 4-1 to approve the deal after an eight-month investigation. &quot;After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that&#160;Google&#39;s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick&#160;is unlikely to substantially lessen competition,&quot; the majority wrote in a statement.The commission downplayed&#160;concerns brought by some privacy groups. Privacy concerns are &quot;not unique to Google and DoubleClick,&quot; and &quot;extend to the entire online advertising marketplace,&quot; commissioners wrote.Google, the provider of the most widely used search engine, announced in April that it planned to acquire ad serving giant DoubleClick in a $3.1 billion deal.The commission examined several factors and concluded that the two companies are not direct competitors, the FTC said in a news release on Thursday. The agency found that competition in online ad-serving markets is vigorous and likely to increase.The agency will closely monitor the ad-serving space, however, commissioners wrote. &quot;The markets within the online advertising space continue to quickly evolve, and predicting their future course is not a simple task,&quot; the majority wrote. &quot;We want to be clear ... that we will closely watch these markets and, should Google engage in unlawful tying or other anticompetitive conduct, the commission intends to act quickly.&quot;Google, which faces a similar examination before the European Union, praised the FTC decision.&quot;The FTC&#39;s strong support sends a clear message: this acquisition poses no risk to competition and will benefit consumers,&quot; Eric Schmidt, Google&#39;s chairman and CEO, said in a statement. &quot;We hope that the European Commission will soon reach the same conclusion, and we are confident that this deal will deliver more relevant ads for consumers, more choices for advertisers, and more opportunities for Web site publishers.&quot;Google will remain committed to user privacy, Schmidt added. &quot;For us, privacy does not begin or end with our purchase of DoubleClick,&quot; he said. &quot;We have been protecting our users&#39; privacy since our inception, and will continue to innovate in how we safeguard their information and maintain their trust.&quot;The same month that Google and DoubleClick announced the deal, three privacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG),&#160;filed a petition asking the FTC to block the deal&#160;unless Google made significant changes to its privacy policy. The groups argued that the combined company with have unparalleled access to Web users&#39; personal information.EPIC and the CDD didn&#39;t have an immediate reaction to the ruling.FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour voted against the deal, saying she disagreed with the majority&#39;s view on the direction of the ad-serving market.And Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, while voting with the majority, said the deal raised serious competition and privacy issues. Those issues, &quot;though in part brought to light by the deal, clearly transcend it,&quot; he wrote.In late May, Google announced that the FTC was examining the deal for potential antitrust problems. The FTC can rule that a merger raises antitrust issues, and the agency can recommend remedies. If the merging companies don&#39;t reach a settlement with the FTC, the agency can see an injunction against the merger in a U.S. court.Leibowitz, in November, said the agency was reviewing the case on antitrust, but not privacy, grounds. The privacy groups have argued, however, that the privacy issue is related to antitrust partly because of the competitive edge Google would get in targeting advertising to specific people.In December,&#160;EPIC and CDD filed a new complaint, asking FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras to recuse herself from the case. Majoras&#39; husband works for a law firm that is advising DoubleClick, but DoubleClick and the FTC said that the Jones Day law firm hasn&#39;t represented the company before the FTC.
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Google has begun testing its radio ad service with a small group of selected advertisers, confirming reports from last month which said the company had begun to hire a sales team and was preparing to launch by the end of the year.
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Google generated most of its revenue -- $411.7 million -- through text-based ads displayed on company-owned sites. That&#39;s an important factor, because Google doesn&#39;t have to share the money with other advertising partners.
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Salesforce.com Inc. ,  which has been working with Google Inc.  to make its  Web-based software applications meld with Google's own software  push, said on Tuesday it is enabling its customers to sell  Google advertising through Salesforce business software.
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InfoWorld - Google has begun inviting mobile Web site developers to display Google ads on their sites as part of a limited beta test.