Is Google your search engine of choice? Do you have a Google Account? If so, you can now change the background image of the main search page! Go to www.google.com and “Sign In” – once you have done so, click “change background image” in the bottom left corner of the screen. From here you can browse and upload an image or choose from any of the images in the public gallery.

Interesting commentary – “brands are often surprised to find that their fans of Facebook and the like aren’t necessarily their intended target”  and “big advertisers are finding almost a third of their Internet ads aren’t being seen.”

Charles Colton famously quipped “imitation is the sincerest of flattery”. The same cannot be said for the flood of daily deal products in markets across the United States. Groupon and Living Social have become household names, pioneering an industry. In large part, the rapid growth of this industry occurred in major metropolitan markets, well outside small town USA, the “local space”.

For those unaware, advertising sales in the local space is about relationships. It really does not matter if you are selling TV, Radio, Billboard, Magazine or Newspaper, it’s all about relationships. The pitch is the same; “we” are all a part of the community and will be successful together. As cliché as it sounds, it was true for many decades. As technology and the internet became commonplace, fragmentation in the advertising industry occurred, even in the local space.

Daily Deals Can Damage Relationships

Small businesses invariably are built from relationships in the community. The same community where many are connected and plenty are talking. It’s critical to treat them all fairly and equally, a principle of business proven to generate more referrals. There is tremendous risk in offering a daily deal to attract new customers. Does the message you are sending devalue existing relationships with valued customers?

Attracting The Wrong Customers

It’s hard to argue with a short term spike in revenue but are you not trying to build a base of loyal customers? What percentage of those in search of “the deal” will return to your place of business when it’s back to business as usual? If I like to dine at your restaurant the third Thursday of every month and show up only to find no seating available because the majority are enjoying a 50% discount on dinner, what happens next month?

Starting A Trend

Offering that steep discount comes with a steep price. Do it once and concede defeat as the expectation will be on you to do it again… and again.  If it really makes good business sense to offer the deal, how do you go about explaining that to the community to avoid the perception you will do it again? Generally, you are operating at thin margins and work just as hard at keeping the loyal customers as you do at attracting new ones. Do you really want to send the message there is room for you to reduce costs?

A national study by The Schapiro Group, an Atlanta based market research firm, reveals a number of important findings about how consumers and business owners perceive the local chamber of commerce and the businesses that are their members.

Recent stats gathered by Drop Down Deals show that 6 out of 10 consumers say they will do most of their holiday shopping online this year. More than a third of all online shoppers say they plan to spend less than $500 even though the average amount online shoppers are expected to dish out this year on gifts is almost $860

Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (often called a “spider”). Crawling is the process by which the Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Google uses a huge set of computers to fetch (“crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Googlebot’s crawl process starts with a list of website URLs, generated from previous crawl processes and augmented with sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links (SRC and HREF) on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

There are a number of options available to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site content, including the use of robots.txt to block access to files and directories on your server. It may surprise you to lean there are situations where you might want to block content on your site from being indexed. Watch a video on the topic.

It is equally important to make sure your content is crawlable. Googlebot discovers sites by following links from page to page. Use Google Webmaster Tools to review the crawl errors page frequently. This page will list any problems Googlebot found when crawling your site. Here is a video on Crawling and Indexing.

Google rolled out the highly anticipated Google+ Pages today on the official Google blog! A number of pages are already available (see link below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Why should you care? For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

Read the entire announcement here:

John Wanamaker, consider by many to be father of modern advertising famously quipped: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” As humorous as the statement was, it was equally true. Marketing and advertising are part science, part luck and involve a great deal of trial and error. Technology has taken us to a place where we can better track the effectiveness of online advertising, justify expense, measure ROI and even create attribution for efforts undertaken.

Today, effective measurement is a multi-layered process. Marketers who rely solely on the data provided by ad publishers/networks are being terribly shortsighted. Even the most basic metrics including ad impressions, clicks and CTR can be easily manipulated to appear stronger. In the local space, it is not uncommon to find online publishers who do not filter non-human activity and invalid clicks from ad reporting.

Filtering is a standard practice in the online advertising industry. Most online publishers and ad networks work hard to filter results. Google, for instance, works to filter and protect the advertiser and publisher from any fraudulent or invalid activity and while not foolproof, the systems are highly effective. If you are placing and online ad purchase of any size, ask the question and let the answer factor into your purchase decision: what is being done to filter non-human activity and invalid clicks from advertising response reports?

Here are a few tips to remember when measuring online advertising:

Website Log Files: At the simplest level, you can check how many times a particular page has been viewed over a certain period.

Unique URL’s:  If you are running ads on multiple sites redirect users to a page with a URL specific to the ad.

Tracking Software: Links contain snippets of code allowing for more accurate tracking without any interruption in the user experience.