In what is was a curve ball the Google Places experirment that allowed businesess to pay a flat monthly fee to highlight their listing with a bright yellow tag has been culled mid April from accepting new listings and by now a majority of businesses will have dropped out of the platform as they switch off the functionality.
The $25/month product was likely killed off due the minimal amount of revenue it generated for Google but it's the impact on the quality and user experience for thos using Google Places. The only businesses that might be sore are those who paid to have the upgrading listing will see their traffic and CTR fall through the floor as they return to a standard listing.
The question is has the change come as part of a Google Places refresh that is well overdue?
Finally annouced today Google Shopping has officially arrived in Australia in a move that benefits from the strong Aussie dollar but also the poor effort that retailers have made to move to online shopping. To increase Google's revenues they have enabled AdWords Product Extensions where retailers can submit product information and the relevant product information will be shown within their ads where relevant.
See Examples of Google Shopping Product Extensions
What is different with Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is powered by the Google Merchant Center and supplies all the details on your products to your AdWords campaign match to the relevant user query. AdWords product extensions shows product images, titles and prices of your products under your standard ads.
Why business should use Google Shopping?
The biggest part is the your competitors will start using them and they have a massive uplift in CTR which means more visitors to your online store?
Who loses out with Google Shopping?
One of the biggest losers are most comparison shopping websites, your affiliates and likely all the resellers of your products.
Google recently announced a big upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for it's free Standard Google Apps accounts. They have notified anyone with an existing standard Google Apps account that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.
But as of May 10 2011, any organisation that signs up for a new Standard account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. Google advised they will honour their commitment to all existing Google Apps customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for ..... at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined Google Apps.
This change reduced the maximum number of users down from 50 to a more sustainable 10 users per account, it's also given insight into the number of users that use the standard account are close to 10.
Google expands their Instant search product with version 7 that has now been rolled out to IE8 & IE9 users.
The new Instant toolbar is only available in English with more supported languages added later this week.
Most popular searches power prediction
The search term improved their Google instant auto-complete so that it will now function better for less common, longer and more complex queries getting your search results even faster.
