You can expect to see more out of semvironment in the near future – we have been swamped with work and we have a whole bunch to share.

We’ll see you next year!

A Terabyte (TB) is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 8,000,000,000,000 binary data bits. If these numbers are too mind-boggling to really wrap your head around, think of it this way: if each bit was a sheet of paper, with a Terabyte of data, you could stack C++ manuals all the way to the moon and back! (It would take approximately 4,384,967,400,000 sheets of standard bond paper to reach the moon from Earth)

That’s enough to make nerds and non-nerds shout “Holy crap!” in unison.

Google stated the purpose of such experiments:

Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.

So while 1TB in 68 seconds is impressive, it’s for a good purpose, too: Making people’s lives a little better by providing faster searches. Oh, and giving geeks something to impress their friends about.

Instead of a large banner ad at the top or bottom of Google Images results, Google users are now seeing three text ads appear:

(Screenshot source: AccuraCast)

Reports are also saying that Google News ad testing is now going on as well.

So what can PPC Advertisers, website business owners, and pay per click agencies learn from what Google is doing? Start smathering ads all over anything that’s blank! Just kidding. But we do think that the bottom line is you can be squeezing more out of your sites than you currently are. The caveat, however, is that you need to test your users’ reactions to more ads, changes, and increased monetization strategies on your websites. This is why Google is taking time to test each change it makes to each of its services, and it never just rolls something out point blank. Testing is one of the big secrets of website optimization, and that goes in the PPC world as well.

The two partner companies and their benefits to Google advertisers are described by Google as follows:

COREMedia Systems is the leading provider of direct response (DR) advertising technology and provides the most widely used technology for planning, purchasing and analysis of direct response commercials… For direct response advertisers, this reporting integration will save time in managing ad campaigns by providing the ability to review response and sales data from Google TV Ads campaigns alongside their other TV buys, within the existing CORE system.

Harris Corporation is a worldwide leader in TV advertising traffic, scheduling and billing systems. This partnership will make it easier for our television inventory providers to manage their media sales through the Google TV Ads platform within the existing Harris system. 

Google is a great example of integration all around, yet another lesson that PPC Managers can take to heart: advertise on more than just one front. TV, radio, banners, and video ads are great supplements to a good paid search campaign.

Or maybe the most disliked…

Or just the most expensive as far as Cost Per Click!

We went into the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool and pitted Senators Obama and McCain against each other in a paid search battle. We got the following results:

Now, McCain’s clicks cost more, and there are more potential clicks on an ad targeting his name than Obama’s. As we’ve stressed in posts before, it is fundamentally important to dive into data when researching keywords and other trends in PPC Management. At face value, one could assume that Senator McCain is searched more and has more ad competition than Senator Obama because he is more popular – and therefore will win the election. There are several variables, however, that could cause this to be quite untrue:

1. Maybe so many people search for John McCain on Google because they hate him. This could account for the differences in click volume.
2. Maybe there are a lot of anti-McCain websites bidding on the senator’s name. This could account for the differences in CPC.
3. Maybe Republicans use Google more than Democrats, or maybe Republicans tend to click on ads more than Democrats.

And there are other factors that could cause a Presidential-Win-For-McCain assumption to be unsupported by this data. When managing your own client accounts, you should use the same kind of critical thinking or skepticism:

1. Why are people searching for the terms you are bidding on? Are they transactional terms? Are people looking to buy your product when they search for these terms? Are they looking for information? Are they looking for something else?
2. What kinds of competitors are bidding on your key terms? Are they in the same industry as you? A low representation of advertisers in your same market on key terms could mean opportunity… or it could mean that everyone quit advertising because no one searching for those terms is buying.
3. What kinds of people are doing the searching? Demographics and psychographics affect click behavior. Figuring out the behavior of your target market can be crucial to your success. Basic marketing skills – not just knowledge of how AdWords or AdCenter work – will give you an advantage over your competitors.

The same goes when analyzing ad performance stats like CTRs, Conversion Rates, and Costs/Conversion. Take time and think through the process your visitors are going through to reach your site and convert (or what prevents them from doing either). Make hypotheses about why users are behaving the way they are and then TEST!

Other websites have talked about political search trends at the following urls:

How we’re using the web in the 2008 elections

Bush & Kerry Battle It Out In Search