Tag Archives: google

Why I Like DFP Small Business (a.k.a. Google Ad Manager)

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A little over a year ago, we used a service called Open X on TuDiabetes.org and EsTuDiabetes.org, to serve our ads until we found ourselves talking to nobody when faced with a tech issue that resulted in no ads getting served. At that point, I decided to try Google Ad Manager, a free service that does the same thing (help you manage ads) as a hosted service by Google.

More than a year later (now it’s called DFP Small Business, but it is essentially the same service), we continue to be very happy with the platform. It lets you manage multiple orders for multiple clients over multiple inventory locations. This is ideal for us, having two networks to manage ads on and typically having multiple campaigns under way.

The ability to manage an order includes start and end times, % of impressions and targeting by geography, language, browser, domains and much more. Also, their reporting capabilities are as solid as the rest of the Google products you may be used to, which is advantageous to you and to your clients.

All in all, DFP has become a solution that seems to meet all our needs and has been reliable in its delivery of ads since we adopted it.

Facebook Grants? About Time!

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I have been wondering for some time now why doesn’t Facebook does what Google has been doing for a while now through their Google Grants program: offer in-kind advertising for non-profit organizations.

A cursory Google search (had to do this on Google, clearly!) of “Facebook Ads for nonprofits” revealed that my question had been shared by many already. There was even a Facebook page called “Call to Action: Launch an Ads Grants Program for Nonprofits” (too sad that the original admins were not able to keep up with it -I don’t blame them, considering how tough it is to get Facebook to answer any inquiries)

What do Google Grants do for the nonprofit sector?
I will let this screenshot from our Google AdWords Dashboard speak (Google basically offers the same interface that they offer for their paying advertisers to their nonprofit beneficiaries):

Nearly 66,000 clicks in the course of a little more than 6 months, for a click-through rate of of 2.48%… best of all, at no cost to the Diabetes Hands Foundation. All of it, thanks to a charitable program that Google offers. See what I mean? Those $42,656.34 is how much they would have earned had they sold these ads (we clearly have nowhere near that kind of advertising budget, so it’s not like they would have otherwise have made that kind of money from us…)

The point is: Facebook, with their reach (they now have more than 500 million users) can do A LOT of good! FAR more than a single donation to a single cause by Mark Zuckerberg.

So what do you say, Facebook? Facebook Grants? It’s about time!

To Buzz or Not to Buzz… That is the question! (for nonprofits)

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If you have heard the buzz, so have millions of others lately: Google recently launched a service in direct competition to Twitter and Facebook called Goggle Buzz… or is it a complement to them? Or none of the above?

Don’t worry: you are not alone in having questions about this new service in the social media landscape! To help you figure out what to do about Google Buzz, make sure to read this great post about the role of Google Buzz for nonprofits by John Haydon.

P.S. While I decide how to go about the use of Google Buzz, I decided to activate the Google Buzz Button WordPress plugin, which you can now see at the bottom of all posts on the blog.

How I Use Google Wave

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Reading this great article about Google Wave by Chris Brogan made me think it would be a good idea to share my own views about the latest piece of the Google Puzzle to become unveiled (well, there have been others but this one seems like the most relevant new tool to come out of Mountain View, CA in a while!)

Like most people you can talk to, Google Wave has been a tremendous help in collaborating remotely with others in project work. Specifically, working with David Edelman around the World Diabetes Day USA initiatives last year became A LOT easier thanks to Google Wave. We’d both be on Wave and speaking through Skype as we wrote on the same wave, creating content together, correcting each other on the spot, literally crafting the entire campaign while saving ourselves rework, follow-up emails and tons of replies/replies/replies.

So, in that respect, conference calls and meetings can turn into work sessions, increasing productivity big time. By having users be on the same Wave they can be more on the same page (that came out a little cheesy!)

What are the big shortcomings I am seeing with Google Wave?

  • It’s still a bit rough on the edges: it’s definitely still an early adopters space, kind of like Twitter back in 2006-early 2007. So not too many people (at least not ALL people) are there, which makes it challenging if you want to collaborate seamlessly.
  • It still is very isolated from the rest of the Google suite of products. The two specific products that I MISS seeing it connect with are: Gmail and GTalk. Connecting it with Gmail (notifications about updates on Waves, etc.) is a no-brainer to me (I don’t mean easy to implement, but valuable to the user). Connecting it with GTalk, supporting video and audio while being on the same wave would make the use of other complementary tools like Skype or iChat unnecessary, since you have all you need to host your collaborative work session within Google Wave.
  • Bots that let you do interesting things within Google Wave besides straightup content co-creation are still a mystery to most. Getting by useful Wave Bots (such as the bot that lets you tweet from within Wave) is still more of an art than something structured, reminding me at times of the dark early days of the web, back in 1994-96, when directories like Yahoo! were the way to find good sites…

In the meantime, while Google Wave continues to evolve and become more robust, check out this useful 101 put together by LifeHacker, to help people make the most of Google Wave.

Less people searching for diabetes on Google?

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Today, as I learned about Google Insights tool, I typed in “diabetes” as a search term.

I was sadly surprised to learn that over the course of the past 5 years LESS people have been searching for “diabetes” (starting with searches about “symptoms of diabetes” (arguably one of the starting points to find out whether you have diabetes or not).

Not a reason to celebrate, but there it is… though there’s more people WITH diabetes that don’t know it, there’s less people searching to become informed about diabetes! :(

Google Results Highlighting Tweets ABOUT People and Places

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Google is doing interesting things about tweets, displaying them as “bubbles” at the top of the search results. Is this the start (to my knowledge) of Google getting creative about Tweets to not miss out on a huge chunk of information that it could make sense of? I think so.

I learned about this by performing a simple search for “chezpanisse twitter“: I was trying to find the Twitter account for the famous Berkeley restaurant, after watching a fascinating interview of Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse, with Charlie Rose.

What if Twitter and Facebook vanished?

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Am I the only one who felt this way? No, not like an atomic bomb had gone off… but rather that the web attack targeted at a pro-Georgian blogger that took down Twitter and partly affected Facebook, LiveJournal and Google, was simply unbelievable! And it made me wonder: “What if Twitter and Facebook vanished?”

Until now (to my limited network security knowledge) the DDoS attacks were sort of like getting back at “the man,” at the big corporation, in retaliation for something.

But yesterday’s attack was different. It was aimed at an individual (I don’t know how powerful or influential of an individual, but a single person nonetheless). It can be compared to taking down an entire city with an atomic bomb just to quiet a single voice.

What are the things I am most impressed with?
1) An attack of this scale is possible and Twitter is vulnerable to it, as well as FB, Google and LiveJournal too, to a certain degree).
2) Because this kind of attack is possible and because we’ve gotten to depend so much on social media and the Web for our communications, as crazy as it sounds, this kind of attack partly accomplished its purpose (while disrupting the day/s of many more people and groups, naturally).
3) In the future, attacks of this kind could become more common, because of (1) and (2). So organizations (and individuals) need to think about building redundancy in terms of the channels they use to communicate and disseminate information (while keeping them manageable -not easy, I know). Companies like Twitter need to look real close at what happened in order to protect themselves (and their users, in the process) from such dramatic disruptions in the future.

Annoyed by Google Ads with changing domains

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I know I am… There’s this “wrinkle removal” web site that keeps appearing once and again in our Google Ads, in spite of us having removed about 7 different domains that it was connected to. Have you seen it?

Sounds like an opportunity for some Google Ads intelligence to be put in place, where destination pages get parsed for content and if a domain has been blocked for a particular site, any other domains that point to the same content get blocked along with it.

There you have an idea, Google Ads folks! Hopefully soon we will not have to carry Google Ads any more.

Is Magritte More Popular than Diabetes?

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A few days back, Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine wrote this great post explaining why Google would most likely NOT do a World Diabetes Day doodle… as they in fact didn’t.

One of the arguments she was given was this:
“Google chooses its doodle subjects by pure metrics: “diabetes” is searched for a good bit in America, but not enough worldwide to make the doodle short list.”

So, based on the fact that Google’s home page today featured a Rene Magritte doodle, I am sure “Rene Magritte” must be an incredibly popular search on Google, compared to “diabetes“… right?

Anyway… as sarcastic as this post may be, I just had to let it out. :)