Google's newest venture

We're excited to announce Google Ventures, Google's new venture capital fund. This is Google's effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies. By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google's unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses.

At its core, Google Ventures is charged with finding and helping to develop exceptional start-ups. We'll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven't thought of yet. Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.

Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the "next big thing," and we'll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures.

Getting your Medicare records in Google Health

Google Health is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on a pilot program in Arizona and Utah that lets Medicare beneficiaries import their Medicare claims data into Google Health.

The pilot is one of several CMS programs to test out how the government can give beneficiaries secure access to their medical data online. Before I came to Google, I worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which houses CMS. At the time, the idea of giving beneficiaries access to their own Medicare claims data in electronic format was just that — an idea. Today, it's becoming a reality. And given the more than $19 billion investment the government is making in Health IT as part of the stimulus package, now is the perfect time.

As a part-time caregiver to my mother who has a serious chronic illness and someone who just lost both elderly grandparents in the past four months to illness, I can see the benefit of having all of my family’s medical information organized in one place. When Google Healthlaunched last year, I promptly set up accounts for my mother and both grandparents. But at the time, I found it frustrating that I was not able to access electronic copies of my grandparents' Medicare claims — where most of their medical data resided.

The Medicare Arizona and Utah pilot is designed to give beneficiaries choice in the tools they use to manage their medical records online. Google Health is one of four personal health records (PHR) that beneficiaries can choose from. While only traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare beneficiaries with a primary residence in Arizona and Utah are eligible to participate, this includes nearly 1.1 million beneficiaries living in those regions.

For beneficiaries who choose to participate, it's important to know that Medicare does not have access to information in your Google Health Account — Medicare will only be sending data to your Account. Beneficiaries who participate in the pilot will still have access to data imported into their Google Health Accounts after the pilot concludes at the end of 2009. And with the recently launched Google Health sharing feature, any beneficiary enrolled in this pilot can now share this data with family members and doctors in their care network.

If I had this type of electronic access to my grandparents' medical records during my family's medical crisis, it would have been a huge help to me. I applaud CMS for taking this big step towards empowering consumers with access to their own health records.

If you're a Medicare beneficiary living in Arizona or Utah and are interested in participating in the pilot, you can get started here.

Google AdSense: Dos for Using the Google AdSense Program

Google AdSense is really a fun and fairly easy way to make extra money. It is important that you follow the rules though, as Google is very serious about the integrity of their AdSense program. Choosing knowingly or unknowingly not following the rules could result in your Google AdSense account being terminated as a worst case scenario. Here are a few dos for using the program:

DO

Read the terms and conditions and program policies thoroughly.

Read up on everything you can about Google AdSense. Learn from others experiences and mistakes.

Learn how to optimize your web site for the most enjoyable and profitable Google AdSense experience. Realize it does and will take some time and hard work. That is why it is so important that you choose to write about something you care about. Hard work can prove to be even harder if you don't like what you're doing.

Visit other web sites that you know are benefiting from Google AdSense. Click on the ads only if you are truly interested in the product or service being advertised. Read other people's blogs and comment on them. Only offer a comment though if it is truly sincere.

Hopefully, these helpful tips outlined will ease you into using the program and help you avoid mistakes that could possibly cost you a lot of time or money.

Google AdSense: familiarize yourself with the Google AdSense preview tool

The Google AdSense preview tool allows you to preview the ads that may show on any web page thereby letting you make an educated decision on whether to add Google AdSense to your existing pages.

You can also view sample ad formats and colours which will allow you to see how the colours and formats you want to appear in your ads will look before they actually launch on your pages.

You can also view borders, backgrounds and text colours from the preview tool and by clicking preview you can see how these will look with actual ads.

You can also see geo-targeted location ads meaning you can see what ads users in Canada can see even if you live in Japan.

The preview tool is available in all active AdSense languages and is easy to install. For specific installation instructions, you'll need to go to the Google AdSense support site. Follow the instructions and click on the link provided and you'll be a previewing genius in no

Performance-based Search Engine Marketing to Thrive in 2009

It is going to be a tough year for search marketing ahead in 2009.

Many companies have been negatively affected by last year’s economic downturn, and one of the first casualties during the time of financial crisis is marketing spend. Even as the most cost-effective marketing channel – search engine marketing’s spending fell 8% in the US. Before setting advertising budgets for 2009, companies for the first time in nearly a decade started to severely scrutinize search marketing’s performance.

This is definitely the right time to manage your marketing spending according to your revised business goals. After all, search marketing is not an expense, but an investment.

Shift from off-line to online marketing

For companies that have been spending aggressively on mass marketing (for example, TV commercial ads), it is time to cut back and review the performance.

For companies that can rely entirely on online channels, it is the perfect time to shift completely from traditional marketing channels to online – especially to search marketing. In doing that, companies should start:

• Outsourcing search marketing to experienced search marketing agencies or individual experts
• Building an inhouse PPC team slowly and from scratch
• Structuring a global PPC team, with the end goal to save operational cost

Leverage from your competitors’ loss

Your competitors’ biggest loss will be your biggest gain when you use the economic downturn as an opportunity for growth.

In 2009, it is the time to recruit some of the most experienced PPC specialists when your competitors are starting to cut expenses and have laid off their online marketing experts.

It is the time to buy ads at a cheaper price – If your competitors have cut search marketing spending, you should increase (or at least maintain) yours. You will be surprised that many competitive keyword inventories are now available at lower costs.

Focus on performance-based search marketing

It is the time to focus entirely on return-on-investment from your marketing budgets and figure out the most cost-effective PPC business models.

Sophisticated bidding algorithms will help to optimize monetization of your PPC campaigns. By integrating your PPC campaigns into systems like Omniture or Efficient Frontier, it will allow you to:

• Streamline the set up of your new PPC campaigns
• Optimize your spending by auto-pricing your keywords based on their individual performances
• Review and analyze your PPC performance on all levels across all major search engines
• Manage your long-tail keywords more efficiently
• Identify and minimize PPC click fraud

Google continues to dominate in search

Even 2009 may seem like a bad year for search engine marketing, Google still managed to gain significant search market share among all other major search engines in 2008. It will depend on whether this vigorous growth in search volume can compensate the loss in advertising revenue.

Regarding advertising platforms, Google will further pull away from Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter by regularly introducing new features and innovations to Adwords.

Diversify your marketing channels, but select the right channels

If you have been a big buyer on display ads, start reviewing the performance of all your banners and stop spending on those that have been under performing.

Find fast growing web sites that provide ad spaces that are truly worth spending your advertising budgets. Leverage from social media, video and viral marketing.

Complement PPC with SEO, and vice versa. Leverage from the keyword long tail by using SEM keyword research tools.

Partially or totally cut spending from the second tier PPC search enginesthat have been generating poor ROI.

Use social marketing to boost SEO, combine several online marketing channels, and blend PPC into your overall marketing strategies. Leverage from Google’s Universal Search.

Be as creative as possible!

Focus on your website’s users, especially the most valuable users

A successful PPC campaign is about using the right combination of keywords, ads, and landing pages.

• Improve usability of your web site - SEO is Usability for your users, so as PPC
• Improve PPC copywriting - Ensure the marketing message on your PPC landing page is consistent with the marketing message of your PPC ad
• Optimize your PPC landing pages for higher conversion rates
• Run A/B testing using Google Website Optimizer

PPC can be used to identify the patterns and behavior of your most valuable customers. The common scenario for most of the websites is that 80% of the sales are driven by 20% of customers. Focus on the “higher value” traffic and generate more conversions.

• Identify the keywords that have been driving high conversions and/or large profit margins - Track your conversions and traffic by using Google Conversion Tracking, Google Analytics and other third party analytic systems.
• Increase the CPC bids for those keywords or use Adwords Conversion Optimizer
• Improve the ad copy for those keywords
• Optimize the landing pages

Shift towards new markets

If the sales volume of your target market is shrinking, move to target a new market. Most companies in the developed western countries believe China is the new market. Ensure your marketing team:

• Knows the cultural differences when selling to Chinese
• Is aware of the language barriers when selling through the China market
• Understands whether your business will be scalable in the Chinese market
• Focuses on quality and be customer-oriented, so try to understand the Chinese consumers before selling your unmodified American-customized products to them!
• Figures out the China PPC strategies