Okay, so’ “Bing-ified” isn’t a real word, but I’m not sure how else to explain the new Google Image Search.  When Bing was launched fourteen months ago, we discussed some of the interesting features in a MoreVisibility Round Table post to our YouTube channel. 

One of the features that stood out to me at launch was the image search functionality in Bing. It’s one of the areas that Bing scored a clear victory and a better search experience over Google.  Google Image search was very paginated and offered little in the way of segmenting results.  Contrast that with Bing’s free-flowing, one page layout and filtering capability; it was a win for Bing. 

Fast forward to July 20, 2010; Google announced a new interface for Google Image Search which seems to borrow heavily from Bing.  In the official post, Google mentions “… some heavy-duty algorithmic wizardry…”  to make it all work; which seems to hint that perhaps some of the technology is borrowed or leveraged between Google Image Search And Google Goggles.

If you’re not in the I-phone or Android set, Google Goggles is a smart phone application for the Android which allows you to search Google using an image taken with the phone’s camera.  Hypothetically, if you are at the Miami Seaquarium and want to learn more about the dolphin you are about to swim with; snap a photo and Google could return more information about habitat, range, diet, etc.   Currently, as with most Google Products, Google Goggles is in beta and the functionality above does not exist, yet.  It will however, translate menus, search landmarks or tell you more about the bottle of wine on the shelf in front of you. 

In their post announcing the new image search, Google mentions that it can even look at the spots of a leopard and return the proper subspecies.  That statement reveals the awesome power and future of Google Goggles and image search.  The possibilities are staggering, and the applications could help law enforcement or allow you to learn everything about your daughters’ beau with one click.

Google also announced that image search can be targeted separately for AdWords; so for advertisers there are some immediate benefits.  If you’re selling image related products or “Free Lindsay Lohan” t-shirts; you can target those gawking at her in Google Image search. 

The Google Remarketing tool announced this past spring can be a powerful tool, if properly configured.  All you need to know to participate is found in AdWords.  Your campaign’s ads and banners will be available to the Google Display Network.  This is a network of websites owned by Google and sites that have joined the network.

When setting up your campaigns that leverage this interest based advertising, you will want to continue to review and tweak the available websites where you wish to have your banners’ displayed.   There are two options, managed placements or automatic placements.  In the managed placement you can review the thousands of sites based on their category and select which ones you think would best fit.  In the automatic placement, you roll the dice.  You will need to tweak these settings in order to find your best return on spend.

A prerequisite before the campaigns can bear fruit is audience definition.  AdWords has a section to define an audience and subsequently generate a tag which must be inserted between the tags on the desired page(s).  There is also a combo-audience one can generate that can be an intersection of audiences.  You can have one audience for browsers that visited a page, and another for browsers that visited that pages’ thank you page, meaning they completed the purchase or action.  By excluding audience members that hit a thank you page from an audience that hit a landing page, we now have a combo-audience of non-converting visitors.  This set up requires two AdWords audience tags, one deployed to the landing page and one to the thank you page.  A caveat to this is the audience must have a population of 500 in order for an AdWords campaign to display on the ad network(s).

The second step is to set up an AdWords campaign.  This should be a display network and not search based campaign since you want your branded visual cues to jog the visitors association of why they were originally drawn to your site.  You then assign an existing audience(s) to the campaign/adgroup.  Once your audience reaches 500 unique visitors, your banners will begin to be displayed on the network.  You may also want to cap the number of times your ad will be displayed to a visitor in a day, so as not to offend them by having your banner appear too frequently during their web browsing activity within a day.  Be sure to apply best practices for measuring these results, since this a relatively new offering and can only get better with age.

Killing some time while waiting for a doctor’s appointment – we are completely engaged, open to new information and want to access it quickly.

If this is sounds like the perfect audience to target with your advertising, you are right – and recent reports show substantial growth in this segment. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s Mobile Access 2010 report, 6 in 10 adults in the United States go online using a wireless connection.

Your company or client has an incredible opportunity to engage the consumer through PPC and get them to take immediate action. With a simple click of a button (or touch on the screen), they are either on your website or connecting a call to the phone number in your ad.

The results in this report were based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults, age 18 and older. A few quick highlights of the report show potentially how large the mobile audience can be:

• 82% of Pew survey respondents said they owned a mobile phone. That translates into roughly 187 million, out of 228 million US adults overall.
• 38% – 40% of that population goes online from their handsets, or about 75 million people  (for 18-29 yr olds that number is 65%).
• 55% of mobile Internet users are online via their mobile phones at least once a day and 43% are access the mobile Internet “several times a day.”

The study also found that a lower income level did not have much affect on Americans having mobile access by noting that “17% of those earning less than $30,000 per year are cell-only wireless users, as are 20% of those who have not graduated from high school and 15% of those who have graduated high school but have not attended college,” whereas “the affluent and well-educated have higher overall levels of wireless internet use due to their much higher rates of ownership and use of laptop computers.”

By observing patterns in an analytics program, one can gauge what type of SEM strategy should be implemented in order to understand how to best to reach their audience.  Search ads with a phone number on the ad may be enough, but mobile sites and applications such as Chipotle Mobile Ordering that let the user find the nearest location, build and order their burrito - probably have their good share of loyal repeat customers.