Spreading holiday cheer and regional cuisine through AdWords

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.]

When we here in the U.S. think of Thanksgiving, many of us think of our favorite foods: perhaps a fresh-from-the-oven pumpkin pie, a sweet glazed ham or a succulent turkey. But thanks to Charlie Hohorst III of Lafayette, La., tens of thousands of Americans dream instead of a turkey... stuffed with a duck... stuffed with a chicken.

For the past 15 years, Hohorst has run food shopping site Cajun Grocer, which specializes in more than 1,000 different authentic Louisianan foodstuffs and delicacies. The “turducken”—a Cajun dish consisting of a de-boned turkey filled with duck, chicken and stuffing—is “the bread and butter” of his business, says Hohorst. He can attest to their growing popularity as he ships an ever-increasing number of turduckens to cities all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston.

Cajun Grocer’s business has grown hand-in-hand with the use of Google AdWords. Before starting AdWords campaigns in 2002, sales were fueled primarily by word of mouth, and reaching the right audience at an affordable price was a challenge. “With a specialty product like a turducken,” says Hohorst, “who do you target and how do you target them?” Using AdWords, Cajun Grocer can show off their products alongside relevant searches on Google and measure every penny spent on advertising.

Cajun Grocer’s ad for “turducken” searches, using AdWords Product Extensions.

The process of hand-crafting all eight types of turducken for the Thanksgiving rush starts in April and continues through packing and last-minute shipping as late as November 23.

Aside from their role in spreading the culinary influence of his native Louisiana, what Hohorst really loves about turduckens is that, much like the Thanksgiving holiday itself, they give people a reason to come together. “They’re a gathering item. Many people have heard of them, and when someone they know has one, it can bring in 10 or even 20 people.”

Posted by Jim Prosser, Communications Manager

Now available with Google Apps: Blogger

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Blogger
How do you let the world know what's important to your organization on a day-to-day basis? You may have a Web site, but when was the last time you added fresh content? You may have advertisements and media placements, but how interactive can you make those conversations? Many companies solve these problems by using blogs to connect in more meaningful ways, sharing up-to-date information and allowing follow-on conversations; and now Google Apps users have the perfect tool for delivering a corporate blog: Blogger.

Blogger is an easy-to-use yet extremely powerful content publishing platform that helps you broadcast stories, insights, and ideas to others in only a few clicks. Your organization can use Blogger to start conversations with customers or partners about upcoming events, product launches, or your company's vision for your industry.

A recent study showed that an estimated 34% of US companies already use one or more blogs to connect with their customers, and this figure has doubled in the past few years.* Google uses blogs, just like the Enterprise Blog where you’re reading now, to connect with our users and partners. In fact, Google has almost a hundred blogs running on the Blogger platform, covering topics as diverse as our renewable energy policies, product updates, developer challenges and code snippets, and information for advertisers and partners.

Blogger offers a powerful rich-editor that lets you create a great looking site with simple and intuitive tools that require no web design experience to use. And for those that want to achieve a deeper level customization, Blogger provides great flexibility and full control over the blog content you create, letting you edit the HTML and add CSS and Javascript to create your own unique look and feel.

Just like Google Apps, Blogger runs in Google’s cloud so you never have to worry about provisioning new hardware or updating software. Blogger already serves content from millions of contributors to over 300 million readers, so the platform is ready to scale to meet your needs as readership grows with your organization.

Learn more and get started
Blogger can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information you can take a product tour or learn about Blogger’s top features. Finally, you can track the latest news and updates on Blogger’s own blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Blogger at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Blogger

Note: Blogger may not be available in all areas.
* Source: eMarketer, August 2010

Selling into the Hole

Days like today need particularly good timing. It's very easy to sell into the hole and have the market come "right back atchya".

Price falls until it shuts off selling.

The ES today was weak on the overnight news. There were opportunities to get shorts on at a good trade location between 9.30am and 11.30am at around 1190.50ish. It doesn't often give you that much time. The thought did enter my head whether I was selling into the hole, but two things made me do it anyway:
1. The picture fit my trading plan and so I had to take the trade, and
2. I thought there were traders long from yesterday's close and that they would feel the pain and push the market lower. That was my vision.

The RTH open was another decision point. There was the Gap trade to think about. There was the "they" to think about. Would the two coincide or would there be a battle?

Those support lines you can see on both yesterday's and today's MP chart came in handy too.

Well, the Gap traders were run over. They provided yet another chance to go short (trade #4) and then the sellers stepped on the gas. I picked a couple of spots that I thought could hold: 1177.00 and 1173.50. You can see them on the MP chart.

Driving toward better ROI: How one small business uses the Conversion Optimizer to increase sales

Elliott Antal, eMarketing Manager from the Richard Petty Driving Experience, recently won the Google AdWords Conversion Champion Challenge. His sweet, sweet reward was one-on-one time with the Conversion Optimizer team (and a free trip to Google headquarters).

While Antal was here, we gained more insight into why the Conversion Optimizer, an automated AdWords tool that manages bids to achieve conversion targets, has become an important part of his small business marketing strategy. “We don’t have a large marketing budget so we have to optimize everything we have,” says Antal. “Using the Conversion Optimizer makes perfect sense because it allowed us to track all dollars and maximize efficiencies.”

Renowned NASCAR driver Richard Petty founded the driving experience in 1994 to provide high quality motorsports entertainment with new audiences. The business is headquartered in Concord, North Carolina and it runs NASCAR driving experiences at over twenty racetracks worldwide. The Richard Petty Driving Experience is all about the in-person adventure, so marketing it online requires creativity and dedication.

Antal’s initial strategy was to target new audiences with two campaigns: one focused on race tracks where Richard Petty has a presence and another focused on Richard Petty branded terms. He quickly noticed that while he was reaching a vast audience, clicks weren’t resulting in as many purchases as he had hoped.

When he activated the Conversion Optimizer, Antal knew he’d found the solution to his problem. By automatically investing budget in clicks that are likely to lead to sales, the Conversion Optimizer reallocated funds to the most cost-effective terms. “Our main goal is to have people book a riding or driving experience and this allowed us to move money to keywords that lead to those conversions,” says Antal.

Before using the Conversion Optimizer, Antal had allocated budget equally across branded and non-branded terms. When he activated the tool, conversions on branded terms increased significantly and yielded a stunning return on investment -- even better than other non-AdWords initiatives. To capture even more conversions, Antal moved some of his overall marketing budget over to the branded terms campaign.

“As much as I would like to do so, I’m not able to comb through my AdWords account every hour,” says Antal. “The Conversion Optimizer is like my assistant, helping me change bids and keywords even when I’m not able to. For many small businesses where marketers have to wear multiple hats, I think Conversion Optimizer is a huge help.”

To learn more about the Conversion Optimizer, please visit the Conversion Optimizer site.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion Optimizer

Now available with Google Apps: Google Voice

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.

Welcome to Google Voice
Telephones make our lives easier every day, but we’ve all met with the limitations of what the existing technology can do for us. Maybe it’s missing an important call because you were away from your office. Maybe it’s juggling multiple voicemail inboxes or struggling to listen to voicemail in a crowded conference room or on a noisy train. Maybe its wishing you could set up a conference call right from your mobile phone and connect with colleagues instantly.

Now, Google Apps users can move beyond these limitation and use their telephones in new and more flexible ways by using Google Voice with their Google Apps accounts.

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, regardless of which phone or carrier you use. Here’s a little bit about how it works:

• A Google Voice number is tied to you (not to a single device) and can ring all of your phones. This means when someone calls your Google Voice number, you can choose to have it ring your work phone, home phone, mobile phone, or all of them at once, so you’ll never miss a call again.


• Google Voice makes voicemail as easy as email by transcribing your voicemail messages and storing them all in one place, along with your SMS messages, for as long as you like. You’ve long had the ability to quickly scan email messages as they arrive, and Google Voice now brings this same flexibility to voicemail.


• With Google Voice you can switch phones in the middle of a call, so you can continue a conversation that you started on your desk phone from your mobile when you need to get going.


• You can also customize call settings based on who’s calling. Google Voice lets you choose which phones ring based on the caller, which voicemail greeting is played if you don’t answer, and allows you to block certain numbers or send them straight to voicemail. For example, with this functionality you could direct most calls to your desk phone, but also ring your mobile when an important customer calls, as well as serve different voicemail greetings to that customer than you do to your coworkers or suppliers.

Just like Google Apps, Google Voice runs in Google’s cloud so it can be accessed online, even when you are away from your phone.

Learn more and get started
Google Voice can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information, you can visit the Google Voice overview page to see video explanations of the key features or take a look at our Help Center for details instructions. You can also follow the latest product news and features on the Google Voice Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Voice at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Vincent Paquet, Product Manager, Google Voice

Note: Google Voice is only available in the U.S.

A bridge to the cloud: Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office now available to early testers

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog and the Google Docs Blog]

Tens of millions of people have moved to Google Docs because it’s 100% web: it provides real-time collaboration in the browser, with no software to install, manage or upgrade. Of course, we know that many more of you still use Microsoft Office, because until recently, there weren’t many tools to help you collaborate and share with others. Now there’s more choice.

To help smooth the transition from Office to the cloud, my teammates and I founded a company called DocVerse, which was acquired by Google earlier this year. Over the last 9 months, we’ve been hard at work moving the DocVerse product to Google’s infrastructure. We’ve also renamed it Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. Today, we’re pleased to take the next step towards a public launch and make it available to early testers.

For those of you who have not made the full move to Google Docs and are still using Microsoft Office, Google has something great to offer. With Cloud Connect, people can continue to use the familiar Office interface, while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy.

Users of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can sync their Office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving Office. Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version.

Once in the Google cloud, documents can be easily shared and even simultaneously edited by multiple people, from right within Office. A full revision history is kept as the files are edited, and users can revert to earlier versions in one click. These are all features that Google Docs users already enjoy today, and now we’re bringing them to Microsoft Office.

All you need is a Google account, and you’re ready to go. That’s it!

If you’re a Google Apps for Business customer interested in joining our preview program, please sign up here. If you’re not, don’t worry- at launch, Google Cloud Connect will be available free to everyone, including consumers.

Posted by Shan Sinha, Group Product Manager

Update: Thank you for your interest! Due to the extraordinary demand from thousands of businesses in just the last few hours, we are no longer accepting volunteers for our early testing program. Please fill out this form if you would like to be notified when Google Cloud Connect becomes available.

Many of you have also asked about availability for Macs. Unfortunately due to the lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac, we are unable to make Google Cloud Connect available on Macs at this time. We look forward to when that time comes so we can provide this feature to our Mac customers as well.

The Father of Algos?

It's the Comice pear season now. I absolutely love Comice pears. I remember that I first ate one when I lived in the U.S in the mid 1980's. I had been helping Bob Pardo with his autotrading program. I was doing some testing, if I remember rightly. Bob was the first person to sell a commercial autotrading program where the user could optimise. I really can't remember the details and whether I was of much use at the time, but Bob was kind enough to send me a fruit basket and it was full of Comice pears. I've loved them ever since. They are originally French, I think, and I'm now buying them in France, which makes them taste especially good.

Autotrading has come a long way since those early Bob Pardo days. Bob has since gone on to write a book about autotrading: here.

When looking up that reference, I see Bob has written another - a rewrite of the first. Look here. I haven't yet read this second one (but I will), but knowing the first one and reading the contents list for the second one, I can say that it would benefit anyone wanting to create an algo.

Today's trading in the ES RTH was great. All the people who took my course by DVD or (w)(s)eminar will recognise the pictures. It all started with the Gap trade and then just got better. The reversal at the EMA resistance trade hit the Fib target like an olympic champion archer hitting the bulls eye. There was a reload option on the way as well, Great stuff!!