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Mobile Mondays: QLife receives 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search Ads

12:05 pm - May 21, 2012 in Inside AdSense
QLife is a leading hospital finder, drug database and health-care information website. QLife’s mobile application, “Medicine Search” is one of the biggest health-care applications in Japan. The app enables users to search for information on a range of medicines. QLife reached 2.5 million downloads of their app after the 3/11 Japan Earthquake, when Japanese consumers sought to pay greater care and attention to their family’s health-care.

Recently, QLife’s Executive Producer, Yoshimasa Mine spoke to us to describe why they choose to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications and AdMob mobile advertising, and shared some optimization best practices.
Why and when did QLife choose to start building a mobile application?
In 2008, when the iPhone was introduced to the Japanese market, there was a mobile industry event, Mobitec, where I felt the potential of high-end mobile. Mobile phones are a device that's always with a consumer, regardless of whether they're at home, at work, or at play. This was a good match with our business of providing a medicine search service - a search that is done instantly at a time of need.

Next, we took a look at our own company's data. We began to see large increases in traffic from mobile, even more than PCs. We wanted to build and encourage mobile activity to complement desktop traffic, particularly during holidays and weekends where we saw mobile traffic surging.


Why did you decide to monetize your mobile app using AdSense and AdMob?
We originally started using AdSense on our desktop site. As a health-care review site, we need to protect our objectivity and integrity to our users. As a result, advertising is the best solution for monetization, over paid reviews from other health-care services and companies.

We chose AdSense because of the quality of the ads, the content matching technology, and the limited number of sales resources we had internally.  Serving relevant ads is important to our business; we view ads as useful content for our business, and irrelevant ads have not been successful in bringing revenue to us.

We used to use only AdMob to monetize our application. But last year, when Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps was released, we decided to implement it for two reasons. First, we already used Custom Search Ads for our desktop site. Secondly, we’ve heard that using both Custom Search Ads and AdMob will increase CTR because Custom Search Ads will show more related ads in search results.  


What did you see as a result of implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps?
We’ve seen revenue from mobile increase by 560% after implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications. We’re seeing CTRs, CPCs, and RPMs maintain healthy levels in line with our internal benchmarks. Ad engagement tends to be higher with users who own our free app.

When we compare how these perform to our desktop site, we find that the mobile app generates lower CPCs but higher CTRs for us.To increase more app downloads, we are working hard to create high quality content to meet our user's needs. 

How long did it take to implement Custom Search Ads on mobile apps?
We took some time to implement Custom Search Ads on our app, since changes won’t go live until our users update their version of our app. It took us three to four days including the test period to implement this.

Could you share any publisher best practices you’ve found across using Custom Search Ads and AdMob?
  1. Show Custom Search Ads on search result pages. Use AdMob on other content pages.
  2. We also use the AdMob House priority level to serve direct ads to users.
  3. With Custom Search Ads, you'll see a variation in the number of ads that show, depending on the amount of organic search results you're delivering.  We'll always place one ad above search results. We'll also choose to show another ad below when there are more than five search results. In doing so, we can maximize revenue while complying with the program policy, which permits only one ad per view.
What’s next for QLife?
We've found a lot of success with the medicine/health-care search and service business. We'd like to expand our business in a couple of new directions.

First, we're interested in growing our business as an app developer for the health-care and medical service sector. We saw good success with the consumer application, and so our reputation as a medical app developer has increased in the industry overall.

We're looking to take our app to new global markets. There is a need for a quality medical and health-care search service anywhere in the world. With a publisher solution like AdSense, we are excited to expand and monetize our business beyond our home market in Japan.

Finally, I’m excited to announce that we just launched a new iOS app, Find Clinic that seeks to help people easily find and access hospitals at home and abroad. We’ve implemented Custom Search Ads for mobile apps on Find Clinic as well, and look forward to seeing similar successes!

Posted by Tatsuo Sakamoto, Account Strategist

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Announcing the 90 regional finalists of the Google Science Fair 2012

8:27 am - May 21, 2012 in The Official Google Blog
Congratulations to the regional finalists of the second Google Science Fair! These top 90 entries from around the world represent some incredibly innovative and groundbreaking science.

This year’s competition was even more international and diverse than last year. We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse. Our judges were impressed by the quality of the projects, and it was no easy task to evaluate the creativity, scientific merit and global relevance of each submission to narrow down the entries to just 90 finalists.

Thirteen of our 90 finalists have also been nominated for the Scientific American Science in Action award, the winner of which will be announced on June 6 along with our 15 finalists. These top 15 and the Science in Action winner will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California in July for our celebratory finalist event and for the last round of judging, which will be conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators.

Thanks to all of the students around the world who submitted projects to the Google Science Fair and congratulations to all the young scientists who were selected as regional finalists.

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

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Happy Birthday DoubleClick Search V3

3:42 pm - May 18, 2012 in Inside AdWords
DoubleClick Search V3 is one year old! Over the last year we've focused on:
  • Campaign Management
  • Deeper Insights
  • Bid Optimization
  • Better Results
To learn more about a year of DoubleClick innovation, visit the DoubleClick Search blog.

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

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Fridaygram: email journey, humans and robots, special space launch

1:53 pm - May 18, 2012 in Google Developers Blog
Author PhotoBy Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

This week we launched Story of Send, a new site that shows you what happens to your email after you click (or tap) Send. The site is meant for everyone, so you can share it with your [insert favorite non-nerdy reference person here].

story of send screen shot

Even though Story of Send is designed for all viewers, there are great features inside for us nerds. These appear not just in the text and animation, but also in the form of photos and videos. In particular, take a look at the video At the data center, which you’ll find on the Safe and Secure page, for a rare look inside a Google data center.

We’re used to great technology in our computers and mobile devices. More rarely, we get to see amazing tech that truly transforms lives. Thanks to research in robotics and neuroscience, two paralyzed people have controlled a robotic arm with their thoughts via a tiny injected sensor. One participant used the robot arm to grab a bottle and bring it to her so she could drink from it. This woman has been paralyzed for 15 years. After the successful experiment, one of the researchers was quoted as saying "She had a smile on her face that I and the research team will never forget".

Finally, space fans might want to make time this weekend to watch the May 19 launch of the private SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on its way to the International Space Station. Depending on where you are on the planet, the launch is scheduled for morning, afternoon, or evening on Saturday. Those of us here on the west coast of North America and in Hawaii can just plan to drink a lot of coffee and stay up late tonight.


Each week we publish Fridaygram, featuring stuff from Google and beyond that you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren't necessarily related to developer topics; they’re just interesting to us nerds. This week we’re wondering if Zefram Cochrane would be interested in the SpaceX launch.

More from Scott Knaster in Google News

 

A look inside our 2011 diversity report

1:13 pm - May 18, 2012 in The Official Google Blog
We work hard to ensure that our commitment to diversity is built into everything we do—from hiring our employees and building our company culture to running our business and developing our products, tools and services. To recap our diversity efforts in 2011, a year in which we partnered with and donated $19 million to more than 150 organizations working on advancing diversity, we created the 2011 Global Diversity & Talent Inclusion Report. Below are some highlights.

In the U.S., fewer and fewer students are graduating with computer science degrees each year, and enrollment rates are even lower for women and underrepresented groups. It’s important to grow a diverse talent pool and help develop the technologists of tomorrow who will be integral to the success of the technology industry. Here are a few of the things we did last year aimed at this goal in the U.S. and around the world:
We not only promoted diversity and inclusion outside of Google, but within Google as well.
  • We had more than 10,000 members participate in one of our 18 Global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Membership and reach expanded as Women@Google held the first ever Women’s Summit in both Mountain View, Calif. and Japan; the Black Googler Network (BGN) made their fourth visit to New Orleans, La., contributing 360 volunteer hours in just two days; and the Google Veterans Network partnered with GoogleServe, resulting in 250 Googlers working on nine Veteran-related projects from San Francisco to London.
  • Googlers in more than 50 offices participated in the Sum of Google, a celebration about diversity and inclusion, in their respective offices around the globe.
  • We sponsored 464 events in 70 countries to celebrate the anniversary of International Women's Day. Google.org collaborated with Women for Women International to launch the “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Represented in 20 languages, the campaign invited people to celebrate by joining each other on bridges around the world—either physically or virtually—to show their support.
Since our early days, it’s been important to make our tools and services accessible and useful to a global array of businesses and user communities. Last year:
  • We introduced ChromeVox, a screen reader for Google Chrome, which helps people with vision impairment navigate websites. It's easy to learn and free to install as a Chrome Extension.
  • We grew Accelerate with Google to make Google’s tools, information and services more accessible and useful to underrepresented communities and diverse business partners.
  • On Veterans Day in the U.S., we launched a new platform for military veterans and their families. The Google for Veterans and Families website helps veterans and their families stay connected through products like Google+, YouTube and Google Earth.
We invite you to take a look back with us at our 2011 diversity and inclusion highlights. We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far, but also recognize that there’s much more to do to. These advances may not happen at Internet speed, but through our collective commitment and involvement, we can be a catalyst for change.

Posted by Yolanda Mangolini, Director, Global Diversity & Inclusion/Talent & Outreach Programs

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From Words to Concepts and Back: Dictionaries for Linking Text, Entities and Ideas

11:30 am - May 18, 2012 in Google Research Blog
Posted by Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig, Research Team



Yet in each word some concept there must be...
— from Goethe's Faust (Part I, Scene III)

Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google's core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.

How do we represent concepts? Our approach piggybacks on the unique titles of entries from an encyclopedia, which are mostly proper and common noun phrases. We consider each individual Wikipedia article as representing a concept (an entity or an idea), identified by its URL. Text strings that refer to concepts were collected using the publicly available hypertext of anchors (the text you click on in a web link) that point to each Wikipedia page, thus drawing on the vast link structure of the web. For every English article we harvested the strings associated with its incoming hyperlinks from the rest of Wikipedia, the greater web, and also anchors of parallel, non-English Wikipedia pages. Our dictionaries are cross-lingual, and any concept deemed too fine can be broadened to a desired level of generality using Wikipedia's groupings of articles into hierarchical categories.

The data set contains triples, each consisting of (i) text, a short, raw natural language string; (ii) url, a related concept, represented by an English Wikipedia article's canonical location; and (iii) count, an integer indicating the number of times text has been observed connected with the concept's url. Our database thus includes weights that measure degrees of association. For example, the top two entries for football indicate that it is an ambiguous term, which is almost twice as likely to refer to what we in the US call soccer:



text=football url count
1.  Association football  44,984
2.  American football  23,373
⋮ 

An inverted index can be used to perform reverse look-ups, identifying salient terms for each concept. Some of the highest-scoring strings — including synonyms and translations — for both sports, are listed below:




concept:
“soccer”
football and Football
Soccer and soccer
Association football
fútbol and Fútbol
footballer
Futbol and futbol
Fußball
futebol
futbolista
サッカー
축구
footballeur
Fußballspieler
sepak bola
足球
فوتبال
футболист
כדורגל
piłkarz
voetbalclub
ฟุตบอล
bóng đá
voetbal
Foutbaal
futebolista
لعبة كرة القدم
fotbal
          concept:
“football”
American football
football and Football
fútbol americano
football américain
アメリカンフットボール
American football rules
futebol americano
فوتبال آمریکایی
美式足球
football americano
Amerikan futbolu
Le Football Américain
football field
อเมริกันฟุตบอล
פוטבול
كرة القدم الأمريكية
Futbol amerykański
미식축구
futbolu amerykańskiego
football team
американского футбола
Amerikai futball
sepak bola Amerika
football player
američki fudbal
反則
كرة القدم الأميركية

Associated counts can easily be turned into percentages. The following table illustrates the concept-to-words dictionary direction — which may be useful for paraphrasing, summarization and topic modeling — for the idea of soft drink, restricted to English (and normalized for punctuation, pluralization and capitalization differences):



url=Soft_drink text % 
1.  soft drink (and soft-drinks)     28.6 
2.  soda (and sodas)     5.5 
3.  soda pop 0.9 
4.  fizzy drinks 0.6 
5.  carbonated beverages (and beverage)     0.3 
6.  non-alcoholic 0.2 
7.  soft 0.1 
8.  pop 0.1 
9.  carbonated soft drink (and drinks)     0.1 
10.  aerated water 0.1 
11.  non-alcoholic drinks (and drink)     0.1 
12.  soft drink controversy 0.0 
13.  citrus-flavored soda 0.0 
14.  carbonated 0.0 
15.  soft drink topics 0.0 
⋮ 

The words-to-concepts dictionary direction can disambiguate senses and link entities, which are often highly ambiguous, since people, places and organizations can (nearly) all be named after each other. The next table shows the top concepts meant by the string Stanford, which refers to all three (and other) types:



text=Stanford url %  type
1.  Stanford University 50.3  ORGANIZATION
2.  Stanford (disambiguation) 7.7  a disambiguation page
3.  Stanford, California 7.5  LOCATION
4.  Stanford Cardinal football 5.7  ORGANIZATION
5.  Stanford Cardinal 4.1  multiple athletic programs
6.  Stanford Cardinal men's basketball 2.0  ORGANIZATION
7.  Stanford prison experiment 2.0  a famous psychology experiment
8.  Stanford, Kentucky 1.7  LOCATION
9.  Stanford, Norfolk 1.0  LOCATION
10.  Bank of the West Classic 1.0  a recurring sporting event
11.  Stanford, Illinois 0.9  LOCATION
12.  Leland Stanford 0.9  PERSON
13.  Charles Villiers Stanford 0.8  PERSON
14.  Stanford, New York 0.8  LOCATION
15.  Stanford, Bedfordshire 0.8  LOCATION
⋮ 

The database that we are providing was designed for recall. It is large and noisy, incorporating 297,073,139 distinct string-concept pairs, aggregated over 3,152,091,432 individual links, many of them referencing non-existent articles. For technical details, see our paper (to be presented at LREC 2012) and the README file accompanying the data.

We hope that this release will fuel numerous creative applications that haven't been previously thought of!
Produced by Angel X. Chang and Valentin I. Spitkovsky; parts of this work are descended from an earlier collaboration between University of Basque Country's Ixa Group's Eneko Agirre and Stanford's NLP Group, including Eric Yeh, presently of SRI International, and our Ph.D. advisors, Christopher D. Manning and Daniel Jurafsky.

More from Research @ Google in Google News

 

Helping students fish for a better future in the land of 10,000 lakes

2:50 pm - May 17, 2012 in The Official Google Blog
Minnesota has long been a state that’s prided itself on its commitment to education. Now the state has taken on the mission of becoming a technology hub as well, setting the goal to become one of the country’s top five technology states by 2020. Last week, we travelled to Minnesota to pilot two new programs designed to help students with an interest in technology get a jump on the job market, and learn directly from Google engineers over Google+ Hangout.

First, we partnered with Teach for America on a classroom mentorship project that pairs Google engineers with middle school science and math classes via Google+ Hangouts. A dozen Googlers paired up with classrooms in Minneapolis/St. Paul last week to introduce a curriculum modelled after Solve for X, Google’s initiative that celebrates technology-based moonshot thinking to solve real-world problems. In the coming weeks, each classroom will chose a big problem to tackle (world hunger, homelessness, climate change, etc.) and develop an innovative technology solution to address it—with help from the Google mentor who will join the classroom via Google+ Hangout for coaching sessions. We think hangouts are a great way to connect Googlers with classrooms far away, and are looking to expand this pilot to other states in the fall.

Google Engineer Selim Onal talks with students at the Minneapolis KIPP Academy about Solve for X

We also kicked off our first-ever youth entrepreneurship training as part of our Google for Entrepreneurs programs. The summit brought together 60 high school students from the Minneapolis STEP-UP program, an effort designed to place students from lower-income communities as interns at Minnesota businesses over the summer. Our goal was to give these students some basic training in Google tools like Docs, Apps, YouTube and Google+ so that they can enter their internships with a better understanding of how technology and the Internet can be of help to them, as well as spark these students with an entrepreneurial drive that will serve them well in these opportunities. After a morning of learning about Google tools, the students broke out into teams to pitch their own business ideas to solve challenges in education, government, transportation and the music industry. A number of mentors from the Minneapolis tech community joined us to help coach the students, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak was on hand himself to help get the students started.

Minneapolis STEP-UP students pitch their start-up ideas to address a series of real-world challenges

Science and technology disciplines are projected to add 70,000 jobs to the Minnesota job market by 2019. We hope by partnering with local organizations, we can help give students the inspiration and skills to enter that job market ready to excel.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of Community Partnerships, Google+

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Hangouts Hackathon: 1 API, 5 developers, 2 weeks

1:14 pm - May 17, 2012 in Google Developers Blog
By Jonathan Beri, Google+ Developer Advocate

Cross-posted from the Google+ Developers Blog

Last week we released an update to the Google+ Hangouts API, which includes several new features and possibilities to build on, like the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app.

As with any new API, we’re especially interested in what sorts of things our developer friends will dream up, so we've commissioned a handful of them to play with it over the next couple of weeks, and to share their thoughts and discoveries along the way. The participants represent a wide range of developers -- from agencies like The Barbarian Group to independent developers like Eyebeam alum Aaron Meyers teamed up with OKFocus.

Follow the Hangouts Hackathon with us on the Google+ Developers page, and, if you’re working on an interesting Hangouts API project we’d love to hear about that too. Use hashtag #hangoutshackathon to chat about our work, or your own, with the new API.


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Announcement: Custom alerts will sunset on June 30, 2012

1:06 pm - May 17, 2012 in Inside AdWords
When we first created custom alerts, we wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviors or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, we observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify.

Based on automated rules adoption, we have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, we will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, we will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails.

We are actively working to bring you an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, check out some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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Shiver me timbers, the 2012 D4G Winner is….

12:04 pm - May 17, 2012 in The Official Google Blog
After 114,000 submissions and millions of your votes, second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisc. is this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google National Winner. His doodle “Pirate Times” will be featured on the U.S. Google homepage tomorrow, May 18.

Hoffman, who attends the Prairie School in Racine, Wisc., responded to this year’s theme “If I could travel in time I’d visit...” with a colorful depiction of his dream visit to an era filled with swashbucklers. There, he’d “sail a pirate ship looking for treasure, have a colorful pet parrot and enjoy beautiful sunsets from deserted islands.” With his win, Dylan has come into some treasure of his own: a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for his school. As an added bonus, Dylan’s doodle will grace the front of a special edition of the Crayola 64-crayon box, available this fall.


After this year's record-breaking submissions, choosing the National Winner and the four National Finalists wasn’t an easy decision. In addition to selecting Dylan, millions of public votes also helped us determine the four National Finalists, each of which will receive a $5,000 college scholarship:
  • Grades 4-5: Talia Mastalski, Grade 5, East Pike Elementary School, Indiana, Penn., for her doodle “Traveling to me.” Talia says, “When I think of Google, I think of a wormhole leading me to knowledge. If I could travel in time, I would visit a similar wormhole into the future to find out about ME.”
  • Grades 6-7: Herman Wang, Grade 6, Suzanne Middle School, West Covina, Calif., for his doodle “Retro City.” Herman says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit Retro City. A future city made of robots and humans.”
  • Grades 8-9: Susan Olvera, Grade 8, SOAR Alternative School, Lafayette, In., for her doodle “Traveling Back to the Future.” Susan says, “If I could travel in time, I'd travel back to the future. If there is life on other planets, I believe we'd visit the natives as well as invent different ships and rockets for quicker transportation. With what we have accomplished currently, I believe the ‘future’ isn’t so far away.”
  • Grades 10-12: Cynthia Cheng, Grade 11, Edison High School, Edison, NJ, for her doodle “A World of Adventure.” Cynthia says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit the age of the Vikings. Though their tales of monsters may not have been entirely true, they were some of the greatest explorers in history. It would be a remarkable experience to share adventures and discover new lands with them.”
After the awards ceremony in New York City today, all 50 of our State Winners will unveil an exhibition of their artwork at the New York Public Library, where their doodles will be displayed from May 18-July 19. In addition, the artwork of all our State Finalists and Winners will be displayed at exhibitions in their home states across the country over the summer. Be sure to check out the local exhibition near you.

Thanks to all of you who voted and helped us select this year's winner. Even more important, thank you to all of the students who submitted entries. Keep on doodling and we’ll see you next year!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Product Management

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