Timberline Interactive

Alan Rimm Kaufman offers a good post today on how to use the new hProduct "microformat" to mark up your ecommerce website's HTML to convey product data to Google.

hProduct markup will enable Google to capture product names, brand names, categories, descriptions, URLs and photos, each in discrete fields -- similar in fashion to the Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) . The big difference, of course is that where you have to regularly, manually push a feed up to Google Product Search, the new hProduct spec works automatically, every time Google crawls your properly formatted website.

It's still unclear how the data will impact search results, but fielding your product data like this is part of a Web 2.0 trend (Alan is seeing it as Web 3.0) for more logic, meaning and sortable information -- the "Semantic Web." Alan speculates on whether -- and if so, when -- this development will be game-changing for ecommerce. The main incentive, for online retailers, is simple: more sales.

To me, this lengthens the checklist that any online marketer should use to amplify the reach of your product line, and grow sales:

• Submit product data feed to Google Product Search. They'll appear free, both at the underutilized Google Product Search site, but also more importantly, withing Google search results as "Shopping Results."
• Submit product data feeds to any Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) that gives you good ROI. Shopping.com, Gifts.com, FindGift, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla are the ones that work best for us.
• Enable customer reviews and ratings and syndicate them to the world through services like SyndicateVoice and Buzzillions
• Produce news releases for your new or noteworthy products. They have a shot at appearing under "News results"
• Optimize product images for image search

I might have suggested "produce RSS-formatted feeds of your new or noteworthy products," but this is a marginal one -- at the consumer level there has been too little adoption of RSS feeds to put this on your front burner.

For details on how the hProduct and other microformats work, check out "Product Information" on Google Webmaster Central.

Google silenced its critics (see my earlier post below) and delivered yet another quarter of surging earnings growth in the face of speculation that the company's paid search revenues were withering along with a recession-bound US economy.

In the earnings conference call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt -- speaking softly but carrying a big stick -- made a few, clear points:

• "Paid click growth is much higher than has been speculated by outside parties."
• "We are showing fewer but even better ads."
• "We're well positioned for 2008 and beyond -- regardless of the business environment that we find ourselves surrounded by."

In other words? In your face!

Google shares soared 18%, past the $500 level for the first time in months.

This should be a thrill to investors and soap-opera lovers alike! Google's Q1 2008 earnings call webcast will be streaming across the internet today at 1:30 pm Pacific time (4:30 pm Eastern time; you midwestern and mountain folks can do the math).

Why, if we don't own GOOG, should we care? Because it raises the curtain on a big question: Where is the online ad market going?

After quarter after quarter of torrid growth -- and a fourth quarter 2007 surge of 25% -- Google reportedly slowed to a crawl early this year. ComScore has been tracking anemic 2% to 3% growth in paid ad clicks, and although the firm took heat for the accuracy of their numbers, given the abruptness of the turnaround, many analysts have come around to the view that the numbers are real, and that they point to 1) the slowdown in the overall economy, and 2) normal post-holiday seasonality to which, up till now, Google has been immune.

While more experts accept the notion that fewer people are clicking ads, the other unanswered question is about ad quality. Google and Yahoo have been retooling their ad-serving algorithms to focus on higher-quality ads and higher-quality clicks (the latter by weeding out fraudulent and accidental clicks, better policing the quality of the content networks, etc.). If Google is, as a result of higher click quality, attracting a higher cost-per-click, the earnings machine may still be operating at full tilt. We'll know the answer this afternoon!

* (CNN Money sums up the story nicely.)

Yahoo -- in the crosshairs of a takeover bid by Microsoft that Steve Ballmer says may soon go hostile -- is reaching out to arch rival Google.

Yahoo will provide some of its advertising space to Google AdWords ads, in a two-week experiment that is seen as testing the waters for a broader partnership. Of course it may just be posturing by Yahoo, which has countered that Microsoft's offer is too low, and has been scrambling for weeks to find white knights to save it from either 1) being gobbled up by Microsoft in a hostile bid, or 2) being made increasingly marginal in the search and search-advertising game.

Meanwhile, Google has no interest in a Yahoo-Microsoft marriage. On its blog, Google (which knows a little something about competition) whined that such a deal would be anticompetitive.

The partnership will display Google ads in response to about 3 percent of Yahoo searches made in the U.S.

Cuddling up to Google may help Yahoo fend off a takeover bid, but to search marketers like Timberline Interactive, the attractive thing would be more exposure with less work. Why manage ad campaigns in both Google and Yahoo if Yahoo would simply roll over and syndicate our Google ads across its whole platform?

In the short run, that would certainly make things more convenient for online marketers. But talk about anticompetitive! In the long run, it's best for marketers when a few robust ad platforms are competing for their business. Search-engine ads and other online advertising products will be more fairly priced, and offer better management tools and targeting options, when there are more strong players in the game, not fewer.