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Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed. If you're an old-school <a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords&cd=null&hl=en-US&ltmpl=adwords&passive=false&ifr=false&alwf=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fadwords.google.com%2Fselect%2Fgaiaauth%3Fapt%3DNone%26ugl%3Dtrue">AdWords</a> advertiser, you may remember that you originally set bids based on ad impressions (cost-per-impression, or CPM). Later, AdWords transitioned to a new model where bids were set based on ad clicks (cost-per-click, or CPC). Now, as technology has become even more advanced, we’re seeing the next phase of search engine advertising. What if we told you that you could bid for ads simply based on conversions? (A conversion is a goal set by an advertiser, such as a website visitor purchasing a product or filling out a form.) With <a href="http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/">Conversion Optimizer</a>, Google does all the heavy lifting and complicated analysis, letting you bid simply based on how much a conversion is worth to your business (cost-per-acquisition, or CPA). By using Conversion Optimizer, advertisers are not only seeing an increase in profits but have more time to devote to the rest of their business. We’re excited to announce that this AdWords transformation is well underway: advertisers are already using the Conversion Optimizer to manage approximately $1 billion in spend annually.* This new shift benefits two areas Google cares deeply about: showing our users the most relevant ads and helping our advertisers increase their profits. So how does it work? Each and every time someone types in a search query, AdWords runs a new <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/introduction-to-ad-auction.html">keyword auction</a>. Advertisers who are still bidding on a cost-per-click basis will be using the same bid in many different auctions, so sometimes their bid may be too high or too low. However, for advertisers using Conversion Optimizer, we'll automatically adjust the bid for each of these auctions so that it can hit the sweet spot more often, helping the advertiser to make more money. For example, suppose you're advertising an online shoe store and you purchase ads using the keyword "shoes." Because your clicks come from many different types of people who have different intentions, Conversion Optimizer takes many factors into account to optimize your ad performance. If you don't ship internationally, Conversion Optimizer will learn that clicks from international users don't convert and will eliminate traffic from outside the United States. It might also learn that when customers include the word "cheap" in their query, they are particularly likely to convert because your prices are very competitive. Essentially, Google does the detective work — you tell us how much a conversion is worth and our algorithms make it happen. As more advertisers transition to Conversion Optimizer, we look forward to showing more relevant ads and, in doing so, helping our advertisers achieve better results. <a href="http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/">Learn more about Conversion Optimizer</a> and get started using it with your AdWords campaigns. * Annualized figures based on Q2 sales Posted by Andrew Silverman, Product Manager, Conversion Optimizer

Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successf...

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Audio care packages for service members with Google Voice

(From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest and are pleased to have Sergeant Dale Sweetnam join us here. SGT Sweetnam is working with Google's communications team this year through the U.S. Army's "Training with Industry" Program. -Ed.) It's not easy to stay in touch with friends and family when you're fighting in a country thousands of miles from home. I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Army journalist where I flew in Black Hawks over Balad and Baghdad working to generate news coverage about my fellow soldiers. The whole experience was physically and emotionally draining, but it was especially difficult when I called home at the end of the day and nobody was there to answer. For servicemen and women who are constantly on the move, having a single number and an easy way to retrieve messages from loved ones can be invaluable. To help our service members communicate with their loved ones and show our support to those serving our country, Google is launching a new program. Starting today, any active U.S. service member with a .mil email address can sign up for a <a href="http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html">Google Voice</a> account at <a href="http://www.google.com/militaryinvite">www.google.com/militaryinvite</a> and start using the free service within a day. When you deploy, your life is put on hold. While you live and work in a different world, everyone else moves on with life back home. Your family and friends keep moving, and this sometimes means it's just not possible for them to stay awake until 2 a.m. to receive a phone call. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan is seldom an option. Google Voice provides a solution to some of these problems. Service members can set up an account before they deploy. Or if they're already deployed, families can now set up an account for their service member. Loved ones can call to leave messages throughout the day, and then when that service member visits an Internet trailer, all the messages are right there. It's like a care package in audio form. I signed up for an account when I came to Google, and it's already making communications much easier here in the States. I know when I return to combat, Google Voice will help make life a little more manageable. Posted by U.S. Army SGT Dale Sweetnam, Army Fellow

Audio care packages for service members with Google Voice

(From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest and are pleased to have Sergeant Dale Sweetnam join us here. SGT S...

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Two views from the 2009 Google Faculty Summit

<div>(Cross-posted from the <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/two-views-from-2009-google-faculty.html">Google Research Blog</a>)</div><div> </div><div>We held our fifth <a href="http://www.google.com/events/facultysummit2009/">Computer Science Faculty Summit</a> at our Mountain View campus last week. About 100 faculty attendees from schools in the Western hemisphere attended the summit, which focused on a collection of technologies that serve to connect and empower people. Included in the agenda were presentations on technologies for automated translation of human language, voice recognition, responding to crises, power monitoring and collaborative data management. We also talked about technologies to make personal systems more secure, and how to teach programming — even using Android phones. You can see a more complete list of the topics in the <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/2009facultysummit/agenda">Faculty Summit Agenda</a> or check out my <a href="http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfr86rt_10cmxp2kcv">introductory presentation</a> for more information.  </div><div> I asked a few of the faculty to provide us their perspective on the summit, thinking their views may be more valuable than our own: <a href="http://research.cens.ucla.edu/people/estrin/">Professor Deborah Estrin</a>, a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and an expert in large-scale sensing of environmental and other information, and <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/%7Eouster/">Professor John Ousterhout</a>, an expert in distributed operating systems and scripting languages. Professor Estrin's perspective: We all know that Google has produced a spectacular array of technologies and services that has changed the way we create, access, manage, share and curate information. A very broad range of people samples and experiences Google’s enhancements and new services on a daily basis. I, of course, am one of those minions, but last week I had the special opportunity to get a glimpse inside the hive while attending the 2009 Google Faculty Summit. I still haven't processed all of the impressions, facts, figures and URLs that I jotted down over the packed day and a half-long gathering, but here are a few of the things that impressed me most: <ul><li>The way Google simultaneously launches production services while making great advances in really hard technical areas such as machine translation and voice search, and how these two threads are fully intertwined and feed off of one another.</li><li>Their embrace of open source activities, particularly in the Android operating system and programming environment for mobiles. They also seed and sponsor all sorts of creative works, from K-12 computer science learning opportunities to an the open data kit that supports data-gathering projects worldwide. </li><li>The company’s commitment to thinking big and supporting their employees in acting on their concerns and cares in the larger geopolitical sphere. From the creation of <a href="http://www.google.org/flutrends/">Flu Trends</a> to the support of a new "Crisis Response Hackathon" (an event that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to jointly sponsor to help programmers find opportunities to use their technical skills to solve societal problems), Googlers are not just encouraged to donate dollars to important causes — they are encouraged to use their technical skills to create new solutions and tools to address the world's all-too-many challenges.</li></ul>This was my second Google Faculty Summit — I previously attended in 2007. I was impressed by the 2007 Summit, but not as deeply as I was this year. Among other things, this year I felt that Googlers talked to us like colleagues instead of just visitors. The conversations flowed: Not once did I run up across the "Sorry, can't talk about that... you know our policy on early announcements". I left quite excited about Google's expanded role in the CS research ecosystem. Thanks for changing that API! Professor Ousterhout's perspective: I spent Thursday and Friday this week at Google for their annual Faculty Summit. After listening to descriptions of several Google projects and talking with Googlers and the other faculty attendees, I left with two overall takeaways. First, it's becoming clear that information at scale is changing science and engineering. If you have access to enormous datasets, it opens up whole new avenues for scientific discovery and for solving problems. For example, Google's machine translation tools take advantage of "parallel texts": documents that have been translated by humans from one language to another, with both forms available. By comparing the sentences from enormous numbers of parallel texts, machine translation tools can develop effective translation tools using simple probabilistic approaches. The results are better than any previous attempts at computerized translation, but only if there are billions of words available in parallel texts. Another example of using large-scale information is Flu Trends, which tracks the spread of flu by counting the frequency of certain search terms in Google's search engine; the data is surprisingly accurate and available more quickly than that from traditional approaches. My second takeaway is that it's crucial to keep as much information as possible publicly available. It used to be that much of science and engineering was driven by technology: whoever had the biggest particle accelerator or the fastest computer had an advantage. From now on, information will be just as important as technology: whoever has access to the most information will make the most discoveries and create the most exciting new products. If we want to maintain the leadership position of the U.S., we must find ways to make as much information as possible freely available. There will always be vested commercial interests that want to restrict access to information, but we must fight these interests. The overall benefit to society of publishing information outweighs the benefit to individual companies from restricting it. Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives</div>

Two views from the 2009 Google Faculty Summit

(Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog ) We held our fifth Computer Science Faculty Summit at our Mountain View campus last week. Abou...

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Pfizer Settles Trovan Case with Kano State

As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073001847.html">reported</a> by the Washington Post, and many news sources outside of the US, Pfizer Inc has settled another lawsuit, <blockquote> Pfizer signed a $75 million agreement Thursday with Nigerian authorities to settle criminal and civil charges that the pharmaceutical company illegally tested an experimental drug on children during a 1996 meningitis epidemic. Nigerian authorities say Pfizer's test of the antibiotic Trovan killed 11 children and disabled scores more. Pfizer says the deaths and injuries were the result of meningitis. An attorney for the state of Kano, where the charges were lodged, said the settlement was a long time in coming but welcome because it set the record straight about Pfizer's culpability. 'People and entities can and must be held accountable for the consequences of their conduct,' the attorney, Babatunde Irukera, said. 'People around the world are no different and must be accorded the same levels of protections, always.' </blockquote> Pfizer is not quite done with this case. <blockquote> Charges filed against Pfizer by Nigeria's federal government, which is seeking about $6 billion in damages, are unaffected by the settlement, Irukera said. Two lawsuits related to the Trovan experiment also remain pending in New York. </blockquote> The Post's article summarized the issues in the case, thus: <blockquote> Details of the drug trial were first made public in December 2000 in a Washington Post investigative series. The articles reported that the trial did not conform to U.S. patient-protection standards and that the oral form of the drug used in the trial had not been previously tested in children. Pfizer had no signed consent forms for the children, the articles said, and the company relied on a falsified ethics approval letter. Five years later, in May 2006, The Post obtained and published a confidential report that concluded that Pfizer violated Nigerian and international law in the experiment. That set in motion the criminal charges. </blockquote> We first posted about this case in 2006, <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2006/05/nigerian-committee-criticizes-pfizers.html">here</a>. We posted about Pfizer's heretofore most recent legal settlement, <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/02/pfizer-settles-for-mere-2300000000.html">here</a>. I wonder again whether multi-million, or even billion dollar settlements have that much effect on the leadership of a company as big as Pfizer? Such settlements do not affect the leaders directly, and their financial effects one a company so big are negligible. Be that as it may, do we need more examples to remind us that strong skepticism should be the rule when evaluating clinical research done or sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, or other health care corporations with vested interests in the research turning out a certain way? Such skepticism is warranted whatever the clinical context, whatever the product being evaluated, and whatever country in which the research is done. Here in the US, debate has been swirling about health care reform. Many of the arguments have been about how costs can be controlled while health care quality is increased. Better research about the benefits and harms of specific drugs, procedures, devices and tests might enable physicians to choose the most appropriate care for each patient, potentially improving quality while also reducing costs. This example, plus many others discussed on Health Care Renewal, suggests that putting at least an arm's length between companies which sell drugs and devices and the clinical research meant to evaluate these drugs and devices has the potential for making better quality, less biased, more accurate clinical research available (see the topics: <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/suppression%20of%20medical%20research">suppression of medical research</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/manipulating%20clinical%20research">manipulating clinical research</a>.) Maybe putting this topic on our local US health care policy radar would increase the chances of achieving meaningful health care reform. Maybe if the US took the lead in separating clinical research meant to evaluate drugs, devices, procedures, or tests from the corporations selling them, the result would be a movement that would benefit health care around the world?

Pfizer Settles Trovan Case with Kano State

As reported by the Washington Post, and many news sources outside of the US, Pfizer Inc has settled another lawsuit, Pfizer signed a $75 mi...

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"Going Google" with Google Apps

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email. The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better. Here at Google, we have a term for the moment a company realizes there's a better way and goes for it: "going Google." Over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have gone Google — including Motorola, University of Notre Dame, the Mercy Corps and many more — and each day, 3,000 more organizations join them. We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we're telling the story in a new way. We're kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks. The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually — you guessed it — goes Google. Here's a preview: <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QJ06e0SpNII&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QJ06e0SpNII&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> Visit <a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gogoogle.html#utm_campaign=gogoogle&utm_source=en-na-us-ogblog-gogoogle&utm_medium=blog">www.google.com/appsatwork</a> to get more information about the benefits of going Google. Already gone Google? <a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=I%27ve+%23gonegoogle+-+here%27s+why%3A">Tweet your story</a> and check out our tools to help <a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/spreadtheword.html">spread the word</a>. Posted by Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in ...

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Making Hospitals Safer by Making Healthcare IT Safer

At my July 24, 2009 HC Renewal post "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/07/inquiry-to-joint-commission-on-points-i.html">Inquiry to Joint Commission on points raised in my July 22, 2009 JAMA letter on HIT</a>", I reproduced a letter I sent to the Joint Commission seeking their opinions on the issue of Health IT "hold harmless" and "defects nondisclosure" contractual terms. (See "<a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/301/12/1276">Health Care Information Technology Vendors' Hold Harmless Clause - Implications for Patients and Clinicians</a>", JAMA 2009;301(12):1276-1278 and my HIT difficulties website essay <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/failurecases/?loc=cases&sloc=koppel_kreda">here</a>.) Those contractual terms cause hospital executives to violate Joint Commission safety standards and their own fiduciary responsibilities to people both providing and seeking care in hospitals. My inquiry was acknowledged, and I await a reply. In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/l03medical.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper">Making Hospitals Safer for Patients</a>, New York Times, Aug. 2, 2009 , Mark R. Chassin, president of The Joint Commission, wrote: <div style="margin-left: 40px; font-family: arial;">To the Editor:Jim Hall makes an important point about the costs and preventability of harm caused by medical errors, but his suggestion for a National Medical Safety Board is not the answer. It is not sufficient to investigate health care “crashes” one at a time and hope to transform the health care system into one that performs more reliably.Too often, the lessons learned are not easily transferable to other hospitals or even to other problems within the same organization. The key to transforming our health care system into a safer one is to use proven quality improvement methods — already in use in high-risk fields like aviation and nuclear power — as part of everyday work ... </div> In a followup email to the Joint Commission, I pointed out to Dr. Chassin that this is the same key to improving the quality and safety of EHR, CPOE and other information technology-based medical devices. I also pointed out that "Hold harmless" and "Defects nondisclosure" -- a.k.a. "gag clause" -- contractual methods (unless I'm mistaken, in which case we're all in jeopardy) are not used in building and deploying safety-critical devices found in the aviation and nuclear energy industries. -- SS

Making Hospitals Safer by Making Healthcare IT Safer

At my July 24, 2009 HC Renewal post " Inquiry to Joint Commission on points raised in my July 22, 2009 JAMA letter on HIT ", I re...

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An Outsider’s Take on American Medicine

Jonathan Kaplan’s The Dressing Station was published in 2001, but I am only reading it now. Much of the book is about battlefield medicine, but one part concerns his coming from Britain to America in the late 1980s. Born in South Africa, he attended medical school there, then went to Britain rather than be drafted into the military. With research budgets cut under Thatcher, he came to America to be able to pursue his medical career. After his dreary British experience during a period of budget cutbacks, he greatly enjoyed the cheerful commercialism and general prosperity of American medicine. He promptly found a research project to work on that would enable him to write a Master’s thesis, and the work was fun and went swimmingly. Nonetheless, Dr. Kaplan was quite disconcerted by some of the differences between British and American medicine. Working on another study, he reviewed hemorrhoid surgery results. He was startled to realize how much more surgery was done for minor piles in the U.S. than in Britain, though results were unimpressive – then “I found the payment invoices in each patient’s folder. These were met by the health insurers, who paid out a lot more for an operation than injections. . . . The logic of a for-profit system appeared to lead to expensive solutions and spiraling costs.”He was also startled by anecdotal reports of how the stock market crash of 1987 led one surgeon to actually shed tears mid-surgery when he heard the news. As well, the serious, money-oriented medical students surprised him, as he was used to quite a number of more arty, intellectual types among medical students in other countries.Still, he was thrilled about his promising research results on a heated balloon angioplasty device. Later, he was disillusioned to hear that after the device received FDA approval, the main competitor, a laser manufacturer, bought out the idea and shelved it to keep it off the market. I thought his observations fit well with Dr. Poses’ concern about insidious corruption in medicine and too many physicians who don’t feel the expected fiduciary responsibility to patient welfare. As well, it makes Maggie Mahar’s term of “money-driven medicine” seem – well – on the money.

An Outsider’s Take on American Medicine

Jonathan Kaplan’s The Dressing Station was published in 2001, but I am only reading it now. Much of the book is about battlefield medicine...

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