Yucca

What we learned during our visit to Google HQ

As the title suggests, Yucca recently had an insightful visit to Google’s London headquarters. Travelling up to London along the M4 corridor, a very early start (5am) and too many coffees left us curious as to what discerning information we would be leaving with.

As you can imagine, the Google offices are quirky, colourful and full of food. Upon arrival we quickly gorged on some very small pastries, another coffee, and sat comfortably in what can only be described as an examination table desk combo.

Our chairman for the event was the personable Simon Morgan, Senior Industry Head. He explained the agenda for the day, which was extensive and munificent.

Our first guest speaker was Mark Howe, MD of agency operations in northern and central Europe. Fresh from giving a speech in Westminster the week before, Mark’s speech enlightened us on some insightful statistics and led the themes for the day:

1. The internet’s volume is now 1.2 Zetabytyes. To get a bit of perspective, a Zetabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That enough space to watch an episode of The Sopranos on constant replay for 125 million years. That’s a lot of gabbagool.
2. In 1999, there were 4 million searches a day; in 2009 there were 4 billion searches a day worldwide.
3. The UK is the second largest digital ad market in the world, and is considered the most mature market out there. Astonishing considering we are only the 22nd most populated country in the world, accounting for only 0.89% of the world’s entire population.
4. The number of mobile internet users by 2020 will be 10 billion worldwide.

Our next speaker was Shiuvo Morgan, he gave an interesting talk on the revolution in research and insight. The key theme was that data is powerful and science is sexy. He showed us the tools that can be used to build the perfect PPC campaign, including Insights For Search, the Google wonder wheel , and Double-click ad Planner. These are all tools that we use at Yucca when creating PPC campaigns.

He also showed us an interesting trend within insights for search, around the keyword cupcakes.

After a brief break, which included a rather large cupcake, it was the turn of Andy Smith - Google’s Industry Head for Mobile - to present.

Andy informed us on “the mobile revolution” including some interesting facts and PPC developments:

1. App revenue will be $35 billion by 2014
2. 40% of all tweets are mobile
3. 23% of all searches are mobile worldwide
4. Businesses are not keeping up with the growth of mobile. £50.3 million was spent last year, but the market had a potential of £771 million

As well as informing us on the latest Ad extensions for mobile PPC, such as hyper local map extensions, Andy informed us on the potential of display mobile ads that could be created via Admob, such as full page expandable adverts, or click to canvas, which includes the ability to embed interactive video within the page.

Next, Bruce Daisely, Leader of YouTube and Display enlightened us on the potential of display advertising and the power of emotional and rational advertising.
More facts:

1. Emotional advertising is twice as effective as rational.
2. YouTube ads have an average of 20% CTR and 25% CR.

He also supplied us with some interesting case studies on the power of YouTube advertising, namely the Orabrush.

Andy was followed by Biren Kalaria, who gave a passionate presentation on PPC display advertising and provided some insights into developments for the future, including the ability to target gender and ages.

He also updated us on the benefits of remarketing and negative remarketing. Yucca utilises these tools already, and negative remarketing is a very effective lead capturing asset.

Our last speaker was Peter Fitzgerald, Direct of Eire/UK Retail. Peter started the presentation by stating that mobile bridges online and offline retail, and that the future of shopping is mobile. Already we are seeing tap and pay technology, but only 80% of all websites are optimised for mobile usage.

Peter suggested that mobile should be tracked independently from desktop based PPC, and that all things mobile are just beginning to evolve.

With the “smart” phone ever evolving, and the world now rushing towards smart phone technology, we can see the future Peter talked about in sight.

We had a great day at Google, it was interesting and thought provoking and we look forward to our next visit.