New Google Features Small Businesses Should Know About

Google has been pretty busy launching products and features this week. As Google is an essential part of any online marketing strategy, we thought it would we be good to highlight some of the key features here.

City Pages

Google launched new City Pages, where people can browse a list of top businesses as recommended by locals by rating, category, and filter. The feature is starting with Portland, Austin, San Diego, and Madison, but will be expanding.

Google Instant Pages

Google launched Instant Pages as a new search option in Chrome. What it does is pre-load the result it thinks you’re going to click on, so the page loads instantly when you actually do click on it. This has raised some concerns regarding analytics, and whether analytics programs will count these pre-loads as visits. Google discussed the subject with WebProNews here.

Chromebooks

Google’s Chromebooks are now available to consumers and businesses from Acer and Samsung via BestBuy.com and Amazon. Google has been touting its Chrome OS operating system as a big win for businesses. More on that here. 

Mobile Search

Google introduced some new mobile search features, which were previously available in the Google Search mobile app, but now are available at Google.com from a mobile web browser, indicating that they’ll be more heavily used. They’re displaying new shortcut icons on the Google for Mobile home page to make it easer for consumers to find things nearby. There are icons for things like restaurants, coffee, and bars, but there is also a more button, which leads to other categories like shopping, ATMs and gas stations.

Google also introduced a way to build longer, more complex searches, through adding suggested phrases to the search box.

My Places

Google launched a new tab on Google Maps called "My Places," which gives users somewhere to see all of the places they’ve starred on Google Maps, rated on Google Places, or added to a customized map with icons and annotations through My Maps. It might be a good idea to encourage customers to star your business, which will keep you in their personal collection of places. This could help with loyalty.

Advertiser Tools

Google announced some tools for Google Display Network advertisers aimed at improving measurement, transparency and value for display campaigns. One feature is Relative CTR, which shows how ads perform relative to other ads running in the same places on the network. One feature is Impression Share, which represents the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which they were eligible for. Another feature is the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool, which tells you why your ads aren’t showing on the Display Network. Finally, there’s the Unseen Impression Filter, which ensures CPM advertisers aren’t charged for impressions that have a small chance of actually being seen (like below the fold).

Offers

Greg Sterling came across an offer ad from Google, which led to a page called "My Offers," which seems to indicate that Google will be using various means to get offers in front of customers (in addition to the recently launched Google Offers product, which is basically a Groupon clone). Given all of Google’s various products, it has a lot of ways it could potentially expand its offers offering in terms of visibility and user engagement.