Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we’ve blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

It also makes sense to provide you with richer types of information in the ads. If you’re looking to buy your mom a new handbag for the holidays, for instance, you might want to see pictures, prices, the addresses of boutiques in your area and a map of how to get there — all within the ad.

To provide a better search ads experience, we’ve been developing and testing a variety of new ad formats. These formats are focused on giving you the information you need, while retaining what you love about Google advertising: that the ads are relevant and useful.

If you’re in the U.S. you may have already seen a number of these ad formats when searching on Google.

Some of them include visual elements. For example, if you’re curious about the movies that are playing this holiday season, you might see an ad with a video that lets you watch a trailer.

You might also see an ad with more links so you can quickly find a specific page in an advertiser’s website. If you’re researching airfare to visit your relatives for the holidays, it saves time to go directly to Priceline’s page about booking flights, rather than the general homepage or rental car page.

Or, if you’re trying to find a holiday bouquet to bring to your dinner party hostess, you might see an ad that shows your local florist’s location on a map and provides driving directions.

Other new ad formats might help you find all the addresses and locations of a chain store in your area. So if you’re vacationing abroad this season and have a craving for something familiar, the ad might show you all the nearby Pizza Huts that can deliver to your hotel.

And starting today, you might spot ads that include images and prices for specific products. When shopping for the ski outfit your nephew has been hinting about all year, you might see pictures from the retailer’s inventory to help you quickly determine if they have the color and style you had in mind.

Still other ad formats may introduce new ways of presenting information, such as Comparison Ads, which allow you to specify exactly what you’re looking for and to compare rates and prices in a single location. With the approaching new year comes resolutions to get things in order, so you might want an ad that lets you see side-by-side refinancing offers.

While we experiment with new formats, we’ll remain loyal to our core principle: that getting the right ad to the right person at the right time matters. As we continue to think up innovative ways to give you the information you want, you’re likely to see even more ad formats until we pinpoint the most useful, relevant and engaging ones. We’ll keep trying new things until we discover the “perfect” ads that improve your overall search experience.

From: Official Google Blog

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Claim your subdomains
You can now claim subdomains, such as myblog.blogspot.com, in Google Ad Planner. Your site’s subdomains can also appear in Google Ad Planner to give advertisers a more detailed view of your site for their media planning. Learn how to claim your sites in Google Ad Planner.

Share more Google Analytics metrics
We’ve expanded the type of Google Analytics data you can share with Google Ad Planner. You can opt-in your page views, unique visitors (cookies), total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on site, which ensures potential advertisers see the most accurate information for your site. Learn how to share your Google Analytics data.

Delegate site ownership
Managing your website profile in Ad Planner has just gotten easier. You can now invite additional users to edit and maintain your Google Ad Planner site profile.

Display an Ad Planner badge
Highlight your Google Ad Planner profile by displaying our new badge on your site. Advertisers who click your badge will be brought directly to your Google Ad Planner site profile, where they’ll find your traffic, demographics, and advertising information.

Choose from four Ad Planner badges:

From: Inside Adsense

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Yes, this year for Halloween, AdSense for feeds is putting on a Blogger costume and allowing all Blogger publishers to easily monetize your RSS and Atom feeds directly from the Blogger interface, in the same way you set up AdSense on your blog beforehand.

To set this up, go to Blogger and select the blog you wish to monetize on your Blogger Dashboard, and select “Monetize.” This will give you some basic options for configuring ads, and if you already have connected your Blogger feed to FeedBurner, will confirm that the proper feed is being configured. AdSense for feeds will automatically pick the right ad sizes for your users, content, and end medium.

After setup, you will be able to view your AdSense reports (including feed revenue) directly from the Blogger Dashboard, as well as from your AdSense account. Additional feed management options for your feed and feed analytics will be available from http://feedburner.google.com.

From: Adsense for feeds blog

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As more and more advertisers use rich media ad formats, such as Flash and interactive ads, we want to provide the same benefit to users for those ad formats. So today we’re starting to add the “Ads by Google” message to rich media ads in a way that’s unobtrusive to the ad creative and your site, but as user-friendly as our current “Ads by Google” notices on other ad formats.

You’ll soon notice a small “i” (for “information”) icon overlay in the bottom right-hand corner of these ads, which will expand when the user hovers over it. This was specially designed for rich media ads. This new message will appear on ads created by AdWords advertisers, and will show up on your website’s standard AdSense ad units.

Just like before, users who click on the “Ads by Google” label will be taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they’ve just seen. Our tests of this new message format on rich media ads showed that they provided information to users without affecting ad performance.

Source: Inside Adsense

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What is Twitter? 69 Percent of Adults Don’t Really Know

You would think that with an estimated $48 million of free media coverage per month, most people would at least have a pretty good idea about what Twitter is, even if they aren’t users themselves. But according to a new study out today from Harris Interactive, 69 percent of adults don’t know enough about Twitter “to have an opinion about it.”

ClickableNow: Add Links to Your Twitter Background

ClickableNow, a product of SHIFT communications and Whitley Media, is about to mix up the Twitter background space with their new service that promises active links in your Twitter background. Marketers, advertisers, and hyper-linked Twitterers can rejoice, your backgrounds are now clickable (sort of).

Digg on Twitter: A Powerful RSS Reader for the Lazy

Digg is getting in on the act, launching separate Twitter accounts that you can follow for each of their different news sections. Each time a story reaches the Digg front page, it will be broadcast to one main account – Digg Homepage – as well as to the account representing the category the item was in, like Technology, Science, or Offbeat.

UK Government Officials Get a Guide to Using Twitter

UK government officials won’t have to rely on randomly tweeting without any official guidance anymore. Neil Williams, the Head of Corporate Digital Channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills just published a first draft of an official guide to using Twitter for UK government officials. The guide clocks in at 20 pages, 5,392 words and 36,215 characters – or approximately 259 tweets. The guide explains what Twitter and related social media tools are and how to use them at a very basic level. One section of the guide also explains third-party tools like bit.ly, monitter, and tweetbeep.com.

The Goal of Twitter’s New Homepage? Be the World’s Water Cooler

Twitter now has a brand spankin’ new homepage. Of course, if you’re a regular Twitter user, you’re rarely going to see it because you’re already logged in. But for the 5 billion+ people Twitter has yet to convert, it provides the company’s big chance to get them to sign up and stay on their website.

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