The Next Corner

So many so called Internet Marketing experts have mis-qualified Google+ as a social experiment from the search company in Mountain View. What Google plus will turn out to be, is what you and I are making off it. Right now, it seems to be the environment where you would build up your own authority to be used to classify the value of your publications online.

So how would you use the Google Plus announcements in the knowledge graph box on branded searches for your company? Right, to push a certain message which is actual and important.

Case in point: the economic impact Airbnb is having on the New York City community. Can you imagine that the Airbnb guests over the last year spent more than $632 million dollar in over the different neighborhoods of New York? Where most hotel chains are concentrated in mid town Manhattan, Airbnb guests brought money into local neighborhoods like Astoria Queens, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn or Lower East Side / Chinatown on Manhattan. And who would have expected that Harlem would be a neighborhood you would go, and stay with people in their house to avoid the usual tourist traps. When I first visited New York when I was 12, people told us to avoid Harlem or Queens all together! Fair enough, that was in the 80s.

So here is my advice. If you have something to say, and you have a valuable brand, make sure you publish a blogpost, and share it on your Google+ profile of your company. This  blog postwill show up right next to the brand search results.  Just check the latest Airbnb post on our G+ profile below here.

The best part of all of this: YOU CONTROL THE MESSAGE!!!

Have you seen the latest land grab in user specific data by Google? Yes, that same company which is now obscuring all referral keywords for organic traffic from their search engine because of privacy concerns for the user? Today Google announced: Improved App Insight by Linking Google Analytics with Google Play. Sounds great right, finally you can see the number of downloads on the Google App store, and you can track those users in your app what they are doing and how valuable they are. But guess what, who else can see this with the integration of Google analytics in your App? Right Google!

From the Techcrunch post on the topic (emphasize mine):

The Play Developer Console itself, however, is also getting a bit of an update. It’ll now show information about how often users use an app, for how long and what they are doing inside of it (assuming they have Google Analytics set up in their app).

This two-way data flow, Google argues, “gives you instant access to the in-store and in-app metrics of record in whichever Google product you use.” For most developers, the Analytics integration is probably the most interesting of these two new features, however, as it provides the most comprehensive view of how their apps are performing.

How is it possible the Techcrunch editor, and any other technology writer, totally misses the seismic shift which is happening here. Google getting access to in-App metrics like usage, navigation, in App purchases is a major data point for Google to become the monopoly player on the Android App marketplace. Let me explain:

New Popular Apps

A new App is submitted on the app store. It has the Google analytics integration embedded, which allows Google to track not only the popularity of the App in numbers of downloads, but also would give Google insights into (as mentioned above):

• Number of active users
• Time spend on the App
• Activity within the App

Now do you really think Google would have a popular App like Waze grow as big as it did, before spending over a $1 Billion to buy the popular App? I reckon the business development and the Mergers & Acquisitions teams at Google will keep a close eye on which Apps are doing great after launch, pulling the in-App metrics and negotiate the sh*t out of a deal.

If the App makers don't want to sell, there is always the opportunity to build your own. With all the internal data available for the dev teams, and a hard coded position in the Google Play store, I bet a native Google - Android App would win it 99/100.

Rankings & Popular Apps

In a private conversation with an SEO I really respect, he brought up a good point on the way Google could use the in-App data in a different way to gain a competitive advantage: Cross referencing the internal data across users, you can figure out which App downloaders are the innovators in the space. A little unclear explanation, so let me give a little bid more details.

Across all the App downloads in Google Play, Google can quickly spot those people who downloads apps early in their lifetime., which become popular. Using statistical modelling and a large data set, they could predict the probability a certain App becomes popular purely based on the fact it's being downloaded by certain people. This is not only good for early acquisition discussions, but could also become a competitive advantage over other App stores, because Google would be able to recommend better App's, have better rankings in the App store etc.

Privacy of the User

I more and more get the feeling Google is one creepy company. The argument of privacy within organic search has been made very clear; Google doesn't want anybody snooping on what people are searching for, see this quote:

We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.

So what about the privacy of Android users, downloading an App on their phone, not knowing the big G is tracking every movement, every action and every purchase they make in these Apps? More data for Google, not for us...!

Here is a little peek into the future of advertising in your Gmail account. Prepare to see more popping up, colors changing, and new Ad formats being tested the closer we come to the end of the year. Hey, Google is a for-profit company, and the pressure to out-perform the quarterly results year after year is just really big. With a stock price dependent on good news, the temptation to all that virgin real estate in the free-Google products must be simply too large for some of the groups within Google. Gmail will probably carry many more ads in the next couple of months, apart from the smarter targeting on the content of YOUR emails!

Just think about it, now that you are opt-in into Google+ with that same Gmail account, Google can easily start to target ads much better based on your G+ activity, friends networks and stage in life. I'm sure Google will milk this investment really good, as a large number of people, including me, have been using Gmail for a quite some time. So Google could mine all those emails for better targeting, where in the time I've been using the Gmail account went through various life stages. With some smart people in the room, they must be able to figure out what is next in my life, and include that in the personal ad targeting algorithm to serve "better" ads for me. Hey, if it's good for users, why not!

In the mean time, I still receive other people's email in my Gmail inbox, where I never got an answer on the post about the Gmail security breach. This is still an open issue!