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My Life With Google TV series continues. Yesterday’s test: how well could Google TV locate free (and legitimate) episodes of Caprica on the web? Answer: not very well. But once I found them the old fashioned way, Google TV did make it pretty easy to watch them on the “big” screen of my TV, versus my laptop.

I always seems to be missing episodes of new TV shows when a season begins. The promise of Google TV is that wherever a TV show might exist legitimately — be it pay-per-view, broadcast TV or on the web — Google TV will locate it.

Looking For Caprica Using Google TV

Yesterday, I tried a test for Caprica. While technically still in its first season, the show had a mid-season break and only recently began airing new episodes. For those not familiar with the show from Syfy, it’s a drama that covers the history of how the Cylons came to be in the Battlestar Galactica universe. And yes, I’m a big fan.

I know from my past explorations that Syfy puts many of its TV shows out on its own web site. Were there any from Caprica available? If so, would Google locate them? I fired up the Google TV search box, entered Caprica and quickly found the series listed:

The episode list for the current season was up to date. You can see each episode listed. Notice the icons. Any episode can have up to three icons, which show you where the show might be viewed:

• TV (it’s on broadcast TV, either as a first run or repeat episode to air in the near future)
• Web (it’s on the internet)
• Paid (it’s available through the internet via pay-per-view, such as through Amazon)

Google TV Says No

Notice that for the last four episodes, there’s no “Web” option listed. According to Google TV, these shows aren’t available legitimately on the web for free (I keep saying legitimately. I have no doubt pirated or illegally uploaded full episodes are available out there, but that’s not what I’m after).

That seemed odd to me. I hadn’t been to the Caprica web site recently, but I was pretty sure there would be one or two free full-length episodes available.

To check, I consulted with Clicker. This is a dedicated search engine for finding TV content across the web. It has quickly become my touchstone to see if Google TV’s own TV search engine is working well. In this case, Clicker beat Google TV.

Clicker Says Yes

While Clicker is a web site, you can also consult its listings within Google TV itself. In Google TV’s “Spotlight” area, there are a variety of web sites that have been optimized for the Google TV platform:\

Clicking on the first “All Sites” tile leads you to the Clicker site:

At Clicker, I was able to do a search for “Caprica” and get back internet TV listings from Clicker’s database, rather than Google TV’s own:

I know the image above is blurred, but you can still see individual episodes listed. The three on the screen all say “Play at: Syfy,” which means they’re available to watch, for free, at the Syfy web site.

Once Found, Able To Watch Using Google TV

Google TV missed these, and that’s a pretty big failure, in my books. But now that I knew where they were located, could I watch them through Google TV? Or was Syfy perhaps doing blocking like some of the major television networks (see A Tour Of How Networks Have Blocked Google TV From Their Web Content for more on that).

I went back to Google TV’s search box. I did a search for “Caprica” and this time chose to view results from the entire web. That made Google TV’s web browser load with results from Google web search, just like you might get by doing a web search using your computer.

The Caprica web site was listed right at the top of the results. I clicked and was taken there:

The site appeared just as it might on my computer. You can see down at the bottom how it says “4 Full Episodes Available.” I selected one of these, which caused an ad to begin playing (the ad was from the Syfy web site,  just like you’d get by going to the site directly. It was not from Google):

After the ads, I was able to watch a full episode for free, through Google TV, despite Google TV initially not finding it:

By the way, had I clicked on one of Clicker’s listings from within Google TV, the same thing would happen — though more efficiently. Clicker’s listing would have caused Google TV to fire up the Google TV web browser and take you directly to the episode on the Syfy web site. There, you’d view it via the browser.

Better Integration & Search Choices?

To make Caprica appear full screen above, I had to find the full-screen button within the play window that was part of the overall web page. What would be really slick would be if either Google TV or Clicker could get the episode to load full-screen within your TV, without having to use buttons like that. Anyone who’s ever clicked on a video in YouTube from an iPhone or an iPad understands this well. You go right to the video, not to the page that hosts the video. I’m sure this is something that will come in the future, as partnerships are further developed.

It also makes me wonder if Google TV will ever allow other search engines to be the default in the device. Want your Chrome browser from Google to use another search engine? Yahoo and Bing are other options baked in. Want your Google-powered Android phone to use something other than Google? No baked in options there, but you can at least add apps. Android-powered Google TV is similarly closed. There’s no way to have your TV listings be powered by default by someone else, such as Clicker. Maybe that should be considered.

In the end, I was happy as usual that Google TV meant I didn’t have to hook up my laptop and start running cables to watch free web TV shows through my TV. I caught up on missing episodes of 30 Rock last week this way. It was nice, especially in that Google TV’s own listings found them for me. With Caprica, it was disappointing that I had to know those episodes were out there and hunt them down without the help of Google TV’s own search tools.

http://searchengineland.com/google-tv-watching-free-caprica-episodes-53942?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+Engine+Land%29

Last month we took a look at next-level optimization for paid search, identifying some ways to leverage targeting options and automated algorithms to ensure your paid search campaigns are well optimized. Now its time to take a look outside the friendly confines of paid search programs and see what it takes to up-level your optimization efforts by considering media other than paid search.

Don’t Panic, It’s Organic

First up is the most obvious media channel, paid search’s benevolent brother, organic search. A few months ago I took a look at a framework through which we could better understand the interaction between paid and organic search. In that post I tried to answer the specific question: If I rank #1 organically for my brand term, why should I be buying it through paid search? It turns out this approach applies beyond just brand terms.

There are many ways in which your paid search campaigns can inform your SEO, and vice versa. As an example, we sometimes comb our referral logs for organic search keywords as a source of paid search keyword growth. Conversely, if we see a paid search term driving volume with solid performance, we may choose to build content around that keyword for SEO. Going back to our previous question, you can always test the effect on your SEO of buying a head keyword using the framework we built last time around. The most important thing to remember here is to try to use a common analytics platform on which to build your analyses. Remember that different platforms will often provide very divergent data points, and thus comparing data from disparate platforms will often provide useless if not misleading data.

One Step Beyond

Outside of paid and organic search, there is a whole sub-industry developing as we speak around attribution analysis and management and media mix modeling. I wrote a column about it several months ago where we looked at a three-phased approach to attribution management. Companies are lining up to try to tackle these issues, but doing so requires a level of integration not easily achieved in the world in which I operate. There is a very fundamental issue that normally gets in the way of doing good work on this front, which is that most companies are unable to track all their media with a common technology platform.

More and more websites are beginning to see the importance of this, are taking note and making changes, but with many large companies there is still a significant analytical void to be filled. The fact remains that to conduct meaningful analyses, you need good web analytics. By “good” I mean that you should have a single source of truth for all media, built on solid technology (whether in-house or outsourced), with the ability to track all the way up to the impression level. This is normally not available with search, as the engines generally do not support third-party ad serving, but if you can get this at least for display advertising, you’re well ahead of the game.

Be Responsible

As I mentioned in my previous column on attribution management, there are three important phases: business intelligence, statistical modeling, and actionable outcomes. And while I do believe that as a marketer your responsibility is to fully engage in every phase of this process, as someone who has been in search marketing for more than a decade I don’t recommend doing any of this on your own. There are a handful of qualified companies specializing in this business and you can bet there will be many more popping up in the near future.

But to pretend that as an above-average marketer you can effectively determine how to assign credit across media channels is absolutely irresponsible. It’s like giving me the keys to a Formula One race car and saying “well, you have a driver’s license, you can figure it out.” Don’t do it. What you should do is research vendors in this space and spend your time making sure you can put the necessary pieces together to make a tight business case internally. Ask vendor candidates for case studies that show lift in profit, revenue, or other important metrics. Get your analytics in shape. Understand your own business better. Only then can you effectively put a plan into place that will drive business success through next-level optimization.

Sell, Sell, Sell

OK, so now you have everything set up for success. Your analytics platform is robust and unified. You’ve RFPed some vendors, made a business case for attribution management, maybe you even have a vendor selected and have a purchase order open. Congratulations! Now you have one more critical step to take, and its time to put your sales hat on. In one large company where I have worked, we developed a very sophisticated attribution model in which we had a high level of confidence. The problem we then faced was that we couldn’t effectively sell it around the organization.

There were two main reasons for this. First, the complexity of the model made it difficult for people to understand—this is serious math, and frankly people aren’t going to get it. Second, and perhaps most significantly, attribution management means taking credit away from one channel and giving it to another. The scary truth is that in most scenarios we will be taking credit away from search and moving it up the stack to other events such as display impressions or email. This literally means that search (or other) marketers stand to lose credit, and therefore budget, by engaging in next-level attribution management strategies. This will inevitably cause friction and impede your progress.

What’s a marketer to do? As far as selling the complexity of the attribution model, that’s one of the reasons you’ve outsourced the project. Place the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of the vendor—don’t bear this cross yourself. Call the engagement a “pilot” if you need to—if it doesn’t work, you can always terminate the relationship, right? As far as the other question—the part where you’re stealing budget from other (or your own) channels—the way to overcome this is to have a higher-level ally or sponsor in your organization who sits on top of all the marketing channels. If your CMO or SVP believes that attribution management will benefit the company, that may be all the air cover you’ll need.

The path to next-level optimization through attribution management is a long and winding road. Take your time pre-selling the concepts to upper management, and focus on finding the right outsource partner. If you can do that, you’ll find that navigating this tricky path isn’t so tough after all.

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Google Inc.’s (GOOG) share price hit $600 Friday for the first time since early January after reporting better-than-expected quarterly results and finally indicating progress in developing other significant revenue streams beyond its dominance in online-search advertising.

The Silicon Valley company eased Wall Street’s concerns about slowing growth in its core business by revealing for the first time details about the financial performance of its display- and mobile-advertising segments, which indicated that those operations already total more than 10% of the company’s annual revenue.

Jonathan Rosenberg, a Google senior vice president, said Thursday that revenue from selling display ads for sites across the Internet as well as its own YouTube video site is on pace to generate more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue. YouTube now gets two billion views per week that earn money.

“You guys often ask me, ‘Jonathan, where’s the next multibillion-dollar business after search?’ There is your answer,” Rosenberg told analysts during the company’s earnings call Thursday. “It’s display, and it’s already here.”

In mobile, where Google gives away its Android software to handset makers, Rosenberg said mobile-search queries have increased 500% over the past two years and Google is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in annual mobile search-and-display revenue.

“Clearly, this is the future of search in the Internet,” he said. “Our mobile-search queries have grown five times over the past couple of years and, of course, a lot more of those queries are now coming from Android phones.”

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan said, “The increased transparency related to mobile and display segments will help to drive a higher valuation, as the company seems better positioned to grow robustly for a longer period of time.”

As for Google’s core business of selling text ads alongside its search engine and on other sites, Rosenberg said new advertising formats have contributed to higher revenue.

“The company maintains a dominant position in its highly coveted online-ad segment (search) and suggests rapid growth and scale in the potentially vast markets of display, mobile and video,” Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali wrote in a note titled “No Longer a One-Trick Pony.”

Google shares recently rose 10.8% to $599.50, after hitting an intraday high of $601.

The stock has underperformed the market this year–down 13% in 2010 through Thursday versus the 5.3% gain in the S&P 500 index–on concerns that Google’s display and mobile efforts weren’t growing fast enough to compensate for slowing growth in the company’s core online search operations.

In the third quarter, Google reported earnings of $2.17 billion, or $6.72 a share, up from $1.64 billion, or $5.13 a share, a year earlier. Excluding stock-compensation costs, per-share profit rose to $7.64 from $5.89 and surpassed the average analyst estimate on Thomson Reuters of $6.68 a share.

Revenue jumped 22% to $7.29 billion. Traffic-acquisition costs–commissions paid to marketing partners–were 26% of revenue. Excluding them, revenue rose roughly 25% to about $5.48 billion, above the Thomson Reuters estimate of $5.27 billion.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20101015-710497.html

I missed Facebook’s press conference yesterday about the new Facebook Groups feature that promises that you can share comments, photos and other information more tightly among only people you trust. But I learned about the feature firsthand soon enough, when I found myself added to a group without being asked. And that was worrisome.

Robert Scoble had created the group, invited a number of people, and I was flattered to be included. But Facebook should have asked me first, not just let Robert Scoble or anyone put me into a group without permission.

In fact, I was pretty aghast this had happened. This company has time-and-time-again been accused of trying to push people into being less private, giving them less control. Here, yet again it rolls out a feature that suggests better privacy but gets things wrong. Share with only those you “care about the most” and “feel confident about who sees” what you post, the Facebook blog posts pitch us. But groups go wrong from the beginning, by failing to ask if you want to be included.

It gets worse. As best I can tell, once you’re in a group, you can add anyone else to it. I’m pretty sure the rest of the group members aren’t notified when you do this. The group I’m in started with no one, and now it’s up to over 500 people. I wasn’t told when new people were added, nor is there a notification option for this:

Imagine. You create a group for your 10 best friends, so you can all share pictures and information about your kids. One of them adds a few more people they trust, and so on, and your “private” group is now exposed to friends of friends of friends — who probably aren’t your friends. You weren’t asked about any of this, and the material you thought was private now has wider circulation than you may have originally assumed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the protected groups idea, and it’ll work fine in many cases. But Facebook should ask everyone placed into a group if they want to be there. And there should be some system for the group admins to prevent other members from inviting new people, if they’d like to keep it restricted.

Over at Gigaom, Mathew Ingram has a nice piece illustrating another issue with anyone being added to any group without permission. Jason Calacanis found himself added to a purported NAMBLA group (a man-boy love group) and wasn’t particularly happy. (Note: the postscript below and my follow-up article, Blame One Of Calacanis’s Own 5,000 Facebook “Friends” For Putting Him In The NAMBLA Group, goes into more depth about this.)

The piece also gets into issues about how the groups begin sending you notifications without asking permission. I found this extremely annoying yesterday, when it began hitting me.

It’s pretty simple. Don’t opt us into anything without asking first – and don’t let anyone else opt us into anything on our behalf, without our permission — even our friends.

For related news, see Techmeme.

Postscript: I’ve had a chance to talk with Facebook PR now on some of the issues. Spokesperson Jaime Schopflin stressed that no one could be added to a group unless they were friends with another member of the group, and there’s an assumption that your friends wouldn’t do stupid things.

For example, Calacanis wasn’t added to the NAMBLA group by just anyone. It was done by one of his friends. In particular, it was done by Jon Fisher:

who you can see is a friend of Jason Calacanis:

Calacanis has many “friends” that he’s added to his personal profile who aren’t really friends, which I find is fairly common among different tech writers I follow. Fisher clearly did this to him as a joke. In fact, Fisher’s particular NAMBLA group is obviously a joke.

That’s Facebook’s biggest point, I’d say, in issues like this. Schopflin stressed that Facebook is designed to help you connect with your “real friends,” and if a real friend added you to a group as what happened with Jason, you’d unfriend them.

Personally, I’ve felt Facebook has a strong push of connecting people to others who aren’t their real friends. In particular, I can remember constantly getting “Friend Finder” suggestions of people I didn’t know, though looking today, either Friend Finder is dead or has given up on me.

There’s also the issue that all types of people will try to friend others, and some people will simply friend back out of courtesy or to avoid a confrontation. There’s the classic question of what to do when your boss friends you. Do you say no? But if you let them in, now they can add you to groups, should they decide.

Of course, you can always leave any group you’re added to. That, along with the expected good behavior of your friends, seems to be why Facebook has kept it “simple” Schopflin said and not required people to confirm they want to be in a group. Similarly, there’s not a concern about how members of a group can add other members because since those members are your friends, you don’t expect them to invite others who shouldn’t be there.

By the way, an important point. If a friend adds you to a group, and you remove your self from that group, that can’t add you back to that or ANY group in the future.

I still prefer the old system of how groups worked, where you received an invite and then chose to join, if you wanted. I’d like that back. I’d also like an option for a group administrator to prevent members from adding other members to a group, if they choose. Finally, a notification option to let members know when new members were added might be nice.

http://searchengineland.com/irony-facebooks-new-groups-give-me-less-control-not-more-52495?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+Engine+Land%29

Bing xRank is no more. A Bing spokesperson has confirmed that the search service was recently shut down. The xRank URL, http://www.bing.com/xrank, currently redirects to the Bing home page.

Launched in 2007, xRank was essentially Bing’s version of Google Trends, but with a number of additional features. The help page (which is still on Live.com) calls xRank “a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!” It tracked the most popular search queries on Bing (and Live Search before that), and had special sections broken out for celebrities, musicians, politicians, and bloggers.

The service was expanded and promoted during the Microsoft Live Search days, but seems to have been less of a focus since Live Search became Bing.

http://searchengineland.com/official-bing-xrank-is-dead-52118?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+Engine+Land%29