With the goal of simplifying Google’s standard search advertising model, Google announced that they would begin testing a new fixed pricing system, which is a model much more familiar to local businesses.

Essentially, whether you’re a hair salon, car dealership, or restaurant – for a fixed monthly fee, you will be able to place an ad with Google, much like how you would in the Yellow Pages. This is a huge opportunity for any business that isn’t familiar with Google’s current advertising model, which involves bidding for keywords (something that can be quite a complex process).

Along with this new pricing system, Google Voice will allow ads to feature a unique phone number that can be associated with your business. So when a customer see’s your ad and calls you using the unique number provided by Google, you will receive a “This call brought to you by Google” notification, allowing you to track and measure the success of your ads. With Google’s newly simplified system, any local business with limited online advertising knowledge will be able to run fully measurable targeted ads quickly and easily. And if customers are sent directly to your business phone number, your business may not even require a website to advertise with Google.

However, a nice website is still strongly recommended.

We’re really getting into the world of analytics and here’s a challenge we’ve encountered recently. Given all the help that other bloggers like Justin at http://www.epikone.com/blog/and Robbin at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/ have provided, we thought we’d share a little knowledge too.

Here’s the situation. We are developing a site for a new client that wants to understand the value of their online newsletter. This is a fairly easy thing to do in Google Analytics – simply use their user-defined function by adding the pagetracker_setvar function in a newsletter sign-up confirmation page and start tracking how newsletter subscribers behave in comparison to non-subscribers.

But here’s the challenge – they already have a number of existing newsletter subscribers that won’t ever reach the newsletter confirmation page because they’ve already signed up. So how do we get them assigned as a newsletter subscriber?

This isn’t a coding problem per se – that part’s easy. It’s more of an implementation problem and it doesn’t appear that we can include the pagetracker_setvar code in an actual newsletter, so here is what we came up with as the best alternative.

Send out a special, one-time email to newsletter subscribers that informs them of the new site. The newsletter contains one link that drives them to a landing page that can only be accessed through the newsletter. Naturally this landing page contains the pagetracker_setvar code and updates a visitor’s cookie to tag them as a newsletter subscriber. Of course, we don’t want any non-subscribers being able to access the page or else their cookie will be updated with that value as well.

We recognize that we likely won’t get all our subscribers since some won’t respond to the email; however, it is a reasonable approach for capturing at least some.

We’ve toyed with some other ideas, but the above one appears to be the best at this point. If you know of any more, please let us know by leaving a comment!

Clay

Google made it easier for people to search within a small number of sites by adding a second search box to the top results for those retailers.

Editor’s Note: Some retailers are upset with Google’s additional search box that allows searchers to search within a website without leaving Google. It’s not the results that upsets them, but the ads for competitors that appear alongside. Is this new feature a bonus to the end-user and good use of real estate, or is it unfair to retailers?

That second box takes advantage of the useful search operator, site:. The site: operator allows the searcher to limit results to a query to ones coming from a specific domain.

Many people may not be aware that they can type something like site:example.com and focus their search results this way. Google’s latest project, focused on a handful of popular sites, brings up the second search box so someone using it automatically searches within the domain in question.

It isn’t being as warmly received as Google may have anticipated. The New York Times discussed the feature, and a couple of retailers complained about Google doing in its search results what Google does best: stick text ads next to them.

Fierce lobbying resulted in tweaks to the bill that removed the offending competitor keyword language. Businesses that hate the practice will be keeping an eye on Google to see if the search ad giant has dropped a second search box into their results.