Introducing the Links API

Since we launched our first set of API’s, we've consistently heard from publishers that they want an automated, flexible way to access and serve affiliate ads to scale their marketing efforts, create more unique advertising experiences, and better monetize their websites. Today, we've launched a beta of the new Links API, enabling publishers to query for links, banners, and even create publisher-specific links in real time.



If you're using our existing API's or are looking for more advanced ways to distribute affiliate links, try our Links API to programmatically access and show ads from Google Affiliate Network advertisers in new and creative ways. To get started, take a look at the documentation.



To start testing now, try out the Links API in Google APIs Explorer. Try running some sample requests like listing available free shipping promotions from approved advertisers (requires authentication).

Want to learn more about using Google Affiliate Network APIs to their full potential? Check out our presentation at Google I/O:

As always, we’d love to hear from you. If you have comments or suggestions on our new Links API, please visit our forum and share your feedback.



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Shaun Cox, Software Engineer

Inventory Management now available in DoubleClick Search

If you’re a search marketer managing a large product inventory, you know that staying on top of changing products, new promotions, and seasonal search trends can be incredibly time-consuming. The DoubleClick Search (DS) team is pleased to announce the release of our inventory management solution (beta), which allows you to use your Merchant Center Feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns.

With our new inventory management feature, you’ll be able to update your online advertising based on your physical inventory. To do this, DS monitors changes to your inventory feed and updates your campaigns accordingly.

With inventory management, you can:

• Integrate with your Google Merchant Center feed to leverage your existing investment in product search. The hardest part of inventory management can be the initial setup in integrating your feeds. With our solution, you can avoid this by simply continuing to update your Merchant Center account to keep the inventory fresh and up-to-date. Once you connect DS to your Merchant Center account, DS will automatically reflect any changes.


• Tie the behavior of ads and keywords to inventory levels. For example, you can pause keywords when the related product is out of stock, and reactivate them when it’s back in stock. You can also change landing page URLs when the links in the feed change.


• Refresh ad copies with feed parameters. For example, you can specify templates that would update ads based on price or description updates from the feed.

For example, let’s say you’re a retailer managing two ad groups with different types of kitchen appliances: EZ Freez Ice Cream Maker, and FroYo + Ice Cream Maker. Below is an example of how you can use a template to create relevant, customized ads for your products.

1. Create a template for your ads using an inventory ad template, a generic message that can be modified based on the values of product attributes.


2. Connect the template to the two ad groups via creating a new inventory rule, which binds together inventory items and search entities.

User setup in DS	Auto-created, inventory-managed ads
Free Shipping Template: <TITLE> Free Shipping Today Only! Available for <PRICE> <LANDING_PAGE_URL> Destination URL: [http://www.productpage.com]	EZ Freez Ice Cream Maker Free Shipping Today Only! Available for $34.99 DisplayURL.com/EZFreez FroYo + Ice Cream Maker Free Shipping Today Only! Available for $49.99 DisplayURL.com/Combo

Create and customize rules to automate your keyword states, ad copy, and landing pages. Sample rules:

• If, or when, product sells out, pause keywords.


• If price changes, create new ads based on the ad template to reflect the new price.


• If product landing page changes, update keyword landing pages.

Visit our Help Center article to learn more about Inventory management. To be included in the beta, please contact your Technical Account Manager.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Wood

Google

Announcing Ad Catalog v2 for iOS

We are pleased to announce the release of Ad Catalog v2 for iOS. Ad Catalog is a sample application which showcases a number of best practices when it comes to integrating AdMob ads into your iOS application.

This updated version shows how to integrate AdMob ads into four different types of iOS layouts - TabbedView, TableView, ScrollView and OpenGLView. Highlights include:

• The TabbedView example shows how to correctly implement a GADBannerView singleton that gets reused across many different views


• The TableView example shows how to correctly reuse a single ad inside multiple cells in a TableView


• The OpenGL and ScrollView examples show how to correctly dock an ad to the top or bottom of your screen, outside of your content

You can download a zip file from the google-mobile-dev download page, or you can get the source by taking a look at our online repository.

If you have any comments, questions, or feature requests for Ad Catalog, please let us know about them on the forum or during our office hours.

 - Raj Parameswaran, AdMob Team

Do Alexa Widgets Increase Your Alexa Ranking?

Most of the people on the internet tell you that by adding Alexa widgets to your blog will dramatically increase your Alexa ranking. However, we I would like to explain you is that there are sites like UpMyRank i.e a service in which traffic is exchanged to different domains, well this service is fake and the rankings can't get higher with them. Its better to avoid them rather then wasting your thousands of dollars on it.


Here is what alexa say's about putting alexa widgets on your blog's:

"Then there are the blogs that tell you to put one of our Alexa Widgets on your site. They all claim that your rank will improve dramatically. But, of course, it doesn't work. That would be ridiculous, right? But you wouldn't know that if you read these blogs."

I can't remember how many times I have seen the following titles, "How To Boost Your Alexa Rankings", How To Increase Your Alexa rankings, It's really amazing to see that most of the people really don't know how alexa work and what will increase alexa rank of their blogs in a guaranteed way.

Their is a saying that "Common sense is not common in common people" and it's really amazing to see that how many people fall for this. Alexa ranks websites on the basis of traffic, not on the basis of alexa widgets.

If you are really interested in increasing your alexa rankings, I would recommend you reading the following post:

• 10 Great Tips To Boost Your Website's Alexa Rank

Delivery Manager: A new way to manage email routing

Google Apps administrators can use a new feature in the administrator control panel to manage routing and basic filtering of email to on-premise systems as well as email to Google Apps users. These changes are a part of the integration of Postini and Google Apps.



Editions included: 

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



Languages Supported:

All languages



For more information:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2685650

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/08/continuing-transition-from-postini-to.html



whatsnew.googleapps.com


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