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Tag: tag advertising

  • Google Tags Are No More

    After about a year of testing, Google has decided to get rid of its Tag advertising program for Google Places.

    The program allowed advertisers to highlight their organic listings with yellow tags showing offers, photos, videos, menus, reservations, etc. for a monthly fee.

    “Tags make your organic business listings stand out on the Google and Google Maps search results page with a bright yellow marker that highlights specific attributes such as offers, videos or photos,” said Google Places Senior Strategist Brianna Brekke said in December, noting that it did not affect the organic ranking of a business listing on Google or Google Maps.

    Google Tags Get Discarded

    “Since that experiment began, tens of thousands of businesses have used Tags to help potential customers make easier, more informed decisions when searching,” said product manager Shalini Agarwal in a Google blog post. “Throughout this period, we monitored Tags closely to learn more about our users’ business needs and how they used the product.”

    “We’ve made a decision to shift our efforts toward other present and future product offerings for local businesses, and will be discontinuing this trial,” added Agarwal. “We’ve learned a lot from our Tags trial and will take that knowledge into account as we continue to find the best ways to serve users and local businesses alike.”

    Back in July, Google gave businesses the chance to use Tags free for a month.

  • Google Expands Tag Advertising for Local Businesses

    Last week Google changed the Local Business Center to Google Places, and along with that change came some new features for local businesses. We looked at those here.

    Among those changes was the addition of Google’s tag advertising. For $25 a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for things like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial.

    Google Tag advertising - new feature for Google PlacesGoogle promised that while the offering was starting out in a limited number of cities, that number would be expanding. The expansion process is underway. Google has now announced the addition of 11 new cities.

    The new cities are: San Jose, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and Mountain View.

    "You’ll notice that we’ve added Mountain View, CA to the list of cities participating in the trial," says Product Manager Shalini Agarwal. "Because we are still tweaking the product a bit, we thought we’d make it available in our hometown so we can get quick feedback as we work on new features."

    Businesses in the available cities can sign up for Tags from their Google Places accounts.

    In a couple weeks, Google says it will launch a new tag type: "post to your Place Page". This will be a freeform text field that will let business owners highlight custom messages announcing sales or events.

    The company did not indicate when more cities will become available, but I would expect the feature to make regular expansions in the not-too-distant future.