Baidu Profit up by 80%

Chaina's most popular search engine announced that the profit of the latest quarter is up by 80%. It says more companies are stated showing Ads in their search engine and this makes the competition in online Ads more competitive.

Similar to Google, Baidu also growing fast and Google's exit from China helps Baidu to grow faster. Baidu has steadily increased its market share since Google Inc. closed its China search engine in March 2010 after saying it no longer wanted to cooperate with the communist Beijing government's censorship rules.

Baidu has increased its share to 76% from  64% same quarter last year. At the same time Google share went down from 31% to 19% during the same time frame.

Baidu, long seen as a Google copycat, has launched a series of initiatives including a music download service to expand its appeal and differentiate its brand.

Saravanan

Solarwinds announced their Q3 results

Solarwinds announced their Q3 2011 results. They haev done $53.9M in Q3. They have done more than projection ($51.9M) by the analysts.

Their Q3 total revenue growth is 31% y-o-y. They had a lower new revenue (license) $25.5 M 22% growth y-o-y. But their maintenance revenue is high. It is 28.4 M that is 40% growth y-o-y.

Their marketing and sales spending is high. It is 15M and it has gone up by 31% (y-o-y). They have a projection of $52.8 - $54.2M for Q4 and the year projection is $195M -$197M.

Their Spending to new revenue percentage is 55% this year and it has gone up by 3% y-o-y. This shows the competition is high in the IT market. There are more low and medium end companies coming into business and that make the Solarwinds to be more dynamic.

Solarwinds has a cash and cash equivalent at the end of Q3 2011 is $165.8 M which is dropped by $37M from Q2 2011 end. They have paid $35M to TriGeo aquisition during Q3 2011. They have released Two products Synthetic End User Monitor and Web Transaction Watcher. This is going to add value to their recent aquisition TriGeo product Event Log Manager Product.

Saravanan

Bid-per-Call in AdWords

AdWords is introducing bid per call in US and UK. With our Ads, phone number also will be shown and on getting a call, we will be charged for the call as well as the click. Similar to the Quality Score, Phone Call Quality Score also will be there to decide the position of the Ads.

When we start bidding for the call, Ads will be shown in computers and tablets and will be charged when we receive a call to that number. As this is new, there is a good possibility of conversion at a reasonable cost for the early users.

To take advantage of bid-per-call, select the option to use a Google forwarding number when we set up Call Extensions so that our systems can measure when a call to our business occurs. With bid-per-call, we'll also get the benefit of detailed call reporting right in AdWords, which includes:

• Summaries of completed calls, phone-through rate (PTR), and phone call cost on the Ad Group and Campaign tabs. 
• Details for each call, including call time, duration, caller area code, and the ad group that drove the call on the Dimensions tab. 

When we enable call extensions with a Google forwarding number, Google provides and displays a unique phone number in our ads, on both mobile and desktop devices.

If a potential customer calls the Google forwarding phone number from our ad, AdWords will route the call to our business phone number. We'll then be able to see the number of calls we received, including call duration and the inbound area code, in our call reports.


http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-bid-per-call-in-adwords.html

Google Announced Q3 Result

Google has announced its third quarter earnings 9.72 billion 33% growth y-o-y. Google owned sites earned a revenue of 6.74b (69%) and the partners sites generated a revenue of 2.7 b 27% of the total revenue.

The paid clicks on the Ads in Google sites and the Adsense program has increased  28% y-o-y and 13% Q-o-Q. But the cost per click has dropped by 5% in Q3 2011 compared to Q2 2011.

Q3 2011 growth % is the best percentage of growth this year. Also this is the second best in the last couple of years.

In the recent past the contribution of US for the Google revenue is coming down. This quarter the contribution of US is 45% which is the lowest ever. It cam down from 46% in Q2.

The cost per click has gone down in Q3 compared to Q2. The core revenue of Google is Advertising revenue which is more than 90% of their total revenue (9.2b is their advertising revenue). The other revenue from GApps, Android and others are around 0.5 b only for the Q3.

Google is completely depending on their Advertising revenue which is dangerous for them. But there is no one to compete in that domain.

Saravanan