The Great Google Day Adventure

I started to write this as we were sat on the train on the way home after a brilliant day out at the Google Plex in London, but then I found I couldn’t post it as I only had fifteen minutes of internet access remaining so it has had to wait until now. We got down to London in good time with a pleasant journey had on the train and met up with another colleague at Victoria Street Station and then took a steady walk down to the gleaming glass headquarters of Google UK.

I must say I was very impressed as we were greeted in the foyer and taken up to the offices on the third floor were we had a quick coffee before going through to one of the lecture rooms for a series of presentations the first of which was by Sandeep Menon, Head of Small Business Marketeing, EMEA who gave us a quick keynote presentation on several technologies that have made their mark on the world and lead us to where we are today with the internet and the technologies that Google are putting into place to assist small business promote themselves and grow their business online. It was a great little talk and we learned some interesting stats along the way, for instance the internet contributes an estimated £100 billion which equates to e-commerce providing over 7% of GDP to the UK economy with about 60% of that being driven by user consumption, showing the UK’s strong position in e-commerce. SME’s with high internet usage are currently growing 4 x faster than businesses that do not currently have an internet presence and the trend appears to be continuing with expectations of 13% of GDP by the year 2015. With £1 in every £4 being spent online surely it makes sense to have your business promoting itself in the online arena.

We had several other very interesting presentations including the various Google Certification Programmes before having a really interesting one presented by Clara Lee and Laura Moczarska of the Google Agency Strategy Team on the subject of De-Mystifying Adwords. And we even got some heads up information on something new that is coming into Google Adwords, in fact we were given several insights onto things for the future, but heres one of them.

Coming very soon if you are an app developer or your product is available as a download you will be able to include a link in the adwords advert allowing it to be downloaded from the advert directly, remember folks, you heard it here first.

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable day and we enjoyed a little tour of some of the facilities with Esra Guler one of the Google Marketing Managers, and as you can see from the pictures its not only a great place to visit, but looks a fab place to work.