For the first time on a routine week, Facebook has outpaced Google to become the most visited site on the internet.

According to research from Hitwise, Google’s share is still growing, but at only a fraction of the pace of Facebook.

The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.

Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.

So what does this mean for marketers? Well, it’s a slap across the face — any marketer that is advertising on Google should put their efforts into finding a good Facebook strategy stat.

[Via Hitwise]

EQUTE — New research shows again that Microsoft users have a better click through rate for advertisers.

According to Chitika, a survey of 135 million impressions showed 1.05 percent of clicks came from consumers browsing with Internet Explorer — 40 percent higher than Firefox users (0.66 percent), 50 percent more than Safari users (0.50 percent) and 80 percent higher than Chrome users (0.21 percent). By operating system, Chitika found that 0.92 percent of its clickers were using Windows vs. 0.52 percent using Mac OS and 0.46 percent tooling with Linux.

Gavin Dunaway, of Adotas, had some interesting insights into why this might be.

Some of this I believe goes to the branding — Google is getting an increasingly snotty rep — similar to its mobile competitor Apple. It’s smarmy kids that dress like Justin Long who are Googling on their iPhones (Droids?) — a stereotype for sure, but one that is continually propagated by the media. Microsoft has long been a media punching bag — can you be more condescending than calling Microsoft users gullible?

Microsoft, as much as a misnomer as this may be, seems to appeal more to common people, something it’s shot for increasingly in its ad campaigns — and those would be who advertisers are shooting for.

Even trying to partner with the animated TV series “Family Guy,” which definitely falls toward the low end of middle brow, for the Windows 7 launch was an attempt to appeal to the masses. A friend sent me an unironic video for how to host a Windows 7 installation party — I laughed, but at the same time realized how stuck up I appeared. (I should note I’m a Mac user and a Googler, and I’d like to believe my preference is about function rather than intellectual snobbery.)

As Microsoft continues to be rolled out with new systems as normal, Bing ad clicks will keep on going up, after the holidays would be a great time to get ads going on Bing if you haven’t done so and take advantage of all those new computers.

EQUTE — Google Analytics added a new advanced segmenting feature designed with more detailed visitor traffic options in mind.

The new advanced segment options were detailed in a video from Google; which gives an example of a company looking to track only paying orders via the analytics API. The features are pretty advanced, but with a little time, site owners can really get to know their visitors and which ads are performing the best at the bottom line.

See the video via Google’s YouTube:

Along with the new segmentation features, Analytics also includes new custom variables and made it easier to find old dimensions via the account feed — a nice touch likely inspired by other major analytics software.

All the features are detailed at Google’s blog.

EQUTE — Google and Facebook have jumped into the URL shortener ring in a move that could crush other services like Bit.ly and Ow.ly.

The move could finally be an answer to all those Twitter links that you don’t want to go anywhere near. Seeing these shortened URLs will give readers an additional layer of security by knowing that their clicks aren’t going to some phishery or virus-laden site.

Google’s goo.gl has a very, very short page describing their new service.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

Stability — ensuring that the service has very good uptime

Security — protecting users from malware and phishing pages

Speed — fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google toolbar now features a new share button that shortens the URLs, and Blogger now allows users to syndicate their feeds to Twitter using the shortened URLs.

Facebook’s shortener seems more designed to bring outside users to Facebook, or the new FB.me. It also features a neat trick to direct readers to the site with an easy to understand link. Say the Facebook name for your blog’s fan site is StarTrekPlanet, it can be truncated to FB.me/startrekplanet, making it easy for people to see where they are going.

These URL services also leave the window open for things similar to Digg’s approach where each site found through the shortener features a toolbar header. If Google and Facebook did the same it could mean greater reach for their sharing services.

This is a great stride in the field, it will certainly be interesting to see how third-party services weather the storm.

EQUTE — New numbers from WebVisible show that small businesses are expanding their online advertising efforts, but especially turning to search marketing to get the word out.

Researchers showed that on average, small businesses spent money on about 55 keywords — a 30 percent jump over 2009’s 43 keywords. That’s not huge, but the amount of money they spent spiked a dramatic 91 percent — $1,658.

Those spending the most were attorneys and dentists, spending 2,560 and $2,005 respectively.

Also interesting, small businesses are buying into Bing, which grabbed 10.5 percent of the small business market share, taking 5 percent from Google.

EQUTE — Anyone running an SEO campaign knows that the first step is getting indexed in the search engines. But after that the tactics are overwhelming and even seasoned site owners might forget about Google’s mobile search.

WebProNews has a good write up about how to get indexed in Google Mobile Search, but there are a few key steps that will be enough for most people.

1. Create a Google sitemap — just like creating a normal sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools
2. Allow any user to User-agent to access your mobile site i.e. Googlebot-mobile.
   

   “You should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ (which is the string used at present),” says Jun Mukai, a software engineer on Google’s mobile search team. “Instead, check whether the User-agent header contains the string ‘Googlebot-Mobile’. You can also use DNS Lookups to verify Googlebot.”

3. Make sure your site contains mobile-friendly URLs’ DTD (Doc Type Definition) declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML.

With the explosion of Internet-enabled phones (and more coming soon after the holidays) it’s high time to really make sure your mobile site is up to snuff — even if it’s not bringing you a lot of traffic.

EQUTE — It makes sense that Google’s upcoming Caffeine update will likely emphasize speed.

Google has already made load time a factor in AdSense quality scores but the purported addition the feature in all Google search is new and could mean big changes to a lot of publishers.

The guys over at WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts about the possibility.

Google has a lot of clout on the Internet, obviously, but they cannot control the speed. Matt Cutts said it himself, they want a faster Internet. So this is one way to push site owners to speed things up without hurting sites that can’t speed things up.

Anyone looking to test their site before Caffeine rolls out after the holidays should check out Google’s page speed test. Testing loading speed should be a no-brainer to most site owners, but now it’s even more essential to make sure the site is running on all cylinders.

EQUTE — Google is looking to the future of display ads, and acquiring Teracent is on step toward reworking and tweaking display ads.

Teracent customizes display ads by targeting ads to location, time of day, Web site content and keeps tabs on how recent ads performed.

The features will soon be available on the Google Content Network and for Doubleclick clients — allowing advertisers a slew of new options for ad targeting.

Google’s Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management and Joerg Heilig, Engineering Director wrote about the deal on the official Google blog.

We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the web. That’s why we’re pleased to announce today that we’ve entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Teracent. The transaction, which is subject to various closing conditions, is expected to close this quarter.

…

Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

These new options will take some getting used to, but it could lead to a much better targeting once advertisers figure them out.

EQUTE — The next move in Google News is designed to make publishers and readers happy with integrated results from Google Fast Flip.

Fast Flip is Google’s article reading helper, which gives publishers more space to show off their site instead of turning every article into a hyperlink like Google News alone does. The practice was riling some publishers that said Google News turned their hard work into a commodity for Google instead of the publisher.

Google responded to blogger Steve Rubel saying that the integration was one of their many search tests.

Hi Steve, I work with the Google News team. At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. A few weeks ago we started running a few small ones exploring how we might incorporate results from Fast Flip into Google News. From these tests we hope to learn whether including Fast Flip results in Google News would provide a good experience for users and news publishers. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html

Google hasn’t said when the new feature will be rolling out, but it could appease a great many publishers. Speculation also says that the change could build the framework for creating paywalls to articles — maybe Rupert Murdoch won’t leave Google.

EQUTE — Google and European advertising regulator Advertising Standards Authority are going into business to investigate advertising complaints. ASA said that without the Google funding, it wouldn’t have the resources to adequately regulate digital media from viral videos to banner ads and e-mail marketing.

Google said it was only happy to help.

Matt Brittin, Google’s UK managing director, told the Telegraph that, “if people have a complaint about a claim made on a website it’s important that it is properly investigated. We support the ASA’s aims of providing consumer protection and are happy to help get this up and running for the benefit of UK consumers and businesses.”

One lawyer says the funding raises some ethical questions and competition questions inside of Europe, and for good reason.

Jo Farmer, a partner at law firm Lewis Silkin, told the Telegraph that, “Consumer groups will be delighted that the ASA is looking to close down this gap in their regulatory regime. But, important questions remain — such as what is going to happen to websites that are hosted outside of the UK but are aimed at UK consumers? Will the ASA be looking to its funding partner Google to impose any additional penalties for non-compliance, such as blacklisting offenders from Google’s search pages?”

The changes are scheduled to go into effect in the second half of 2010, but more announcements form ASA and Google will likely come before then .