Global energy firm BP is using Google AdWords in an effort to help stem the tide of bad publicity that has washed up on its shore following the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to news agency AFP, the company has already spent $1.25bn on containing the spill, which occurred following an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in April.

And as well as trying to minimise damage to the environment, the company is also attempting to minimise further damage to its reputation with a PPC campaign.

BP has bid on keywords including ‘BP oil spill’, ‘BP oil spill lawsuit’ and ‘BP suit’. All searches bring up a sponsored listing on Google which links through to the company’s page detailing its response to the disaster.

“Info about the Gulf of Mexico Leak. Learn more about how BP is helping,” say the adverts.

Speaking to ABC News, a BP spokesperson, said: “We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find out more about our efforts in the Gulf and make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer.”

Commenting on the move, the chief executive of one US marketing firm, said: “…they’re getting so much bad press that directing traffic to their own site is a great PR strategy”.

By Richard Morris

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Proof that online advertising spending has remained resilient throughout the wider economic downturn came today when Google announced its latest batch of financial results.

The search giant registered a year-on-year revenue rise of 23 per cent, with revenue of US$6.77billion for the three months to March 31 2010.

Profits rose by 37 per cent – and yet analysts remained stoically unimpressed, and Google shares fell by five per cent after the results were released.

Analysts’ unease seemed to have been caused by news that Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt would no longer take part in the quarterly conference calls announcing the company’s results – despite Google stressing that this had no wider meaning about Schmidt’s role in the company.

There was also some concern that, despite the strong performance, Google’s cost-per-click – the price advertisers pay when someone clicks on their ad – had fallen by four per cent over the final quarter of 2009. This meant that it had risen by seven per cent over the year as a whole, when many analysts had expected its AdWords programme to post an even larger year-on-year rise.

The California-based company still makes most of its revenue from outside the United States, with the proportion having stayed fairly constant over the last two quarters, at 53 per cent and 52 per cent respectively.

Google admitted that it would continue to make substantial investments. Leading up to the results, it had been active in the market, and indeed had made its first foray into the UK, buying visual search recognition app developer Plink.

Its PlinkArt software lets users analyse and identify well-known works of art and gives them the chance to buy poster versions. The developers claim the software was downloaded more than 50,000 times within six weeks of its launch. Plink founders, Mark Cummins and James Philbin, will work on Google’s own visual search project, Google Goggles.

Google had earned US$842million from the UK in the first quarter of 2010, or 13 per cent of its overall revenue – identical to the proportion earned in the same quarter the previous year.

Internationally, it said it had recruited 800 extra staff during the quarter, and its global head-count had reached 20,621 as of March 31.

Paid search adverts are already playing their part in trying to sway the voting public ahead of this year’s general election.

The Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to announce later this morning that the 2010 general election will be held on May 6. He left Downing Street at 10am on Tuesday morning, heading for Buckingham Palace to ask permission from the Queen to dissolve Parliament .

The next few weeks will see all parties campaigning, and while the internet is already playing a major part in the battle for hearts and minds, this will undoubtedly snowball as election night draws near.

A search for conservative party in Google currently brings up three sponsored links – two of which relate to the general election. One paid search advert from the Labour party offers to reveal “The Tory risk to Britain”, while a Conservative paid ad below is entitled “Labour have failed – find out why you should vote conservative in the election”.

According to the Evening Standard, the Conservatives have been buying up key search terms on Google, while the party’s Facebook page has attracted over 30,000 fans. The Labour Party’s Facebook page has attracted a little over 10,000 supporters.

With polls suggesting there is only a narrow margin between the two main political parties, the internet is set to play a considerable role in attempting to influence the electorate.

Lord Gould, Labour’s political strategist during four election campaigns, told the Guardian the internet will be “a giant autonomous force” in this year’s fight. He likened it to “an army of the night that moves on its own and no one will be able to control its influence”.

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Europe’s highest court has ruled that Google did not infringe trademark law by selling keywords to trigger advertisements, and rejected claims from bespoke luggage-maker Louis Vuitton and others that the practice undermined their brands.

The European Court of Justice said advertisers were free to buy keywords identical to trademarks of rivals as long as the way the advertisements were displayed did not mislead consumers over the authenticity of goods and services.

The court said that in cases where ads could confuse consumers, brand owners should invoke their rights against the advertisers concerned rather than Google — unless Google failed to act on a complaint, or actively manipulated keywords.

The ruling is good news for Google’s AdWords paid-search business at the core of Google’s $23 billion online advertising operations, as well as of competitors such as Yahoo! Inc, and gives brand owners a way to prevent wrongful use of their trademarks.

“It’s a good decision in large parts,” Fabian Ziegenaus, an intellectual property lawyer at Linklaters, told Reuters.

“It does not forbid Google per se to sell trademark keywords, so the business model is not at stake, and brand owners are also protected through the decision.”

Advertisers often buy brand names of their competitors as keywords to increase viewings for their own ads. Google says the practice is in the interests of consumers who do not want their search results to be limited to a single brand.

Brand owners can also bid for their own brand names as keywords and this auction process determines the order in which sponsored links are displayed in the Google search results.

Until 2004, Google banned advertisers from buying others’ brand names as keywords, but changed its policy in North America in that year, and four years later extended that to Britain and Ireland.

It says it will honour valid complaints from brand owners and prevent their rivals from using a trademarked keyword in their advertisements’ text.

Both Google and LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury-goods group, claimed the court’s decision as a victory.

“Trademarks … are key for companies to market and advertise their products and services. But trademark rights are not absolute,” wrote Google’s senior litigation counsel for Europe, Harjinder S. Obhi on the company’s European public policy blog.

“We believe that user interest is best served by maximising the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts.”

LVMH Vice Chairman Pierre Gode told Reuters: “We are very happy with the decision. We consider the decision is very important as the liability of advertisers is well established.”

A new service currently under test from Google looks set to shake up competition among the growing comparison website market.

AdWords Comparison Ads lets users compare various relevant offers, with results being offered in less than a second, as, according to Dan Friedman from Google blog Inside AdWords, “speed is of the essence for many users.”

After being tested in the United States in the mortgage comparison market, the service has now spread to the UK, initially offering users the opportunity to compare current credit card deals. “Some major issuers have signed up to be part of the initial run,” Friedman said.

Comparison Ads allows users to make very specific searches – for example 0 per cent balance transfers or interest-free purchase offers – and displays results side-by-side.

Friedman continues: “There are no long forms for users to fill in…It’s part of our service to make ads more relevant and useful to our users, and to help our advertisers reach the people who are more interested in (their) products and services.”

Advertisers using the service do not receive any information which would allow them to identify the source of a query, unless a user applies explicitly for an offer made through the site.

The end of the temporary cut in the UK's value added tax (VAT) rate from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent, as 2009 bade its farewell, coincided with a big surge in web searches, according to Experian Hitwise.

Search terms such as ‘VAT increase’, ‘vat increase 2010’, ‘vat rate change’ and ‘when does vat go back up to 17.5%’ received their highest ever traffic on January 2 – but fewer than half of those who used these terms went on to visit official sites, Robin Goad of Hitwise UK said in his blog.

Nearly half of those searching for information about the VAT increase ended up visiting the Government website, while 13.3 per cent found more information through news sources.

Another 12.9 per cent of those searching visited business and financial sites, which paid for 26.8 per cent of the traffic they received, with business information sites such as Business Link bidding aggressively on a number of terms.

These figures overshadowed the performance of retailers’ websites during most of December, with just 4.2 per cent of searches landing on retail websites, although the sector saw a surge in traffic the week before Christmas with consumers trying to grab last-minute bargains before the rate increase.

Between December 21 and January 2, UK internet visits to retail websites increased by 13 per cent. The increase in that period was only two per cent the previous year.

The biggest increase during that period was in the house and garden sector, where retailers experienced a 67 per cent increase in traffic.

Other sectors selling big ticket items also posted above average increases, with the sport and fitness, computers and appliances and electronics categories all performing well.

Google is stepping up the service offered to its AdWords customers by allowing them to tailor their advertisements to the most relevant search queries.

Comparison Ads allows advertisers to match their ads to exact search terms. As Dan Friedman said on the Inside AdWords blog: "Sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want."

He cited the example where a customer was searching for mortgages, and said users searching for ‘mortgage’ on Google.com  would be able to specify the type of loan they were looking for, and then compare relevant offers alongside each other.

Friedman also said businesses would benefit from the ability to better target their ads: “You can target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads,” he said.

These will be generated when a user clicks on an ad for Comparison Ads, which will take them to a page containing more detailed, sponsored results.

At this stage, a user can further refine the results by adding extra information such as income and home value. “Once users find an offer that matches their specific needs, they can either call you directly or request a quote,” Friedman added.

If a user requests a quote, Google automatically blanks out the user’s phone number and sends the AdWords client a unique code that they can use to contact the user directly.

Google believes the three key advantages of the system will be speed, transparency and privacy.

It will be evaluating the results of a trial currently being undertaken on a limited basis with a number of AdWords’ mortgage and refinancing customers before rolling out the system more widely to search users and advertisers.