Google Europe Blog: SMEs

The Internet - the engine of European economic growth?

Thursday, October 28, 2010

farmhouse kitchen tablesomeone’s bedroomThe Boston Consulting GroupConnected Kingdom report

In 2009, the Internet contributed £100 billion to the UK economy. That represents 7.2% of GDP.

The Internet’s contribution to UK GDP is bigger than that of many other industries, for example utilities or transport.

The UK is the no1 country in the world for e-commerce and is a net exporter of ecommerce goods and services: we export £2.80 for every £1 we import.

The companies that enable the online economy (ie, provide the infrastructure, access and services that constitute the Internet) employ an estimated 250,000 people in the UK and have revenues of over £50 billion.

The Internet economy is expected to grow by 10% per year

exporting tartanonline games for kidsOxford Internet Institutewww.connectedkingdom.co.ukPosted by Sarah Hunter, Senior Policy Manager, Google UK

Unlocking the Internet’s potential for SMEs

Thursday, October 21, 2010

AgroterraTimrSpreakerPIN-SMEEurope 2020 Innovation Union Flagship Initiative33% of all SMEs to buy and sell online by 2015Small Business Actonline advertisingGmail, Calendar and DocsEurostat figuresworking with public- and private sector partners in the UKin PolandPosted by Sarah Greenwood, Policy Manager, Google Brussels

A Polish Internet Revolution

Monday, May 10, 2010

Poland is one of the few countries that is emerging from Europe’s financial crisis relatively unscathed. While many European Union members struggle to raise funds, Poland’s zloty remains stable and interest rates low.

During my recent visit, my former Dow Jones colleague, now Bloomberg bureau chief Dennis McQuaid, told me how the government just had sold off a large state-owned insurance company – and the offering was seven times oversubscribed, making it the country’s biggest ever IPO. Poland’s economy has kept growing and the streets of Warsaw bustle with well-dressed shoppers and the clatter of construction.

Personally, this success is gratifying. As a journalist, I covered Poland during the 1980s when it laboured under communism. Stores were empty then. But the Polish spirit amazed me – how a courageous people could undertake a successful non-violent, spiritually-based, worker- and intellectual-led revolution. In 1989, I watched some Solidarity supporters set up the country’s first free newspaper in a day care centre. It was called Gazeta Wyborcza.

Today, Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland’s top paper, part of the giant Agora group. It operates out of an airy, sparkling, shiny steel headquarters building. Grzegorz Piechota, the paper’s special projects editor, presented an upbeat outlook for the future. While Gazeta hasn’t escaped the pain of the transition online, it has embraced the web, starting dozens of sites targeted to different audiences, from teenage girls to senior citizens. “We know we have no choice except to move online,” Piechota said.

For Google, Poland represents a successful laboratory for bringing business online. Nimble, small, family owned companies dominate the economy. Yet most have little or no online presence. While four in every five consumers are searching for information online about products and services, a Google-sponsored study last year showed that fewer than half of small Polish businesses have any online presence.

In order to get Poland online, we launched an Internet Revolution campaign at the end of last year, supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The program offers advice on how Polish companies could get online using both Google and non-Google tools, including a free package to help them establish a web domain, create a website and launch their first domestic or international online advertising campaign.

The success of this initiative has exceeded our expectations. Last week, we announced at a press conference that over 10,000 small entrepreneurs had signed up. The Polish economy may ‘only’ rank 21st globally, but it’s clear that the country has a healthy appetite for making the internet an integral part of doing business and driving growth for the future.

Posted by Bill Echikson, Head of Communications, South, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

Reaching Consumers Across Borders

Thursday, May 7, 2009

EU SME weeksolutionsestimates SMEs that use AdWords, Google's online advertising product, can reach consumers who are searching for products and services in multiple languages, across borders, all from a single online advertising account paid for in one currency. Advertisers may target ads to users in more than 40 languages or use location targeting to direct ads to different countries, regions, or cities. The biggest bonus though, is that advertisers only pay if someone interacts with their ad. In simple terms, if there is no click, there is no payment.
AdWords offers the ability for SMEs to show ads to consumers using several methods, such as matching country or language targeting to Google domains (.fr, .de, etc) or by specific geographic search terms ("London plumbers" would show to users in London). Another component of targeting is by an analysis of the user's IP address. IP addresses can give a general sense of a user's physical location, based on the regional assignment of IP addresses. Such advertising targeting capabilities give advertisers a reasonable sense of control that they are not wasting precious advertising euros on clicks from potential customers that they are unable to serve.
Many European SMEs have successfully grown their businesses across national borders thanks to the global targeting capabilities in AdWords. Having found success in the UK with AdWords, the footwear retailer Cloggs launched a French-language website coupled with ads targeted to French consumers which has generated an average of 100 sales daily.
What we see is that the proportion of our EU customers' AdWords budget spent on cross-border prospects is about double the Commission's 7% figure for cross-border consumer purchases. That difference is not surprising - AdWords advertisers can more easily target consumers across borders compared to traditional media. Further, our figures include B2B sellers, and some may have set up local fulfillment operations such that consumers are unaware that the ultimate seller is in fact based abroad.

In any event this is a figure that both we and the Commission would like to see increase. And more choice for consumers is a good thing too. To that end, we have increased our efforts to educate AdWords advertisers about how they can attract consumers from across borders to their websites by expanding their advertising campaigns internationally. AdWords specialists recently held online web tutorial sessions in 4 languages open to advertisers in 7 EU countries, offering tips for how to expand their reach across borders. We invited thousands of advertisers in the EU to these live sessions and will make recordings of these trainings available online. This month, we're going to post international campaign expansion tips on Google's European Inside AdWords blogs (check out the Swedish Inside AdWords blog for an example), spreading the word for how AdWords can support the entrepreneurial ambitions of SMEs in the EU.

Europe Blog

The Internet - the engine of European economic growth?

Unlocking the Internet’s potential for SMEs

A Polish Internet Revolution

Reaching Consumers Across Borders

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