If you have “US English” (at least in the UK), the URL is http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor – and that offers you version 7.6.1 (as of Sunday 5th Sept 2010 at 14:00 UT). What makes that version confusion doubly confusing is that the URL is a redirect at Google’s end from the offered URL, documented in the release announcement as being http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/. I found that I had to switch language preferences to UK English, in order to get to the URL http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/adwordseditor/. That URL does offer the 8.0.1 release.

(REVISED)Testing Failure

After installation, one of the most obvious things to do is to reconnect to your AdWords Accounts. That’s done in the usual way – but Google’s testing has slipped up. On the Mac I’m using, the download window looks like this:

Truncated Progress - font size/window size problem on Mac

The font selected for the window is too large, so the download status is off to the right edge of the window. It isn’t possible to use the Mac font size change keystrokes to adjust the font to fit. The window size can’t be stretched to allow the data to be exposed either. Critical error? No – just annoying and suggestive that the testing regime might mean there’s some more egregious bugs in the Mac version. Tech details to reproduce? Safari 5.0.1 on Mac 10.6.4 with AdWords Editor 8.0.1.

Update

Ah ha! The window sizing bug is caused by a font increase in that account. If the default font size (adjusted in the status area of the main window, lower right) is 110%, you’ll see this problem.

Nice Features

But it does offer some nice features, such as linking to the new Google Places advertising extensions, and the AdWords API Advert Parameters for templated adverts. Still no generalised mechanism to affect the values of Ad Parameters other than via the API, but that feature itself is such a substantial improvement over the original API, that I can’t really complain.

An SEO Note:

Oh, and while I’m at it… I just did a check to see how quickly Google is updating the organic search results… within three minutes of posting, this article is showing up:

AdWords Is An Auction

Basically, AdWords is an auction for space, on each keyword. The more money your advert returns to Google, the more highly the advert will be ranked. If your advert is sufficiently disappointing to users, or misleading, or violates one of a bunch of rules, no amount of money will keep the advert in play. What you pay is determined by the value of the advert below you. If your competitors aren’t willing to pay a lot, you don’t pay a lot. If your advert is outrageously good, then you may end up paying less per click to beat your competitors (you’re renting the space, not each advert).

One of the basic rules of auctions, especially an auction where your payment is determined by the bidders below you, is that the more bidders there are, the higher the value of the auction to the auctioneer. So, Broad Match, the default choice for AdWords, allows Google to recruit as many advertisers to the auction as will reasonably be satisfied. And Google effectively runs an auction for each space on the screen – so increasing the pool of bidders has a large impact on the whole page of results for a keyword.

Another key element for Google and advertisers is satisfaction. If advertisers get dragged into auctions for searches that they don’t want their advert to be shown on, they’ll get some clicks, and those’ll probably be low quality clicks – poor conversions. On the other hand, users mis-key, so a certain amount of Broad Matching activity is useful – it helps you find miskeyed stuff and search queries that you hadn’t considered. But, overall, if the quality of Broad Match is bad, then you’re likely to bid lower on Broad Match, or switch to an Exact Match strategy. So there’s a pressure on Google to keep Broad Match to some reasonable matches, rather than just anything, all the time (that doesn’t mean that a few wild excursions are impossible, just less likely).

A Beautiful Mind versus Broad Match

AdWords can control the use of Exact Match to evade using Broad Match, to some extent, by telling you that search volumes are too small to match your keyword. That’s kind of true – there is a computational cost to managing a huge number of exact matches with a low likelihood of being searched for. So there’s a way to make sure that some quantity of Broad Match stays in play, without everyone heading for Exact Match. The ratio is probably determined using something derived from the Nash Equilibrium – you’ve seen that film “A Beautiful Mind”? That’s the John Nash I’m talking about.

OK, so what’s match types and search queries and auctions got to do with the Google accreditation and Agencies? I think they are intimately bound together, but through an unexpected connection… small advertisers.

Small Advertisers – Welcome To Frustration City

Small advertisers tend to have low budgets. They can’t take part in all auctions for all relevant keywords. The smartest ones use exact match, and geotargeting and the other tools – but you need to have invested time and effort to learn those, which often has a significant cost for small businesses. There’s a lot of users that just don’t understand AdWords, and don’t have the time to invest in learning.

Looking at examples I’ve handled in the AdWords Help Forum… They bid globally for a business with a 20 mile service radius. Their adverts are rubbish – describing their place of business or their name, but not what they do. Their landing pages fail to have a call to action. These advertisers tend to have a bad time with AdWords. They may abandon accounts and start again – causing Google to suspend the account because it looks like a scammer. These small advertisers complain, in numbers. They do so on the AdWords Help Forum, in their thousands.

Abandoned AdWords Users

So far, Google hasn’t really addressed the needs for these users. There was an attempt to create a Starter Edition, but as a cure, it was worse than the disease, and pushed users in directions that were less likely to lead to success, not more. The Starter Edition is gone. It didn’t solve the problem. But there’s still lots of dissatisfied users, asking for help in public.

Marketeers will recognise a classic problem here. Small advertisers, low budgets, can’t afford the services of a big agency. Larger agencies like to have clients who spend upwards of $1000/month – it’s just not cost effective for either party (agency or client) to really consider the $100/month budget client. But these smaller advertisers are present in vast numbers.

AdWords Auctions and the Small Business

What do we know about the auction? The yield of the auction depends on the count of bidders, to a substantial degree. If we can find a way to prevent small advertisers from defecting, then their low value contribution should yield a higher value contribution from larger advertisers. By taking part in a fraction of the auctions (to fit the budget) this mass of small advertisers pushes up the Average Cost Per Click. It’s in Google’s interests to make sure these small advertisers participate, and get some value.

But they’re expensive to create, these small accounts, and low yield for an agency. The Google accredited AdWords consultants and agencies out there, well, they could service these guys, but one and two person agencies tend not be supported by software – effective AdWords management software is pretty expensive. So the very small advertiser tends to be unaddressed, and tends to be dissatisfied – but Google needs them, in order to maximise returns from the largest advertisers.

AdWords – Fixing The Small Advertiser Problem

We can square this circle and resolve the conundrum, I think. What about if Google creates a support team, in a low labour cost country? You pay a little more to have the account set up, and Google uses its’ massive automation to provide a moderately successful AdWords account (statistically, some will be rubbish and some will be awesome, but on the whole, they will barely return a profit for Google). This mass of small advertisers will create a pressure on the auction, pushing up the major advertisers a few cents – on billions of clicks. That’s where the value lies.

By providing more support for small advertisers, and reducing defection, Google makes only a small amount of profit. Google can point to this near-philanthropic effort and everyone will feel good about the multi-billion behemoth doing good. But it’s more clever than that. The support for the small advertisers creates an uplift in the auction, delivering millions of dollars to billions of dollars per year, from larger businesses.

AdWords Agency Impact

But if there’s a low cost way to get your account set up and managed, what happens to the small AdWords agency? Gradually deprived of small businesses with problems to solve, these guys will be pushed out of the market – squeezed between Google below, and larger agencies above.

The new Google Marketplace appears optimised to allow the largest agencies to appear highly ranked – so there’s a force for consolidation amongst small and large agencies.

And that would solve another problem. The deceptive agencies that phone up and say they have a special arrangement with Google that lets them place companies on page 1 of search results. The staff who make these calls have no idea whether they are selling SEO or PPC – they just know there’s a special relationship and you can buy your way to the top.

That’s a brand problem from Google. It causes a number of small businesses to believe that Google’s organic results are affected by payments – which is neither obviously true (indirectly it is true – but the money paid doesn’t go to Google) nor helpful (Google benefits from appearing to be uninfluenced by third party money – a fair and impartial judge). By and large, these less-than-entirely-ethical agencies will also be squeezed. That helps Google, and in turn, encourages more advertisers and discourages spend on SEO link building (much of which is wasted after about six weeks, anyway – and the cross contamination means that on informational searches, where there is no commercial intent, Google can start to deliver better informational and less commercial content).

When will this consolidation happen? I have no idea. I’m not well plugged in to Google AdWords insiders these days. If I were, I probably couldn’t write about this, as it’d probably be part of an NDA. But I used to be well connected, and I can guess from observing recruitment (I’ve seen Google advertising for people with knowledge of the Nash Equilibrium, for example), and from thinking about auctions, and marketing… I could be wrong, of course. I’m not always right, but then so few people are. :)

AdWords Agency Consolidation

I’ll guess it’ll happen in the next year. Recessions are a good time to think about and come up with new services to extract more money. We’ve already seen experiments in some countries where Google offered to set up small accounts – in the UK, for example.

It takes a large business, like Google, time to take on and train the staff, once they’ve done the test marketing… So, I’d expect something within the next eighteen months. That’s about enough time to hire an army of third world workers, train them, and develop the supporting websites and collateral, including a physical mail, TV and phone campaign… If you aren’t already planning how to grow or merge your small AdWords agency, this may be a good time to put that consideration back into play.

This would also be a strong play to counter the consolidation of Bing and Yahoo search results, due to come on the agenda, shortly…

How Does Google Rank Results

I don’t know all the details. Rand doesn’t know all the details. Some guys at Google know a lot of the factors. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the search quality team, claims over 200 factors go into ranking.

What we do know is that backlinks – credible links regarded by Google as likely for a search user to visit – are important. We know that anchor text is important. There’s some other factors that we know influence Google ranking.

What *else* do we know?

We (professional search engine optimisation people) know that on-page content is valuable. For low competition keywords – keywords where there aren’t a lot of links and anchor text, and hardly anyone searches – then page content is enough. Look at the example in the graphic below. There’s precisely one page on the internet, with that text for something that I can’t find on Google. When I wrote that, it was true; if you search now, you’ll find that page. Well, until some spoiler copies it elsewhere…

However, try putting the word “bad credit loan” on a page on a new web site with some other relevant and unique content, valuable to a user, and see how high you rank for the term. You can wait. And wait. And wait. You’re not going to show up on the first page of results, just by having a great page alone. It’s not just the content, it’s the backlinks that make the difference.

So we now know, as a result of this test, that while Google does pay attention to on-page factors, they also pay attention to backlinks. And in competitive spaces, *effective* backlinks count for more than the page content.

The important message to understand from this is that different factors apply under different conditions. Content alone won’t put you on page one. Backlinks alone won’t keep you there.

Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate

So, at some scale, do CTR (Click Through Rate) and Bounce Rate make any difference? I believe they do, and this blog is a testament to that. Look at this screenshot.

That’s a Google Analytics shot of the last 15 months activity for a specific page on the Merjis blog. It’s all about “gclid” – something you’ll probably care about if you do paid search and look in web server logfiles.

I’m using this blog as an example, because I’ve been using it for tests for years – I know how it works, and it isn’t confidential client data. I can reveal the usage, because I have my own reasons for running a blog, and few of them directly have anything to with making money.

Most other pages on this site get a profile like this other example:

This is pretty typical for a “newsy” blog article. Usage on the day that it is written, and a dribble thereafter. It then usually dries up after a few weeks, because the rank has decayed with time.

So why, with a higher bounce rate, does the older article do better than the newer article in rankings? If Bounce Rate is important, then surely the lower bounce rate in a newer article must mean that Google should drop the older article?

I suspect that Google doesn’t have a rigid number. They look at how well you do relative to other sites. And especially, they look to see whether search users search again for the same or very similar searches. Read that article on SideWiki, and it’s lightweight. No real information. No real recommendations. The long lived article on gclid has a much higher bounce rate and longer reading time. It’s the reading time that’s the clue. When you’ve read my article on gclid, you probably don’t want to read another article about gclid. It’s reasonably definitive.

Google sustains that old article in search results, despite its’ great age, and despite a high bounce rate, because those users who do read it, value it. It’s there, because it helps Google to deliver a page of search results that users value more than *without* that article present.

Uh – You Didn’t Mention CTR

Again, I don’t think it is actually CTR that Google is looking for. It is user satisfaction. So a high CTR, caused by a misleading piece of copy, won’t help. You have to deliver what you offer. Again, I don’t think that Google is measuring conversion, either. But a high CTR message with a high conversion rate, meaning that users are highly satisfied – that’s what Google wants you to make.

You won’t be directly rewarded for high CTR – but you can measure it (especially if you also run PPC and can get the impression rate). You won’t be rewarded directly by Google for high conversion rates. But Google does appear to prefer sites that answer the question posed by the search query. And the proxy that can be used by Webmasters, who don’t have access to Google’s richer data, is their own performance, as CTR and Conversion Rate. Increase those, and you are more likely to increase position.

Interaction of Factors

If you have a good site, with highly relevant content, you tend to get more links. So disentangling backlinks, and the immeasurable relative user satisfaction, is difficult. Pretty much the only way that I know it can be done, is when you have web sites with accidental misbehaviours that create the right conditions for a test. The technical problems that create the conditions are rare – and recreating them in a real website is likely to decrease the performance. It’s unlikely that anyone will give you the opportunity to mess up their site, just to prove what works.

However, if you want to go about it… Here’s what I think you’ll need:

• A visibly horrible page, with a low conversion – as your starting point
• Weak Title and Meta Description as a starting point
• A lot of visitors per day – it takes a long time to demonstrate, otherwise
• The ability to make sitewide link changes to the page under test
• Good backlinks – you’ll want to know that you *could* rank well on page one

Change the URL for your horrible page, sitewide. Wait for Google to find it and rank it again. Note the position. Watch the position fall over a period of a week or two (depending on visitor volume). Now improve the page, and switch the URL again and wait for Google to find and rank it. Then watch the rankings change and note which way they go. Now revert the page and switch URLs again, and this time change the Title and Meta Description. Now watch the ranking changes. Now fix up the page again and once more switch the URL and watch.

You should, IME, find that you achieve a higher long term position when you have a better title and description, and a higher converting page with a lower bounce rate. If you can explain why you *shouldn’t* get a higher position with a site that is better for users, I’d love to know the reasons. But don’t make your explanation involve “gaming” the system.

And, FWIW, I don’t believe that the Title and Description are important, as direct factors for SEO. You can rank perfectly well for keyword free pointless titles, and descriptions without keywords that are positively turgid and rambling. However, show the user that you are focused on solving their problem, and your CTR increases; and if you are focused on the user, you’ll probably have a reasonable landing page, which will engage and convert better. Google’s not going to reward you for a better snippet, directly, but for a better user experience. Your only measures though, will be what you can observe – CTR, Bounces, Conversions. If I could tell you to look at the “re-query rate”, I’d tell you to do so – instead, you’ll have to use the information you can get.

Implications For SEO

If a blog article can decay to little traffic in a few weeks, or sustain rankings for years, on the same blog, with the same blogging software, then the difference must be backlinks? Well, not substantially. Over the years, I’ve had more backlinks to newsy stories, but still this “gclid” article keeps ranking. And all the time, the other lighter weight articles just keep falling out of the listings.

There’s a few other similar articles on this blog that rank, and stay high for years and years and years. Non-competitive searches, but of long lasting traffic value. And the other sites that I’m competing with, for attention, are large forums. High weight. Much more frequently updated content. I’m *deliberately* not trying to place links for articles. Just letting what happens, happen – so I can understand why it happens. So there’s no contamination effects here with deliberate link placements.

What are the articles? They all tend to be like that gclid article. Something that is detailed, informative, and means that you can go away and do something. Useful articles, in other words. Harder to write than “straight news” articles, as you need unique content, written to address the audience. That’s part of my reason for writing – attempting to develop clearer communication.

The clear implication is, I think, that useful content matters. And how do we know it is useful? It’ll show up in search engine rankings, usablility data and other disturbingly hidden and arcane resource. Google will reward useful content with a better sustained rank – but won’t put you on page one just because you have a great article, unless you have some backlinks to create credibility.

But How?

Rand makes the point that data about use can be gamed. But so can backlinks. That’s the major part of undeclared paid backlinks, small world building, and other “black hat” techniques. We know that Google sees through most black hat techniques, given time.

We also know, or can find out about, Google’s interest in invalid impressions and invalid clicks. For example, invalid impressions are generated when search engine ranking tools are run – they reduce the effective CTR. Invalid clicks are generated when users double click, or are paid to click. Just as with paid search, these two types of invalid activity are measurable by Google. In fact, Google can measure a lot more than a webmaster can see.

We webmasters only get to see bounce rates and conversions. Google gets to look at whether users search again. Much more valuable. If you want to build the worlds’ best search engine, then you want to feature the results that tell you that you’ve got a winning page – pages where users don’t need to search any more. Results that have users positively selecting that site again, when they see it in listings. Webmasters just don’t have that detail, directly. We just don’t know if the other guy answers better – unless we expend effort to learn our customers’ minds and make sure we have the best answer.

User Experience

Google’s Ten Things lists, first, “Focus on the user”. The results from this blog, and from other client activities that I’m not going to reveal in any detail, are fairly clear. Content that Google can measure as being liked by users, rank better and longer than content that is spammy, tedious and weak. The factors that lead to better rankings will include appropriate Titles and Descriptions and engaging content. It has to be, or rule 1 is broken.

We know that Google has experience of measuring impressions and data to look for invalid data. We know that Google is pretty good at it – or there’d be more click fraud problems with AdWords. So, if it can be done, and it is an important indication of quality, why wouldn’t Google use searchers behaviour to modify results, not just personally, but across the index?

Why can’t you improve the results when you click on your own listings? Because it is identical behaviour to the banned AdSense practice of clicking on adverts on your own site. Detectable. Invalid. Not counted. And for reasons that I don’t want to go into, I believe the same will be true of botnets and eLance and Mechanical Turk attacks. There will be a signature associated with them, that doesn’t match normal user behaviour. The signatures can be spotted and countered, by assigning the activities as invalid – just as it is in AdWords. Since AdWords continues to run without being infested with click fraud to unusable levels, we have a working system, on a global scale, that shows that user behaviour can be extracted from noisy fraudulent behaviour.

It isn’t perfect, true, but it separates AdWords from being a system that solely acts to transfer advertising funds to thieves, into a system that, more often than not delivers prospective buyers to an advertiser’s site. It isn’t perfect, but it works well enough. AdWords only works because it identifies and categorises user behaviour.

User behaviour categorisation works in one system that Google has, worldwide, on a service with measurable economic value. Why wouldn’t it be usable in organic search results?

Conclusions

Failing to identify and understand user interests is an SEO mistake. These are reflected by (but are not completely explained by) CTR and Bounce Rates – because that’s about the best that Webmasters can get. Google doesn’t have to use those – they have better numbers that are more meaningful to user experience. But saying that “Google doesn’t use bounce rates” is not the same as saying “Google doesn’t take account of user behaviour”.

Unlike Rand, I believe that Google cares very deeply about the user experience, and that Google has very sophisticated technology, probably shared with the Google AdWords guys, to identify unusual search behaviours and exclude them from consideration.

Given enough data, probably gained from multivariate testing on all the different data centres, Google can identify whether users are more, or less, satisfied by different ordering in search results than a pure backlinks-plus-content model would give.

Small scale tests probably won’t show anything about user interaction – because the activity doesn’t have statistical significance or because the signature of strange search activity is too obvious. So, don’t try faking it – if you’ve read this far, you probably aren’t smart enough to outwit Google’s teams of click-fraud defence guys. They are really pretty good, as anyone with a rational assessment of AdWords click fraud levels will tell you. Not perfect, but good enough to make the effort of using AdWords worthwhile, rather than primarily a way of siphoning your advertising funds to fraudsters. :)

Why do I say “if you’ve read this far”? Because if you really knew how to hide click streams, you’d be doing it with AdSense. And you’d have stopped reading at that point – because you own the game already. If you can’t own that game, you can’t own the game of spoofing user behaviour in organic search – it is (not identical to, but close enough to) the same game. At the moment I don’t understand why you’d bother with SEO behavioural spoofing, if you’d gamed AdSense, because the revenue is a lot more direct… Maybe that’s why Rand hasn’t spoken with any black hatters that have cracked it?

And if Google can detect unusual impression and click data, then they can fulfil their primary mission, with respect to modifying organic rank based on real user data about preferences and satisfaction.

• Complaints that “Google won’t accept my Credit Card“
• Making promo vouchers work
• Suspension for various reasons, often involving guaranteed ways to make money from home, as an affiliate

By and large these users have been cut loose from Google Customer Service. The users have been sent through an automated path to the forum, rather than given human customer service. The causes of this bulk of visitors are, I think, complex, but Google appears at least partly complicit in its’ own generation of clients that it would prefer it didn’t have.

Look at this chain of events for example…

I spotted a mention of a previous Merjis article on another blog. The entire article had been scraped, along with many other sites’ content, to help that blog rank well on searches involving making money from home.

The site was monetised with AdSense adverts for a well known affiliate recruiter. So, first question: knowing that this advertiser will be promoting affiliates, very few of whom have a satisfactory experience to judge from the AdWords Help Forum, why is the advertising permitted either by AdWords or by AdSense?

Clicking on the AdSense advert takes the user to the affiliate recruitment site. They’ve avoided the landing page popup problem, by offering a JavaScript in-page popup to collect email addresses and names. A clever way to avoid the old problems of the classic affiliate squeeze page being given a low landing page quality score.

The popup is the main lead generator – because it makes a free offer that you receive in email. So the offer is invisible to Google bots – they’d have to complete a form, which, by convention, bots aren’t supposed to do (form filling could take actions on sites, like deleting postings, or ordering stuff, etc). And after that, the bot would have to read the email to understand the offer… which is usually delivered on another website.

So you arrive via the email cutout on a third site (the first is the blog-scraper with AdSense but no direct ties to AdWords, the second has no direct AdSense or AdWords connection, and the third site is the one with the sales proposition). The third site reveals that you make money by… signing up for AdWords. And Google will give you a promotional voucher for signing up for hosting via a third party. So, for that matter, will Yahoo, for this most recent “promotion”.

The series of cutouts in this chain makes it harder to detect. But the user still perceives the offer as validated by the major search marketing programs. The organic ranking, the promo vouchers, the AdSense adverts all combine to put the Google brand into the frame for the affiliate recruiter. Not quite as good as endorsement, but imagine how much harder it would be to convince people, if the AdSense adverts and Google comarketing weren’t available?

So Google indirectly pays the affiliate recruiter for running scraper sites, subsidising their costs of advertising, then offers a promo voucher via third party arrangement, which validates the shabby offering, that will recruit people who turn up in the AdWords Help Forum, desperate to make money from home with no knowledge. The volume of people turning up with problems is too high for Google to bother offering Customer Service… and it’s a lot of self inflicted woundings.

You could say that these users should be careful. That it is their responsibility to watch out for what they buy into. I could counter with the notion that providing payments and promotions to organisations that lead to a poor customer service experience appears to be something Google won’t tolerate in other advertisers… but it is OK for Google to do? Why?

Why am I writing about this? I used to enjoy working out small customer problems in the forum. It helped my troubleshooting skills. I could detect emerging problems more quickly. The current forum is useless for that. It’s just a place for people who should never have been recruited by Google, to get free customer service because Google isn’t willing to spend time on them. The mechanism of requiring a public posting decreases the volume of queries, as well as decreasing the value of the forum as a publicly accessible forum.

When we’re looking at social media, the misusage of the AdWords Help Forum as a public customer service forum suggests that there are some deep problems inside Google’s understanding of social media and the implicit and explicit contracts. But that’s another article for another day… In the interim, think of this as the other side of yesterday’s article about PC World and their soft paywall – where PC World made the barrier to interaction too high for me, Google has made almost frictionless something that probably shouldn’t be exposed in public.

A recent graphical rework and substantial posting by Kim Clinkunbroomer (MrsC) has rocketed the popularity outside the AdWords Help Forum.

So why doesn’t Google take the money?

Having seen several thousands of these questions, and looked at a handful of accounts with the problem, I have an answer – maybe not *the* answer, but *an* answer. In all the cases that I’ve seen, Google doesn’t want the account to be opened and to advertise.

Why not?

Because the site or the AdWords Account holder is in breach of, or is suspected to be in breach of, one or more of Google’s Terms and Conditions. It may even be offering a scam, such as those that Google is now actively trying to stop.

So far as I can see, the usual reasons for problems are:

• Opening multiple Google Accounts for the same offer (they may be different URLs, but the offer to the consumer is the same or substantially identical)
• Opening multiple Google Accounts to use promotional vouchers – the voucher program is intended to help businesses new to advertisers, not to provide free continuous advertising
• Offering a “dodgy deal” – Google lists a collection of types of offer that it is unlikely to accept, especially the “Google Money” and “Google data entry jobs”, or one that is becoming quite common in approaches to us to help, offering pirated data such as movies and music.

This third item – the “Google Money Tree”/”Google Treasure” type of offer, or knowingly offering material that could be in breach of copyrights, appears to be a common cause for rejection by Google. And the person suffering from the refusal to open an AdWords account is usually certain that the offering is valid – because they’ve bought an eBook at a price anywhere from $9.97 to $997.00 that assures them that other people have made money this way, and it is fool proof, and accepted by Google. It isn’t.

These scams are a pretty fool proof way for the original operator at the top of the pyramid to make money. But if you look carefully at the details, there are usually clues, visible to those who know something about AdWords. The major clues are that very often the scammers will imply that you get paid by Google. They’ll show a cheque *from Google*. If you get a cheque from Google, then that’s probably because you’re running AdSense, not AdWords. Easy for a novice advertiser to confuse those words, but they mean very different things.

AdWords is an advertising system. You pay Google to advertise offers. The offers have to comply with Google’s guidelines. Under AdWords, Google would usually only pay you a fraction of advertising costs, in the event of a few specific problems in the account – and that would usually be in the form of credits against future payments, in the account; not a check in the post, in other words.

AdSense is revenue generation for publishers. You need a lot of visitors, who click on adverts, to make a decent revenue from AdSense. AdSense will pay you, and if you’re good, it will pay you more than it costs to run your site.

If you see a “make money from home”, or a “work for Google” offer, that involves signing up for AdWords, look for signs that the offer is valid. Check the AdWords Editorial Guidelines before you sign up. Be harsh in your assessment of the offer. Don’t be taken in by “special price” offers, by people who show you an AdSense cheque, and especially ask yourself this question:

If this is such a great deal, why isn’t Google already flooded with advertisers who’ve been making money this way?

AdWords has been running in one form or another for about eight years. In that time, Google has seen hundreds of thousands of advertisers. There are people who’ve made money out of selling these pyramid systems. But this is a mature market – the opportunities to make lots of money have largely vanished.

The more advanced scammers know that you know that the easy ways to make money have gone. So they’ll now sell you “secrets and tricks of the AdWords Masters”, to target “massive, low spending keywords” with certainty of making money. Ask yourself why they wouldn’t be doing this for themselves. It isn’t because they are kind and generous. It’s because they make more money by duping the desperate.

Why won’t Google take the money anyway?

A common complaint from those denied the opportunity to advertise, is that Google is turning down their money, and that it’s not up to Google to decide what can and can’t be advertised.

This is a confusion based on the American “right of free speech” and the assumption that Google will find offering deceptive adverts to be in its’ best interests. Let’s look at those…

Deceptive advertising

Google has been successful because it offered high quality search engine results. Users trust the results, sometimes far in excess of the trust they should place. I’ve heard users complaining that a business *should* be selling a product or service, because the business has been accidentally highly ranked by Google for that product or service.

If Google were to destroy that trust, by offering adverts that mislead users, there is a risk that the business will see a downturn in search engine users. The reputation for delivering good results will be damaged, and overall advertising revenues will be affected. Google goes to a lot of effort to make sure that adverts are likely to be well regarded by search engine users.

Right of free speech

You have the right to say what you want in an open forum; within limits.

When you pay for the channel, then the owner of the channel can decide what they want to carry.

Google AdWords is at liberty to turn down your offer of money to carry a message that they don’t want to carry. Just as a newspaper doesn’t have to carry offensive material in an advert – the publisher has the right the choose the content. If you don’t like it, you have the right to advertise using your own system – it just won’t reach the audience that Google has built through its’ choice of what to carry.

Summary

If Google isn’t taking your money, stop worrying about that, and start worrying about the offer you are making. It may be part of some affiliate recruitment scam, or is an overexploited niche or is deceptive to users in some way. It may make the original designer of the scheme richer, but late joiners will suffer.

If you are running a business, make sure you aren’t offering duplicate adverts – trying to bring people to two sites with the same offer is an obvious trick to try, and Google has been handling that problems *for years*. It’s one of the fastest ways to a permanent ban, once they spot it. And it can happen if you’ve instructed an agency and then open your own account (e.g. if you’ve taken on an agency that offers to get you to number one in search results, without disclosing that they are using AdWords to do so).

If you have a real, legitimate business that doesn’t offer stolen copyrighted material or other offensive content, then pay attention to your site. You may be unexpectedly hosting malware, or using words that associate your product with standard online scams. If you can’t work out what the problems might be, then ask an AdWords expert.

Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve been part of Google’s attempt to de-staff and automate customer service, by relying on the willing help of volunteers. I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum. I contributed a lot of posts, over the years. In the early days, it was a good place to learn AdWords problems, and to spot problems and policy changes before they were announced. Over the last few years, Google has taken to sending users with problems to the Forum first, rather than to customer service.

Now, I don’t mind answering, in public, questions about AdWords, if I have the time to do so. What I don’t like is answering the same question, repeatedly, when it it caused by a failure to understand information architecture and search engine optimisation and I especially detest it when the question is entirely within the province of Google. An example of that? A user saying that their credit card has not been accepted by Google. There is no reason for anyone outside Google to know the causes for that. There is nothing that anyone outside Google can do about that. It’s a problem caused by Google deciding to decline payment – so what can you, or I, or any one else outside Google, say to the n’000th person to claim their card payment has not been accepted? There’s an entire subsection of the AdWords Help Forum that consists of would-be AdWords users complaining that their cards have not been accepted.

It’s not a nice place for a volunteer to hang out. And the rewards are minimal… because the interesting problems are now very few and far between. Anyone wanting to ask a serious question about *how* to use AdWords effectively, is lost in the noise of people whose adverts aren’t running yet (another Google internal problem, where Google has decided to defer approval of the adverts, or keywords, and no-one outside Google knows the precise reason) and other repetitive self inflicted customer service wounds. I wince when I look at the forum – so my response to this miserable treatment of Google’s customers is that I’ve resigned as a Top Contributor.

Agency and GAP Treatment

Agencies can have a Google Account Representative assigned to them. Sufficiently large accounts may have a “vertical” strategic team associated with them. So at any one time I’ve had between one and three account reps to handle problems. I’m actually pretty pleased with the way that works. I can have a new MCC set up inside a day. I can get billing questions resolved, and sort out linking, and raise account limits and have adverts pushed through expedited reviews.

But if you are a mass market, self-signed up customer, with a low budget? Tough. You’re on the self-help program. And that can be a maze of twisty links, all leading inexorably to the AdWords Help Forum, for volunteers to solve problems that Google has created for you, partially because they create a maze of ever shifting links to more or less incomprehensible answers and forms, and the forum.

Google Staffers

Google has a team of staffers who respond to Google-oriented questions. These are the AdWords Pros (AWPs). Empathetic. Pleasant. Courteous. Access to a lot of areas inside Google.

They answer thousands of posts. By eyeball estimate, the most prolific answerer, AWP.Bindu, from India, answers somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 individual threads a year, having checked the account to find out what the status is. She’s unfailingly nice, and really does try to help.

The AWPs are also sometimes ready and willing to help the Top Contributors tackle problems. Top Contributors, or TCs, have to answer frequently, and correctly, and courteously. Otherwise they won’t be TCs. It takes time. Months of answering several questions, correctly, every day. TCs have their own private area in the forum, invisible to normal users.

Why Am I Spitting Rivets This Time?

Google isn’t merely annoying an army of small businesses who’ve had their AdWords accounts terminated for unstated and apparently irreparable reasons, but it isn’t even able to obey it’s own guidelines for making websites. And if it did, the help services it offers, supported by volunteers, would be a lot easier to find, slightly more useful, and less painful for the volunteers that help Google deliver customer service.

Look at this ageing article by Google’s own Matt Cutts, on the use of the Nofollow link attribute. Old news for SEO. The summary of that article is that “page rank sculpting with nofollow is dead, and we may penalise organisations that overuse nofollow”. And what does *that* mean? It means that the nofollow attribute, originally intended to help reduce spam in discussion forums and blogs, has been so widely adopted that the use of the attribute is destroying the way that the web passes link weight.

What does Google do, in its volunteer supported web forums? It nofollows each and every link in every article, even when posted by a Google staffer, much less the “trusted” Top Contributors. The consequence of that is postings with links that refer users to better postings with good information, are not ranked any higher as a consequence of the additional links. That means that users are not served with the best content. That means that TCs and Google Staffers waste time repeatedly answering the same question, because the search engine has been rendered useless.

What does Matt actually say?

I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

In other words, when Google staffers have nofollow links to pages inside Google, or to pages outside Google, they are not doing the right thing. By nofollowing links within the help forum, useful pages inside Google aren’t ranked more highly, and external authoritative resources are also not helped. Ultimately that should lead to Google penalising itself for attempted pagerank sculpting. Amusing, eh?

Why Are Customer Problems Exposed To The World?

Google has taken a philosophy of user contributed content and applied it to ludicrous lengths. As I said earlier, there is no way that someone outside Google can usefully comment on why a specific advertisers adverts are not running. There’s lots of reasons. They usually boil down to “you’re in an account review or an advert review”. But that’s not the specific help that advertisers are looking for – like why their card has been refused.

It is reasonable for users to ask other users about the impact of geotargeting, or what kind of advert copy works best, and the reasonable fees for an agency. But asking other users about decisions that Google has made, for reasons kept private inside Google? It makes no sense to me, or to anyone else that I’ve spoken to, outside Google.

The philosophy that users are frequently enough nice and helpful is fine. I am, even with a snitty posting like this, attempting to help other users on the internet. It is even, in a painful way, helpful to Google, by pointing out that the policies they have developed are one thing and reality is another.

I like the idea of the forums. I use the other Google forums myself. But to withdraw customer service for wounds that Google has inflicted, and only Google can comment upon, and to direct those damaged customers to volunteers for support, is just not sane. Or if it is sane, it is sane in ways that mean that Google can reduce staffing – it isn’t sane in terms of developing a reputation for good customer service.

And lo and bhold, what do we see when the Nexus One ships? The same philosophy that users will help. How can I, sitting outside Google, respond to a question about when someone’s phone will ship? Or issue an RMA for defective hardware? Or deal with provisioning questions? These all need levels of of authority that are really part of the social contract between user and service provider. A relationship in which random third parties should not be welcomed by either side.

Yes, I do run an AdWords Help Forum blog (with Kim doing most of the postings, these days, as I’m just so annoyed with Google). But I regard it as a supplement to Customer Service, not a replacement for it. That’s why I resigned as a Top Contributor. Preventing users from advertising for Google internal reasons, then telling them to consult ignorant third parties, is demeaning for all involved parties.

And then nofollowing every useful link, makes the value of posting much lower than it should be, forcing the volunteers to keep answering the same questions, again and again. Some proper information architecture and linking would help a lot.

Updates

2010-06-21 – typos corrected.

I don’t remember seeing this addressed in any of the web analytics blogs and books that I’ve read for the last few years. It’s possible I missed something, and I’ll gladly add references to those articles, if anyone contributes them in comments here, or in emails to me.

Observation

Like much of good science, this starts with an observation:

When you look at the sources for which you have control of the requested URL, a substantial fraction have no referring info.

To understand what that observation means, we need to know a bit more about how visitors arrive, and what sources of data we have about the visitor.

Page Requests

Paid search, banner advertising, email and so on, allow you control the page request offered by users. You can add tracking parameters, and that lets your web measurement system collect that the request came from a particular source. That’s pretty important for click fraud measurement. If you aren’t adding tracking tags, then the visitor could be turning up from anywhere for any reason.

For example, lets’ assume that you are advertising for an Organic Cosmetics business. You place an advert on a keyword offering “organic acne treatment”. You bring people to a page on the site, for that treatment – http://www.organic acne treatment.com /our-products . You *MUST* add a tracking tag, or use some kind of autotagging (offered by AdWords, Yahoo!Search Marketing, etc) so that clicks from advertising can be measured by your web analytics service, and attributed to your paid search campaign.

What the tag looks like, will depend on your Web Analytics package. If you use Google Analytics, you might have tags like “?utm_media=ppc&utm_source=yahoo&utm_creative=organic+cosmetics”. So the requested page will be something like:

http://www.organic acne treatment.com /our-products?utm_media=ppc&utm_source=yahoo&utm_creative=organic+cosmetics

Without that, all you know is that someone requested that page… or is it?

And, of course, knowing that the click arrived as a result of an activity where *you* control the page request (typical of paid advertising opportunities), means that you now have a handle on part of the click fraud questions.

Referer (sic)

Something else that a web browser can optionally tell the web server, is known as the “referer”, in RFC2616 about the HTTP protocol (See Part 14, on Headers). This “referer” header sent from your web browser to the web server, says what the page request was, for the page *before* the request to the server. So we might see that the request for our page in the example, was referred to by “http://www google com/search?q=organic+acne+treatment” (and there’s usually some other stuff in there, describing the language and the browser and so on). So we know that a search engine was the source, and we know the keyword.

However, we don’t *know* that this click was from paid search. A common frustration amongst new advertisers is failing to identify clicks from AdWords, because advert tracking tags have not been added. Without the tracking parameters, all you have to work from is the “referer” header volunteered by the browser – and that only tells you that the user was looking at a page, not whether they clicked a free or a paid link.

So, one common misattribution is to *over-allocate* clicks to organic search and *under-allocate* to paid search, because neither tracking tags are available, nor is there any common way to tell from the “referer” field, that the source was paid search. I’m going to ignore the further complexities of referrer headers when using contextual advertising – it is much more complex :)

Tying the Pieces Together

Assume that we now have tagged clicks, so we can tell the paid sources that are sending traffic. We have the paid source telling us what they claim. We can match the two pieces of data. If they don’t match, then we have some further questions about the sources of mismatch. I’m not going into that, in this article. I’m going to take a sideways look at that other data-stream, the “referer”.

When you have a good source of paid clicks, one that you can trust as delivering a high fraction of the clicks they claim, and where we get good conversion rates and matching keywords and search queries, we can infer that the people being sent are are also “good” – no or few spoofing robots, no or few paid clickers or fraudsters, etc.

If we now look at the “referer”, we should see that all the visitors come from a page with paid search on it, shouldn’t we?

We don’t. Anywhere from 10% to more than 40% of the clicks have no referer_info at all, or have some clearly dummy data inserted instead of a real referrer.

Attribution Of Origin

So if we have no tracking parameters, we can only know what the origin is, if we have the “referer” field correctly filled in. And in about a fifth of the paid search cases, we don’t. So what does that tell us about “Direct” traffic?

It should tell us that Direct traffic is partially composed of search engine driven traffic, that is missing a referrer header. Some of it will be paid search, some organic search and some from other resources that are potentially trackable.

In other words, there may be more than 50% more clicks that should be attributable to organic search, than are showing in normal web measurements. And Direct is over-represented as a consequence of the way that data is collected.

If you have paid search clicks being tagged and tracked, this means that there is a systematic data error, in which clicks are allocated to Direct, when they come from unknown searches on unidentified organic search engine results.

Summary

Watch out for over-allocation to “Direct” as a consequence of missing or misleading information fed by Web Browsers to web servers.

You should be able to use paid search data to estimate the likely misallocation of clicks to Direct when they should be organic search, and even to estimate the likely frequency for higher volume keywords.

AFAICS, most web measurement and analysis services do not compensate for missing “referer” fields – they don’t even directly report on the number of missing referrer fields in attributed clicks, making the estimation of misattributed clicks hard.

• Early warning of rank changes – helpful to know, and there’s a feedback form at the bottom of the page.
• Competitive response to Binghoo – telling the world they aren’t a relaxed incumbent
• Future indicator of AdWords policy and QS changes

Does this announcement imply any more than that? I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think about it a bit longer.

Geolocation

This test is only available in the US, making testing a bit of a pain. But for certain categories of search, local results should dominate national well ranked results. If you want to find a company that can fix a lawnmower, then finding a high ranked site that is 2000 miles away is probably much less useful than finding a low Page Rank site 20 miles away. While the internet has globalised some functions – purchasing products across international borders is now much easier, even if the legal framework hasn’t fully caught up with the capability – there’s still lots of local needs.

So I’m expecting to test local searches extensively… And I’ll be looking for how my US clients stack up in results and to see what happens to a few of my European clients to see what happens to their results.

AdWords Implications?

AdWords policies aren’t always the same as Google organic search policies. However, it is clear that Google often applies lessons from organic search to paid search. For example, organic search duplicate content rules have become stricter over the years and AdWords has more strictly interpreted duplicate advertising to the annoyance and frustration of many affiliates.

Quality Score is also clearly drawn from organic search patterns – the requirements that landing pages include text matching keywords and advert is well known by now. Whether that’s a valid mechanism or not is still, for me, up for some dispute – I’m pretty sure that I can design a highly converting page that would be given a very low landing page quality score, proving it popular with users and unpopular with Google’s current initial QS rating mechanisms.

I’ll be looking at whether changed organic search results might have any impact on Quality Score. That’ll have little immediate impact on current PPC strategies, I expect, but I often find that an exercise of testing improves understanding of the current system – so there will probably be accidental learnings that may change strategies for some clients.

First Impressions

This is the result of a small sample of twenty high volume searches for a specific client. Looks like important sites move up; heavily optimised sites by “unknowns” are moving down a little or are completely lost.

If continued in other tests, this may indicate a trend that Google has been following recently. The old “you were linked to lots so you must be important” rule has been replaced over the years with refinements like “but you were linked to by places that you linked to in massive link directories” and “but you were linked to massively from free for all directories”. I’m not sure what the basis is for Caffeine, but I’m guessing that other factors about the business are being taken more seriously. Possibly mentions on other key business web sites, and further de-ranking of social commentary sites often abused by SEO efforts?

Time to do some some more testing and see whether any statistical correlations can be made between mentions in different types of sites and the rank changes. That’ll be time consuming, but may shed some illumination for future strategy :)

Rght now, it is 01:27 AM BST (that’s 00:27 Universal Time) or 8:27 pm Eastern or 5:27 pm Pacific. It’s also July 14 for me, and July 13 for the US. So take a look at this screen shot:

If I select “Today” then the User Interface shows the date as the 14th July and the 13th July. The stats reported are updating for the 13th July, but the graphing tool is showing “Today” as the 14th. There are no clicks in reports or in the UI, for July 14th, only for July 13th. It’ll become even more complicated in a few hours, when the East Coast crosses midnight. Use the wrong mix of Ad Scheduling times and you may never work out exactly when the adverts are actually running, as Google becomes confused about which of the three possible time zones is being referenced, and which tool is being set to use which TZ.

Reporting Delays

Complicating this even further is Google’s little note in faded grey at the bottom of the stats table:

Yup – “clicks and impressions in the last three hours” and “24 hour delay in conversion reporting”.

The good news is that the delays aren’t usually that much. That chart above shows some conversions. It’s probably close enough to right. AFAICS, the stats *USUALLY* take about 45 minutes to stabilise. There’s some delays that can cause the stats to lag for longer, and, more importantly for many users, the numbers may decrease over three hours and even for a matter of months later. That’s because the invalid impression and invalid click detection software (click fraud detection) takes a while to work out that a user has a pattern suggestive of suspicious behaviour. The UI and reporting tools do not report clicks, but *billable* clicks. That means you can see a click, which is later withdrawn. In extreme cases you may see a conversion with neither impression or click – someone, identified by Google as a likely fraudulent user, has purchased a product but their impressions and clicks have been ignored.

So, if you believe anything, believe that the latest updating stats are substantially correct for billing purposes as of about 45 minutes ago. Definitely don’t go adjusting your bids as if the stats were being reported in real time… And it becomes more complex yet when you consider the delays in reporting stats in Google Analytics. A topic for some other time, perhaps. :)

Summary

If you think that you’re confused about when something is happening with when things appear to occur in AdWords, it sometimes appears to confuse and puzzle Google, too. Be aware that you may know more about what time events happened locally, than Google does.