'adwords' Category

• Google Analytics: Excluding, Or Only Including, Your Own IP Address.

  When you are looking at websites, especially those where your own company visits are likely to be a significant source of clicks, you’ll probably want to exclude your own visits and those of your staff. Assuming that you share a common IP address – your firewall or DSL connection, typically, you can prevent all activity [...]

  November 17th, 2008

• AdWords Ad Scheduling Problems

  Ever seen the Quality Score message “Your account spending limit has been reached“? When you have unspent budget, cash in the account, you’re not in a scheduled off-period and you have a burning desire to get clicks? You get no impressions, no clicks and no reason from Google Support as to why your adverts don’t [...]

  November 10th, 2008

• Google Throws Away The Rules, Again

  Google’s user base may be built on high reputation with organic search visitor volume, but that doesn’t prevent the search giant from leading users a merry dance in the pursuit of profit. Here’s a real world example. I’ve taken this from a real Google Account, with real web analytics data. I’ve concealed the precise search [...]

  October 29th, 2008

• Google’s Approach To Click Fraud – 2007

  Well, I’m a year late finding this PDF about Click Fraud, ROI and Advertiser Response by Kourosh Gharachorloo of Google. I was doing a periodic scan to see if anyone else has published how to interpret the autotagged gclid in AdWords. It’s nice to see that my old article anticipated many of the arguments – [...]

  October 18th, 2008

• Automated Bidding on AdWords

  We have done a lot of our work on AdWords using the API and programs that we’ve written. We’ve done some work with fast paced advertising – advertisers with a large inventory of rapidly changing stock with different prices (think “travel”). I was reminded of this when I saw a comment on this blog by [...]

  September 22nd, 2008

• AdWords Quality Score Changes To Correct A Design Defect?

  Earlier this year I observed several accounts where the impression volume had drastically decreased, badly damaging the clients’ business. Google insisted that they had changed nothing. To those damaged, it looked like an organised change of some sort. There have been other instances, such as around July 11th, when another step change was visible to [...]

  September 16th, 2008

• Does AdWords Starter Edition Define Evil?

  Google has a pretty good reputation built on Organic Search results and a well known corporate rule “You Can Make Money Without Doing Evil“. However, Google’s behaviour towards advertisers appears to run from a different rule book, in which that rule is absent. This apparent reduction in ethics now seems to be coming back to [...]

  September 13th, 2008

• Christmas Is Coming. Really.

  Having been approached a few weeks before Christmas by some online stores keen to boost their sales in peak season, last year, may I point out that planning your Christmas paid search activity should be in progress, now? For maximum impact, you’ll want purpose-designed landing pages to optimise conversion. That usually means running some experiments. [...]

  August 26th, 2008

• AdWords Quality Score Changing

  In possibly the most significant announced change to AdWords, the Quality Score is changing. This should, within a month or so, cause improvements in conversion if the details are correct. It would be quite possible to mess this up. I suspect that there will be some weeks of agony as first, users will assume that [...]

  August 22nd, 2008

• Exploring Paid Search Auctions

  The generalised second price auction, described in a somewhat mathematical paper by University of Stanford economists, is the dominant auction mechanism for paid search. It is often misunderstood. I’m pretty certain that there’s features of it that I don’t properly understand, too. However, understanding the auction is important for effective bidding and also explains a [...]

  July 29th, 2008