'API' Category

• Automating Content Network Management - Part 1

  About three years ago (2005), we started efforts to automatically improve performance of the AdWords Content Network, for advertisers. We were hoping to develop a product, but we were also doing some research to see how things worked and what lessons we could learn. This is intended to be part 1 of a multipart article, […]

  February 12th, 2008

• Top Position - Bidders Beware

  Whew! My accounts are mostly set to UK time (inherited from previous account administration). So I have US spend that is now two hours after my midnight, and can clearly see the effects of the new Top Position pricing model. It means that *Phrase* match costs are going through the roof. Now that is not […]

  August 23rd, 2007

• 5 Things Meme, Pure Time Delay and Aggregation

  I got tagged. I just noticed.
  So, one of Richard Ball’s tag targets has a 80+ day response time. The effect is that a meme can lie low and then burst into life again. Rather like Quellism, or the Black Planner.
  Five Things About Me you probably don’t know, then Five Blogs Tagged and a short […]

  April 9th, 2007

• Macros, Analytics, Paid Search Performance Improvement

  An outline of the interaction of web analytics and paid search, with suggested usage and some minor extensions that would improve A/B testing using AdWords.

  April 3rd, 2007

• Merjis AdWords Toolkit 2.8.0 released - supports API version 8

  Actually this has been sitting around in my queue for quite a while. Google announced version 8 “sneak peek” release of the AdWords API back in December. For some reason I’ve been kicked off the AdWords API newsgroup. It might just have been a technical problem, but I had also been posting […]

  January 5th, 2007

• AdWords Bulksheets To Disappear

  Several rumours that AdWords bulksheet uploads are to disappear are confirmed in an email to us yesterday from Google Support. We’re to use the AdWords Editor instead. Curiously Google didn’t recommend using the AdWords API.
  Also missing was any announcement about a non-Windows version of the AdWords Editor. We use Windows purely for QA. […]

  December 13th, 2006

• Confirmed: Web Analytics Packages Really Don’t Help Marketers

  I’ve been telling customers for years that web analytics packages are essentially mired in a technologists view of performance, not marketing. Now the larger agencies are starting in on the analytics vendors.
  We’ve developed our own, behind-the-scenes sets of analytics to identify user behaviour and optimise paid search marketing. If you can’t identify average pages […]

  December 8th, 2006

• Merjis AdWords Toolkit 2.7.0

  Yet again we beat everyone else with an update to support version 7 of the API. This is largely because the OCaml programming language makes things easy — comprehensive strong type checking picks out all the places where you need to change the code, and it’s just a matter of making a few quick […]

  November 14th, 2006

• Google AdWords now charges advertisers for broken API Beta

  Google have now announced that the AdWords API Beta will attract fees.
  Any bug reports are still treated as if the AdWords API was in Beta - that is, you get a massive display of indifference from Google Technical Support to any problems you report. I feel bullied and abused.

  We’ve already dropped development of some […]

  November 3rd, 2006

• Google AdWords API - why charging is a bad idea

  Recently (2006) Google have decided they’ll add a second fee for using AdWords, but only for certain types of user.
  You can see how it happens. Someone says:
  “Hey - these guys that use our stuff… they make money off it. We should be, like, charging them or something.”
  And some other person, who’s job is to make […]

  October 2nd, 2006