'intent' Category

• AdWords - Relevance - WTF?

  I’ve been following a thread by a frustrated would-be advertiser in the AdWords Help Forum, with some interest. He’s obviously spotted that Google have potentially created a niche, by suppressing so many adverts when they think that the paid search results are less appropriate. The search is “No Country For Old Men DVD” or similar. […]

  March 24th, 2008

• Is AdWords Search History Permutation Fraudulent?

  My first article on Search History usage was experiential; you can do the searches yourself and see the strange results. This article offers a different type of explanation with a lot more detailed argument. It raises the question for me - is Google’s use of AdWords Search History to generate adverts for unrequested keywords, fraudulent? […]

  March 17th, 2008

• SEO vs PPC

  Andrew Goodman has an interesting start on a discussion of the relative merits of PPC and SEO. I think he’s found an worthwhile thread, but I believe that there’s a different type of analysis to be usefully applied. It is that clicks have different meanings; here is one model for looking at what clicks mean.
  I […]

  March 16th, 2008

• AdWords Died, 2008 - Rest In Peace

  (This article has been superceded, as I’ve dug into the details more - I offer an assessment of who is affected, and how much, in AdWords Search History Permutation).
  Google has completely lost track of their mission, and is busy destroying the value of AdWords. Last summer, Google said it would be rolling out search history […]

  March 11th, 2008

• Apples, not Turtles

  This article was triggered by unreliable internet connections, especially after upgrading to Apple’s latest Mac OS X release, Leopard. It’s a reflection on Brand, the Pareto Principle, and Perception, which is why it ties, strangely, to Internet Marketing.
  There’s an almost certainly apocryphal story that someone was presenting cosmology to a non-scientific audience. At the […]

  January 30th, 2008

• Google, Trust, Content Match, Placement Reports

  A respected peer, Richard Ball, often writes about distribution fraud, and the waste of advertising funds on Google’s domain parking. I have some evidence to back up his claim that advertising on domain parks simply wastes advertiser funds.

  This is a portion of a screenshot from an account with a content match targeted campaign. It […]

  August 17th, 2007

• Click Fraud, Google AdWords and gclid

  A tardy response to Matt Cutts posting and Shuman Ghosemajumder’s joining in the debate… I don’t see some important stuff in Google’s approach to this issue. Maybe I’m selectively vision impaired. Or maybe I read too many other reports about naughtiness on the net.
  New (2008-03)! Google Blog article on click fraud forensics.
  And newer! Richard […]

  July 16th, 2007

• Turning visitors into buyers - whose shoes do you wear?

  Chances are, if you are reading this, you’ve got a problem with turning site visitors into buyers. You’ve probably made one big mistake… It’s common, and almost all sites suffer from this to a greater or lesser extent. It affects shops, banks, consultants and pretty much everything that anyone tries to sell… And it seems […]

  May 29th, 2007

• AdSense and Behavioural Targeting

  Matt Cutts has elliptically proposed that AdSense is a form of Behavioural Targeting. Or, maybe he’s proposing something else… Hmm. Let’s look at that.
  The proposition represents that AdSense is to Behavioural Targeting as Hydrogen Bonds are to Van Der Waals Forces.
  While both forces arise from the intermolecular behaviour of electrical charge, the Hydrogen Bond […]

  April 26th, 2007

• Rev A: SEO, Game Theory and Intrinsically Corruptible Systems

  I’m pretty sure that I can see a rising interest in, and reasons for, dislodging Google’s search and search advertising dominance. However, the causes are complex and the way in which it would happen are even more subject to unpredictable accidents. I’ve now written this article twice, with different perspectives… And I couldn’t think of […]

  April 21st, 2007