Clix Marketing PPC Blog

This should be interesting… eCommerce heavyweights have banded together to form the Alliance Against Bait & Click (AABC) to raise awareness about predatory (and possibly illegal) tactics by unscrupulous PPC advertisers. You know the ones - their ads offer something for free (e.g. Firefox), but the clicker arrives at a site that demands payment.

But it’s clear the agenda is much broader - the organizers don’t like the common - and (so far) legal practice of one advertiser bidding on another advertiser’s brand names.

This is a hot potato - if AABC is succesful, they may put a chill on a practice that is in widespread use. We’ll be looking into this more closely and reporting back in this blog. But for now: where do YOU stand?

Here’s the press release:

Industry Leaders Unite to Protect Internet Users from Deceptive On-line Ads

Alliance Against Bait & Click Website - www.stopscads.org - Focuses on Safeguarding Search

Ever wonder why you end up at one product’s website when it’s not what you wanted or even thought you clicked on? You may have just been suckered by a “scad,” a scam ad lurking in sponsored search results that leads consumers to sites unaffiliated with the brand entered in their search.

The risks of scads to consumers involve more than wasted time or frustration because scads often take unsuspecting internet users to unsecured sites - exposing them to fraud, viruses and spyware.

A recent study showed that over 75% of online consumers are confused by these scads, but help is on the way. The Alliance Against Bait & Click (AABC), a coalition launched today, is focused on arming internet users with the information they need to avoid scads and safeguard their search.

Leaders from across industry sectors have joined together to form AABC and launch the website - www.stopscads.org. AABC’s goal is to raise awareness of “bait & click”, the practice which lures consumers to potentially dangerous sites by using unauthorized and unaffiliated brand names in scads. The site also provides internet users with tools to avoid the pitfalls of deceptive search practices.

“Search engine listings remain plagued by scams and tricks. Consumers deserve to find what they are searching for, but search engines often feature whichever advertiser is willing to pay the most,” said Professor Benjamin Edelman, a member of AABC. “Search engines should protect users from deceptive ads, but if they won’t, we will.”

Despite rules that protect consumers from similar practices in offline marketing, this deception continues to be profitable to the search engines and deceptive marketers, while undermining consumer confidence in brands. Search advertising continues to be the largest online revenue format, generating over $6 billion in 2006, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (1).

Members of AABC include 1-800 Contacts, IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group), Marriott Hotels and Resorts, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Northwest Airlines, Rosetta Stone and Cyveillance. Prominent experts on information technology and business strategy, including Professor Eric Clemons of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Benjamin Edelman of the Harvard Business School, have also lent their support to the effort.

Unknown to many internet users, advertisers can buy the use of another company’s trademarked brand name from search engines to trigger their own ads. When the brand name is entered as a keyword in a search, the scad appears - hijacking the consumer to the competitor’s site.

Many times, the scad will attempt to mislead the consumer by including the brand name in its title or text, despite having no affiliation with the brand. Research commissioned by some members of AABC focused on travel-related searches found that three quarters of respondents were confused when viewing a sponsored result that contained the name of the specific brand they searched for.

Once a consumer has been tricked into clicking on a scad, it not only wastes time, but it can also pose direct risks and harms. Compared to ordinary organic listings for the same search terms, sponsored search results lead to twice as many sites possessing spyware, sending spam, or distributing false marketing claims(2). Scads may also charge consumers for dubious or unwanted services. For example, several scads direct users to sites that charge for Firefox, a popular free web browser. Other scads lure consumers to websites using outrageous and false claims - for example, promising “free ringtones” even though in fact a paid subscription is required.

In addition to providing tips and tools to internet users on how to spot and avoid scads, the AABC website also provides avenues for action. The AABC site features a petition to the FTC calling for tighter controls. The AABC site also lets interested consumers contact the search engines directly to report scads and request tighter filters.

“We encourage consumers to look before they click and avoid ads that look suspicious. The less people click on bogus ads, the less money the search engines and fraudulent advertisers will make and the quicker the scads will go away,” said Jarrod Agen, spokesman for AABC. “Most importantly, if it’s not what you’re looking for when you land, you should leave.”

For more information on the Alliance Against Bait & Click or how to spot “scads”, please visit www.stopscads.org.

ABOUT THE ALLIANCE AGAINST BAIT & CLICK

The Alliance Against Bait & Click protects consumers from deceptive search engine marketing practices. We believe that buying & selling search terms for brands you don’t have the right to use is wrong. Internet users should be able to click on an ad without worrying about being misled or getting ripped off. The impact of scads - or scam ads - spreads beyond their effect on legitimate advertisers. When a user can’t trust the results of sponsored links, it erodes consumer confidence in search. Join the Alliance Against Bait & Click. Stop scads.

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(1) IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. 2006 Full-Year Report.
(2) “Sponsored results contain 2.4 times as many risky sites as organic sites.” The State of Search Engine Safety. McAfee Inc. June 4, 2007.

Look for a slick new version of the Google AdWords Editor to be released today or tomorrow.

Google released today a concise and comprehensive guide to all of their advertising products, along with info about other Google products that advertisers should know about. Oriented toward ad agencies, the guide is useful for anyone interested in the breadth of Google ad solutions; download it here.

This just out from Google - a way to see “examples” of sites that accept Adsense advertising:

Our advertisers have often asked: ‘What kinds of web sites make up the Google content network?’

To help answer this question, we just re-launched the Partners page on the Google content network microsite to include a more comprehensive set of examples of where your ads can appear. After all, the content network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of web sites, from information and news sites like About.com and the New York Times, to blogs like Ask the Builder. And while it’s not possible to individually name all the sites in the content network, the revamped Partners page is meant to better demonstrate the variety of sites available. Below are some features of the new Partners page:

• Sites are organized by category. This will help you browse sites by categories that represent your target audience, such as Finance, News, Entertainment, Technology, etc. For example, if you sell herbal teas, you might browse through the Health & Fitness or Home & Garden categories to see examples of related sites. Or, if your target demographic is female, you can try the Women’s Interest category.

• Once you find a site that’s relevant to your product or service, you can use placement targeting to target your ads to that site directly. We recommend you use the Placement Tool to determine whether a specific site is available for targeting, and to identify other relevant placements to target. Further, if your campaign is already running on the content network, you can see the sites where your ad has appeared by running a Placement performance report.

• For those of you targeting users in other countries, a drop-down menu lets you browse partner sites in countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

(Click on the image for a full size version)

So while the simple question “Where will my ads appear?” may not be the simplest to answer, we hope the new Partners page will help you better understand the variety of sites available to you to help you meet your advertising objectives on the content network.

According to this article in MediaPost, Yahoo may begin serving Google AdWords ads on a broader scale than their joint recent test - which could result in Yahoo eventually earning up to $1 billion per year. Besides being a good move for Yahoo and us AdWords advertisers, it’s possible the increased revenue projections will have an impact on the increasingly juicy-to-watch takeover battle Microsoft is mounting - rumored to “go hostile” today.

It’ll be interesting to see what this Google-Yahoo news/rumor will do to Yahoo’s stock price - and Microsoft’s bid…

Update: Microsoft has walked away from the Yahoo deal. But is this just a tactic that positions Microsoft to swoop back in when Yahoo’s stock price drops? Also, Yahoo’s move toward Google may have been the straw that broke the Ballmer’s back.

If you’re interested in the Google ad fraud class action suit, you might like my SEW blog post and my followup Search Day article. The PDF of the actual filed complaint is here.

The past few months have been a roller coaster ride for Google’s stock price. The main culprit was a series of Comscore reports, starting in January, that implied Google search volume was heading south. Many analysts interpreted this to mean Google’s Q1 2008 revenue from paid ad clicks would be disappointing. Subsequent Comscore reports seemed to confirm this.

Then Google released the Q1 2008 financial results, and all hell broke loose. Advertising revenue was up over 40%, surprising analysts and especially Comscore.

Research firm AdGooroo released data a few days before Google’s earning announcement, claiming that the number of Google advertisers had increased significantly in Q1, which seemed to bode well for Google ad revenue. This data seemed to correlate to/predict Google’s ad revenue improvement — certainly more so than the somber Comscore data.

So what happened? Was Comscore’s data flat wrong? Wall Street seemed to think so; Comscore stick price has dropped 8% over the past few weeks.

Comscore sought to reclaim credibility via this blog post last Friday and this one yesterday. The main points:

1. Comscore’s reported data was U.S. paid click data, which didn’t take into consideration Google’s stronger non-U.S. ad revenue growth.
2. Comscore’s reported paid clicks did not include paid clicks from the Google Network (site publishers in the Google Adsense program), as well as paid clicks from other sources reflected in this table:

Comscore ate a little crow by admitting they should have been clearer up front that their initial reports did not include 70-85% of Google’s total paid clicks. They also promised to keep working on their ability to measure/estimate the number of contextual paid clicks.

I think there are a few more caveats and deeper observations in the data reported by Google, Comscore and AdGooroo. Here goes:

1. Google’s first quarter paid click revenue growth has historically been less steep than its previous fourth quarter. This is due to the fact that there’s significant seasonality in the paid search advertising biz, due to Christmas shoppers. To illustrate this: while Google Site Revenue increased 10% in Q3 2007 over Q2 2007, the increase in Q4 2007 over Q3 2007 was 14%.
2. AdGooroo’s data seems to imply that Google advertising revenue will continue to grow strongly. I believe advertiser revenue increase could lag the increase in the number of advertisers, since advertisers tend to spend more over time as they optimize their ad campaigns and enjoy increasing ROI.
3. Google’s paid clicks are increasingly profitable. As Comscore points out in its most recent blog posts, average click CPS (costs-per-click) have increased, probably due to the implementation of Google’s AdWords Quality Score efforts. Comscore also alludes to another factor that I think will become increasingly significant: more ads appearing on more Google-owned web sites, like Gmail, YouTube, Google groups, etc., as well as via other Google ad-delivery channels like Feedburner. Google pays no TAC (Traffic Acquisition Cost) for these placements, as they do with Adsense publishers.

Here are a few examples of the last observation:

As I detailed in this blog post, YouTube has become a potent force for advertisers, who can place ads on the YouTube site pages, and also right within videos themselves. YouTube is the 6^th most-visited site on the internet, with 68 million unique visitors per month. Advertisers pay a tiny fraction of what they would need to pay for an equivalent broadcast or cable ad with equivalent reach. And YouTube InVideo ads can be targeted such that they are relevant to the context of the video.

(Side note: the acquisition of YouTube may have inspired Google to snap up other hot “internet channels” like MySpace or Facebook - Social PPC anyone?)

Another example: advertising within Gmail. When a Gmail user reads an email, Adsense ads are displayed and the ads are relevant to the content of the email being read. For example, here’s an email that pertains to real estate:

And here’s one pertaining to camping equipment:

A last example: ads displayed by Google-owned Feedburner, which places contextually-relevant ads right within RSS feeds:

This last example underscores a strength Google is exploiting - a move that Microsoft has been reticent to make: ad-supported applications. Google ads might soon appear adjacent to documents in their “Office-alike” applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar - ads that are relevant to the document content. Since the applications are free, users might not mind the intrusion of ads (though certainly there are privacy-protection issues that would need to be addressed). Google doesn’t need to worry about cannibalizing the revenue stream from paid applications - a concern that has probably kept Microsoft out of this obvious game.

The list of Google-owned web sites is big and growing bigger. More and more of them will become channels for targeted content and targeted ads. Good news for advertisers - and Google shareholders.

Update: Google bristles at Comscore.

The Wall Street Journal just released a nice comparison of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo revenue and profit data. Click on the thumbnails for larger views; there’s an interactive version here.

Some observations:

• Yahoo’s fortunes seemed rosy in the 2.5 years after the Overture acquisition. They owned the search advertising space right up until the collision of Google’s superior AdWords UI with the rather disastrous Panama rollout. Wall Street noticed.
• Interesting that the launch of Microsoft adCenter isn’t included as a milestone. The launch didn’t affect the MS stock price, but it would at least fit the context of the graph.
• Impressive revenue per employee multiples: Microsoft = $690K, Google = $987K. Clix revenue per employee is almost as high as Microsoft’s - yessss!
• What makes up $3.94 billion of Google non-advertising revenue?!?
• Looks like Christmas 2007 shoppers boosted Google traffic by a huge amount - and they stayed post-Christmas.

Google just released this excellent overview of the top publishers in their Content Network - including powerhouses like the New York Times, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal (hey, didn’t Microsoft grab them yesterday?), TV Guide, Discover, Martha Stewart, Oxygen, HGTV, Monster, FHM, Rolling Stone, The LA Times, Salon.com, CNN.com, LinkedIn, ESPN, Wired, PC Magazine, TechCrunch, TeenVogue, Travel+Leisure, Reader’s Digest, and many, many other prominent publishers.

No wonder traditional publishers are terrified of the big GOOG.

<Originally posted by me on the Search Engine Watch Blog>

Dear Google Engineering,

We really do love your software. And we appreciate the fact that you introduce valuable new features so frequently. But please: slow down a little, and spend a bit more time on bug testing.

In the time-honored model of software development (call it “pre-Web 1.0″), teams of programmers worked for years to craft scores of subroutines, knit them together into a megalithic “major release,” and then test and re-test the application on a variety of software and hardware platforms. The application would often be “pre-released” to internal and external teams of alpha and beta testers who would run the software under an even wider variety of conditions.

All this methodical testing slowly but surely eliminated major software bugs until the “release” could be dubbed “Golden Master.” Only then would it be released to the buying public, hopefully with only minor bugs remaining. Thus Word 2.0 begat Word 3.0, etc.

That model, though still practiced widely for PC- and server-based applications, seems almost anachronistic in today’s environment of high-velocity incrementally-released Ajax-based web applications. New features – minor and major – appear overnight, often with little or no warning, explanation or documentation. And all too often, with minor and major bugs.

As an agency that manages client pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, we at Clix Marketing are elbow-deep in Google AdWords software – all day, every day. It’s not unusual for us to wake up in the morning and find old features completely replaced by new ones. Almost always the new features provide improved functionality, or eliminate time-consuming steps from a process.

Occasionally, it’s painfully obvious that the new feature hasn’t been thoroughly tested. Recent examples come to mind: a new graphing feature simply failed to work (and displayed only flat-line graphs), and it took Google a week to fix it. AdWords Editor is up to its fifth release, an age when most software has attained stability – and yet it still crashes frequently.

The phenomenon isn’t restricted to Google’s AdWords software. Last week the phone development community was up in arms over their contention that Google’s Android platform for phone application development “…has major bug issues.”

A recent New York Times article explains that Google’s breakneck software development speed is a concerted, encouraged effort to stay out ahead of serious competitors like Microsoft. “Velocity matters,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Google product road maps look ahead only four or five months at most.

But here’s the thing, Google: you’re already waaaay out ahead – for example, your Google AdWords campaign management software is two generations or more ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft. So you can afford to slow down a bit and test more rigorously before even minor software releases. You’re starting to get a reputation for developing buggy software – one that’s not deserved for the most part – and now is the time to nip the problem in the bud before the perception starts to snowball.

Thanks for listening.

 OK, it’s just a tiny link to our blog from an article on the WSJ web site, but it’s a start…

Normally I wouldn’t simply reprint a posting from the AdWords blog, but this time I thought it particularly important that everyone see this one - especially if you have clients who frequently perform Google searches to check their own ads:

“One of the most common questions our support teams receive from advertisers is “why can’t I see my ad on Google?” While it may seem like a good idea to monitor your ad by searching for it, here’s a list (in no particular order) of possible account issues that are difficult, if not impossible, to troubleshoot by simply looking for your ad on Google.com:

1. Your ad has been disapproved.
2. The keyword you used to search for your ad is not performing well and has become inactive for search.
3. Your ad rank is not high enough to allow your ad to show on the first page of search results.
4. Your ad is showing, but in a lower position possibly due to a shift in the competitive landscape.
5. Your regionally targeted ad doesn’t include the region (e.g. city, state, or country) associated with your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address.
6. Your ad is targeting a language that’s different from the language you’ve selected for your Google.com preferences.
7. Your daily budget has been exhausted and your ads are no longer showing for the day.
8. Your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount and Google is spacing the delivery of your ads to ensure you receive traffic throughout the day.
9. You’re using ad scheduling and your ads are currently not scheduled to run.
10. Your account hasn’t been activated.

AdWords is all about results and we understand that you want to monitor your ads. However, searching for your ads on Google can lead to a diluted clickthrough rate (CTR) as well as account changes based on results that may not represent what the average user sees (more on both points later). For these reasons, we strongly recommend against monitoring your ads solely based on a Google.com search. Below, we’ve highlighted three great tools to help you monitor your ads quickly, accurately, and without negatively impacting your performance:

1. “Search” using the Ad Preview page rather than Google.com

For those of you who search for your ads simply to monitor their positions on Google.com, the Ad Preview page is a perfect alternative. The Ad Preview page enables you to view ads (and search results) as they would appear on a regular Google.com search results page to most users, without accruing extra impressions for your ad. Remember, anytime you or your colleagues search for your ad on Google.com, the keyword associated with your ad accrues an impression. Over time, this may decrease your CTR (as the number of impressions increases but the clicks do not) and, in turn, may lead to a lower Quality Score.

In addition, if you search for your ad multiple times on Google.com (not using the Ad Preview page), our system may adapt the results you see. This means you may begin to see your ad in a lower position than before.

You can access the Ad Preview page by adding “/adpreview” to the end of the usual Google URL - http://www.google.com/adpreview. Here’s an example of a search using the Ad Preview page:

(Click the screenshot to view the full-size image.)
2. Use the Ads Diagnostic Tool

For ads that don’t seem to be showing at all, the Ads Diagnostic Tool is a good place to start. Located within your AdWords account, the tool can tell you if your ads are not showing due to approval status, cost-per-click (CPC) and budget price settings, ad and keyword performance, ranking status, geo-targeting settings, etc.

You can access the Ads Diagnostic Tool information two different ways - for a quick diagnosis, point your mouse at the magnifying glass icon next to any keyword in your account. A help bubble will appear with information about that keyword. For a more thorough analysis, go to the tool itself by clicking Tools on the Campaign Management tab.

3. Account statistics and reporting

Your best bet when monitoring or troubleshooting your ad activity is reviewing the statistics in your account. Unlike searching for your ad, your account statistics provide a comprehensive overview of how your ads are performing overall. These statistics can provide you with the average position of a keyword that’s calculated, not estimated, across all the geographic locations, languages, network sites, etc. that you’re targeting.

In addition, your account offers numerous reports that you can run as needed, or schedule to run and have emailed to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis - this means you get all the data without even having to log in to your account!

We understand that it’s natural to search Google.com when curious about how your ads are performing; however, we hope you’ll keep in mind that how your ad appears, or in some cases doesn’t appear, for you, may not reflect how it appears to the vast majority of people who are searching for your product or service each day.”