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August 15, 2008
Google Now Offers AdSense for FeedsGoogle is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network.
No official announcement has been made, but many publishers are able to access the feature in their AdSense accounts. I was able to do so with mine. Below is a screenshot of the process for signing up a feed:
Related Reading: Google Gives Away FeedBurner Services Will Google’s FeedBurner Scorch Organic SEO?
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 14, 2008
Google AdSense Video Units Add 3 Languages, 4 CountriesGoogle AdSense has expanded the availability of its Video Units to include support for 3 more languages and 4 more countries.
The languages are:
- French
- German
- Spanish
The countries are:
- Brazil
- Germany
- India
- Mexico
Previously, video units were available in English and Japanese to users in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 14, 2008
Google Talks Ranking and Basic SEO Again, This Time on Adsense BlogRecently, Google's Matt Cutts gave USA Today readers 5 SEO Tips, which many of our readers found quite basic (albeit good). Then, last week, Google gave an overview of its ranking system. Both come in the midst of Google's latest push to inform about its privacy policy. Now, Google has taken to the AdSense blog to inform publishers of basic SEO tips.
Here's what Ambroise Fensterbank, Search Quality Evaluator, recommends:
- Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
- Use tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
- For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about.
Fensterbank also recommends updating your site with fresh content, which may help the Googlebot crawl your pages more regularly. Also, it may attract links.
And what would a good instructional post be without a video? Hit play below to learn more.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 1, 2008
Google Nixes AdSense Referrals, AdWords PPA; Rebrands DoubleClick PerformicsGoogle has a slew of announcements about its advertising products, including AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick.
First up, AdSense is no longer accepting referrals. They're advising users to remove the code from their sites, but to save the data collected through the referrals. Meanwhile, AdWords is phasing out the AdWords Pay-Per-Action program. Both programs have the last week of August as the expiration date.
Users of AdSense Referrals and AdWords PPA are being pointed to the Google Affiliate Network, formerly known as DoubleClick Performics. Performics was previously both an affiliate network and a search marketing company. Google divested itself of the Performics search marketing business for the obvious conflict of interest. The affiliate portion of the business is what is being rebranded.
Advertisers will be able to set CPAs for campaigns or design custom payments to affiliates. Publishers must apply and be accepted to the program, similar to the application for Adsense.
Finally, while the three remain separate programs for now, an integration could be in the future. Trevor Claiborne, writing on the Inside AdWords blog, "The Inside Adwords blog The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense." (emphasis mine) That sounds like a hint of things to come, don't you think?
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 30, 2008
Google Adsense Video Units Now Available in 8 More CountriesWhen Google announced the addition of video units to Adsense, it only rolled out the program only to U.S. Adsense users. A month later, the program was expanded to the UK, Ireland and Canada. Now, the program includes 8 additional countries, and here they are:
France Italy Spain Australia Netherlands Poland New Zealand Japan
Hat tip to Australian SEW reader David Webb, who noticed the change.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 6, 2008
Google's Adsense for Search Integrates Custom SearchIt's a match made in heaven, or at least Mountain View, California. Adsense for search is now integrating Custom Search. Now you can control those search results users conduct on your site and make moolah at the same time. Here's what you can look forward to:
- Site Search: Choosing this option will keep users on your site only.
- Improved indexing of your pages: Google hopes its recent indexing updates will prove to benefit your Site Search users by providing better Adsense for Search results. Vertical search: You can allow your users to search outside your site, but still set some boundaries. Examples include forums, blogs, or a network of sites.
- Tuning search results and ads with keywords:Control search results by setting a context. If your site is about cats, then enter "cats" and "cat food" as keywords and when someone searches for bowl, then results for cat food bowl will come up instead of other types of bowls or the sport of bowling.
- Selecting ad location: Choose where ads will be placed in relation to the the search results on your site.
- Quick and easy updates: You can now use the ad management feature in Adsense to control the settings for your custom search engine ads.
Here's a video from the Googleplex explaining the update:
Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:21 AM | Permalink
May 5, 2008
Is Google Dropping AdSense Sites Using AdWords?A discussion over at WebmasterWorld suggests Google may be dropping AdSense accounts from sites that buy traffic from AdWords.
Funny how this may have been the way to stop arbitrage way back before all the other methods were used and the experimentation cost regular advertisers lots of money through all the minimum bid increases.
Posted by Frank Watson at 1:59 PM | Permalink
April 22, 2008
Google Sued for Ad Fraud; Another Class Action Settlement?Today Google was slapped with a an advertising fraud lawsuit that will be fascinating – and important – for AdWords advertisers to watch.
The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed by the firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner, on behalf of David Almeida, a Massachusetts-based private investigator. The lawsuit claims that Google defrauds advertisers by obscuring the fact that new AdWords campaigns are set by default to display ads on both Google’s search results pages (and like pages served by partners like AOL) and pages owned by site publishers who display AdWords ads via Google’s Adsense programs.
Readers of my weekly SEW Content Advertising column are familiar with this phenomenon, and my suggested best practice of creating separate search and content campaigns.
At the risk of making life harder for my friends at Google, I need to point out that the suit seems to get one important fact wrong. Reports today in CNET, Yahoo! Finance, Wired and other outlets imply that advertisers are presented with the ability to “opt out” of displaying ads on the content network during campaign creation. Here’s the way Yahoo puts it:
“During this process, users encounter two adjacent boxes. Into the first, customers enter the amount they wish to pay per "click" of an ad displayed on Google.com. The second box is marked "optional." Into this box, a user can enter the amount they would be willing to pay per "click" of an ad appearing on a third party web page. But leaving the box blank does not prevent ads from appearing on third-party sites.”
The truth is, advertisers don’t see this option during campaign creation. The only way for them to opt out of displaying ads on the content network is for advertisers to explicitly edit the settings of their campaign after creating it, and un-check the box labeled “Content Network” – which is checked by default. Some would reason this makes Google even more exposed to fraud charges.
Another irony: some of the reporting claims the content network is inherently flawed in some way. Here’s how Yahoo! puts it:
“Ads on third-party sites are widely-acknowledged to be far less effective (and therefore less valuable to the advertiser) than ads on Google.com.”
Readers of my column know that the content network is not “less effective;” savvy advertisers realize that great, profitable results can be obtained by advertising on content sites. The rules and best practices for creating effective content campaigns are, however, much different than for search campaigns. To Google’s credit, they’ve been trying to make these differences more clear.
I’ll dig into this subject more deeply in the next installment of my column. Meanwhile, my predictions, no matter which way the lawsuit is decided:
1. Google will finally make opting out of the content network much more straightforward, with clear instructions during campaign creation.
2. Google’s advertiser education efforts, via their tutorials and help files, will much more explicitly teach the differences search and content ad campaign best practices.
Posted by David Szetela at 7:53 PM | Permalink
March 17, 2008
SEW Experts: Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion ToolGoogle has launched an important new tool that prevents your Content Ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool. In today's Content Advertising column, "Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool," David Szetela shares some best practices for using the tool to exclude whole swaths of site types that are not likely to convert for your site. Share your thoughts on this new tool for AdWords in the Search Engine Watch Forums.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink
February 26, 2008
Many See AdSense Income DroppingI have been hearing and reading a lot of reports about decreased income from AdSense. A recent detailed post on the topic was done over at WebMasterWorld.
Barry Schwartz and the SERoundtable crew polled publishers at the beginning of the month and found that 63% have noted a drop in their AdSense income.
Add to that the changes in the T&Cs where sites that don't meet impression and click numbers will be terminated from the AdSense program and you have some serious changes to the AdSense landscape.
Has Google finally gotten to the point where they feel they can cut back their publishers? Have they started to thin the herd by making the pay outs lower? Or have the bigger publishers started to take all of the higher paying ads, leaving the rest of the publishers a much lower paying pool of ads to run?
Other possibilities are Google is pushing their newer ad styles such as video - with drops in text maybe publishers will feel more inclined to run the other options....
Is Google not getting enough people embracing the new ad types?
Have the little publishers served their purpose now that Google has many of the once suspicious large publishers?
Has policing small sites become too much work?
The future direction of AdSense seems to be changing. Where it now plans to go is something they should be sharing with the people who helped get them to where they are today.
I would love some input.... losing AdSense income, tried the newer ad formats, have an opinion? Post comments here.
Posted by Frank Watson at 1:03 PM | Permalink
February 25, 2008
SEW Experts: Google AdWords Contextual Advertising Mystery SolvedReaders have tried running placement-targeted campaigns, and found many AdSense publisher sites don't seem to be available to them. In today's Content Advertising column, "Google AdWords Contextual Advertising Mystery Solved," David Szetela shares a way to work around issues with the tool Google offers to discover new sites to advertise on.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink
February 21, 2008
Google to Offer AdSense Video UnitsGoogle today opened up its 9-month-old pilot program to allow qualified publishers to put video ad units on their sites. The AdSense for video beta will use the InVideo ad units which Google uses on YouTube. Unique to the AdSense for video ads will be a text overlay element, a text ad contextually targeted to signals in your videos and on the page where the video lives.
AdSense for video is now available to U.S. publishers with English language sites who serve at least one million video streams a month. In the near future, Google plans to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:58 AM | Permalink
February 4, 2008
SEW Experts: How to Target Sites in AdSenseLast year, Google took another pioneering step and rolled out an AdWords feature that let advertisers place ads on specific sites. In today's Content Advertising column, "Contextual Advertising: How to Target Sites in AdSense," David Szetela shares tips for creating placement-targeted campaigns (originally called site-targeted campaigns).
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink
January 23, 2008
AdSense Adds Help in HebrewJust received this from the AdSense crew so no doubt it is in the official blog.
"We're all about numbers and international launches this week, so we're excited to tell you that we've recently launched our (sweet) 16th AdSense Help Forum, this time in Hebrew. If you're a Hebrew-speaking publisher, visit the new forum to ask your questions about the AdSense program or share your advice with other publishers. You may also see occasional posts from a Google representative nicknamed AdSensePro.With the ever-growing number of forums in a wide variety of languages, now's a great time to join the AdSense community in your language! Our forums are also available in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish."
Posted by Frank Watson at 6:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
January 2, 2008
AdSense Adds Newbie CentralIn their ongoing efforts to help educate their users the Google AdSense team has added Newbie Central - "the complete resource center for newly approved AdSense publishers," their blog announced today.
The introductory page supplies links to what AdSense must know are the most Frequently Asked Questions. It is a great idea - centralizing these questions.
Earning expectations, ad formats, how to filter ads etc. are all the things new users want to know.
Now if you could just increase the payouts I would really be happy!!!
Posted by Frank Watson at 4:39 PM | Permalink
December 20, 2007
Free Google Flip Video Camcorder --No purchase necessaryOK, strike "no purchase necessary." Free Flip video camcorder: "big purchase necessary?"
Google gave big-time advertisers and SEMs (whose clients spend big) a Flip Video Ultra Series camcorder with recording time up to 30 min. and 1GB internal memory.
Search marketer Shimon Sandler recorded an Oscar-worthy short film (YouTubed) of his Google Video Ultra gift being unwrapped. You'll watch the film again and again, if only to get into the Xmas spirit of green envy that children of all ages feel during the Holiday Season.
Google Flip flopped with all the SEMs who only received Google 2GB USB memory cards instead of the Google Flip (with MSRP of $149.99!). The 2GoogleByte USB card was described by our friends at SERoundtable as more or less a lump of coal -- way inferior to last year's Google gift gadget: a sweet digital picture frame.
It would seem only the FTC approves of Google acquisitions these days.
Here at Search Engine Watch, we'll be providing the P.O. Box for Google Customer Returns and the address of the secret Google Gift Exchange location.
Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:46 PM | Permalink
December 16, 2007
AdSense Ad Review: Good for Advertisers?A few days ago Frank Watson blogged here about a new AdSense feature that lets site publishers exclude AdWords ads they feel may be inappropriate for their sites.
AdSense publishers will be able to view ads that advertisers have directed to their sites via Placement Targeting, and choose to block ads they don't feel are "relevant" to their site visitors.
This will certainly be used by AdSense publishers to (attempt to) maximize AdSense revenues - - publishers will block ads that they deem "low-revenue" in favor of ads that visitors will click on more frequently.
But is it good for advertisers? Well, yes and no...
Most AdWords advertisers who create Placement Targeted campaigns have done time-consuming research to identify sites that have proven (or are expected) to be relevant, in terms of producing valuable clicks and conversions. Knowing their ads can be blocked at the whim of an AdSense publisher might make advertisers more reluctant to spend the time necessary to target their advertising.
AdWords advertisers will be able to see the reason an ad was blocked - if the AdSense publisher chooses to provide it. Google says "This feedback gives advertisers more insight on how to increase coverage by adjusting ad quality, content, and relevance. We also use this information internally to help improve products."
Nice theory -- but will AdSense publishers really provide (optional) constructive feedback?
As I've pointed out in my SEW Experts column, Content advertising requires significant work and diligence -- arguably more than for Search advertising. Dealing with blocked ads -- understanding why an ad was blocked, and possibly even corresponding directly with a site owner to appeal the decision -- could just add unnecessarily to the advertiser's workload.
Hopefully this won't happen often - and the system will work to each side's satisfaction and benefit.
But let's keep an eye on it.
Posted by David Szetela at 11:31 AM | Permalink
December 14, 2007
AdSense Introduces Ad Review CenterGoogle has added the ability to preview the ads that will run on a publisher's site and to block those they don't want to appear, the AdSense blog announced today.
This effort at improving transparency could help publishers and avoid sites advertising on a publisher's site that they do not feel are a good fit.
"In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we've developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we'll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site's users," the blog stated.
With growing compliance issues in some industries, this will help Google by allowing publishers to exclude sites that may violate their regulations and thus encourage them to add Google AdSense.
Google asks that you give feedback on why you exclude a site - a good idea and one that may start them looking at their content advertisers as well as the real needs of their publishers who helped make them a big chunk of their revenue.
The feature will be rolled out over the next few months, Google said.
"When it has been enabled for your account, you'll see a green notification box at the top of your 'Competitive Ad Filter' page, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the 'update settings' link in the Ad Review Center. You'll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad," the blog explained.
Posted by Frank Watson at 10:59 AM | Permalink
November 19, 2007
AdSense Video Units To Launch In UK, Ireland and CanadaThe AdSense blog announced it is adding video units to AdSense users in Canada, Ireland and the UK.
"With this new launch, publishers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to show videos from our YouTube content partners and choose those videos by category, individual YouTube partner, or have video automatically targeted to their site. Based on publisher feedback, we've also just added a feature which lets you choose individual videos to be displayed in your video units" the press release stated.
Posted by Frank Watson at 4:23 PM | Permalink
November 16, 2007
Clickable Areas on AdSense RedefinedGoogle announced today on the Inside AdSense blog that it has redefined the clickable area of its text ads to make only the ad's title and URL clickable, instead of the whole block of text.
The move is intended to prevent advertisers from paying for accidental clicks on an ad: "By allowing users to click only on the ad title and URL, we aim to decrease accidental clicks, better aligning visitor behavior with their intent," writes Katie Mandel, AdSense product marketing. "Overall, the decrease in accidental clicks will keep users on your website, interacting your content, until they intend to click on an ad."
The changes began rolling out earlier this week, as noted at Search Engine Roundtable. Google warns advertisers on the Inside AdWords blog that they should not be surprised if they see a decrease in both the number of clicks and the clickthrough rate (CTR) in content network campaigns. It's expected that advertisers will also see an increase in the average return on investment (ROI) of content network traffic.
Early forum conversations finds the impact is not huge, though many publishers are seeing a drop in CTR.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:24 AM | Permalink
October 24, 2007
AdSense Reporting ProblemsA number of forums have noted that Google's AdSense reporting is having problems. Yesterday webmasters were noticing discrepancies in basic impression numbers between AdSense and their log files.
The problems appear to be tied to the Custom Channels statistics, according to most comments.
A comment in Google Groups by a Google employee indicated it had nothing to do with the announced changes to AdSense yesterday. "Our engineers and product team are aware of this aggregate vs. channels reporting discrepancy. They're working as quickly as they can to fix the issue, and I'll let you know as soon as I find out more.
FYI - This is unrelated to the announced product change from the blog yesterday (that feature hasn't launched yet)".
Anyone seeing the same thing in their accounts can discuss it here.
Posted by Frank Watson at 12:13 PM | Permalink
October 23, 2007
AdSense To Launch Ability To Change Displayed Ads From InterfaceToday's Inside AdSense blog announces the ability to make changes from the interface that will impact ads already coded on your pages. No more make the changes at the interface and then change the code on the pages.
While some elements can be done if you know the code without using the AdSense interface, you still need to make the on page changes which can at times be more difficult.
Posted by Frank Watson at 12:45 PM | Permalink
September 18, 2007
Google AdSense for MobileRecently I wrote that Google Mobile was starting to run AdWords ads. This initiative has been expanded to now include Google Adsense(TM) for mobile. This program contextually targets ads to mobile website content.
The program is targeted at people who have created websites targeted at mobile browsers, allowing them to make money on contextual advertising using the same model used by Google on the traditional web. The program is available in the following countries: US, Australia, China, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and will soon also be available in Japan.
For AdWords advertisers that currently do contetual advertising with Google, this will expand the reach of that advertising further onto the mobile platform.
A word of caution is in order for all Google AdWords advertisers. Participation in this program defaults to opt-in. If your content is not appropriate for a mobile environment, you need to go into your AdWords account and manually opt-out.
I have heard some criticism of this policy, as many AdWords account holders will not know that they need to do this, and their ads will be running in a mobile environment, even if that is not what they want. This will result in added expenditure that they will not have anticipated.
The Google FAQ page for the AdWords for Google Mobile initiative states that the procedure to opt out is:
You can opt out your eligible search ads from running on Google Mobile Search pages at any time. On the Campaign Summary page, select the link that says 'View performance data for these ads' from within the alert message or below the table that contains your campaigns. On the bottom of the page that reads "Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile Search," click on the link that says 'Yes, opt me out' to stop running your search ads.It appears that the procedure is a bit different than that. I went into an AdWords account this morning, and could not find the link Google refers to on the Campaign Summary tab. After about 10 minutes, I finally found the following text: "There are 61 days left before we will begin charging for search ads on Google Mobile Search. View details". The View details text was a link to a page where I could opt out of the program.
For the client whose account I was using to research this, my opinion was that the mobile platform was not a fit, so I opted out of the service. Note that Google does say that they try to algorithmically determine the fit of content and landing pages for the mobile platform, but my opinions is that it's better to be safe than sorry.
Posted by Eric Enge at 10:05 AM | Permalink
August 19, 2007
AdSense Randomly Testing Ads On Publishers' Sites?I have seen two conversations about random uncoded AdSense ads appearing on people's sites. Webmaster World is discussing new ads that appear to be adding a "more ads link" and some random text link ads to people's AdSense ads.
A thread here at SEW has found ads being randomly added to a travel blog.
I hope to find out from Google what is happening.... will ask tonight or tomorrow when I am at SES San Jose.
Posted by Frank Watson at 9:28 AM | Permalink
July 26, 2007
AdSense Offers Help For Forum MarketingInside AdSense, the Google blog dedicated to information about their publishing advertising product, posted an article "Getting your forum site to perform well with AdSense" today.
Though it offers only three suggestions (four counting the bonus tip), it is a great start. The three areas covered are the Welcome box ad, the forum post ad and blending colors and borders. While the bonus is about improving ad relevance through sectioning.
Posted by Frank Watson at 2:56 PM | Permalink
July 16, 2007
Google Confirms Mobile AdSense BetaWord of a new version of AdSense for mobile users began spreading last week, and a Google spokesperson has confirmed that it is running a limited beta of the product, according to ClickZ.
"Google is committed to finding new and better ways to get users the information they need while on the go, and to opening up new revenue opportunities for our partners," the spokesperson said. "We are currently conducting a limited beta to test AdSense for mobile, a monetization product for mobile publishers. We will continue to evaluate the beta and will refine the product based on feedback from our users, publishers, and advertisers."
Google has been seen testing mobile search ads in the U.S. and U.K. in September 2006, and in more of Europe, Asia, and Australia in November. This is the first time Google ads have been placed on third-party mobile publisher sites.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:22 AM | Permalink
AdSense Adds CPA Ads With CPC, CMP AdsA thread over at WebMasterWorld is discussing the integration of Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) ads into the AdSense mix. CPA had been offered as a beta to a number of advertisers but it seems a bunch more are seeing this on their sites.
Posted by Frank Watson at 12:47 AM | Permalink
June 28, 2007
AdSense Rolls Out Referrals 2.0Beyond the text and image ads AdSense offers - the release of Referrals 2.0 now incorporates products that you can sell on your site. The product that had been in beta previously is now being launched globally - well I did see instances in French, German and Italian.
Like the text ads, the Referral product looks at the content on your page to determine a good product fit.
The press release issued today is below.
This past March, we launched a referrals beta to test the feature and iron out some wrinkles. Now that we've finished our testing, we're pleased to announce that referrals 2.0 will soon be available to all AdSense publishers.While some of you may already be familiar with referrals for Google products, this launch will greatly expand the inventory and functionality of referrals for AdSense publishers. Below we've highlighted a few of the key benefits of referrals 2.0:
- Expanded product inventory: While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren't able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.
- Category and keyword targeting: With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That's why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.
- Ad unit optimization: It can be tricky picking the best ads for your site, so we've included ad unit optimization for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. We'll then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads we expect to perform best on your site.
- Better targeting for pages with multiple themes: With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique "keywords" for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.
- Greater compensation for high-quality traffic: Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.
- Add your seal of approval: Unlike AdSense for content ads, our program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.
To get started with referrals, click the AdSense Setup tab in your account, then click Referrals. If you don't see referrals 2.0 right away, please check back in a few days, as the feature will gradually become available in all accounts over the next few weeks. Please also keep in mind that for some languages, advertisers are just getting started so ad inventory may be limited at this time. We encourage you to check back frequently to see new offers.If you have any questions about how to add a new referral unit to your site, be sure to check out the updated referrals section of the Help Center.
Posted by Frank Watson at 4:37 PM | Permalink
June 5, 2007
Google to Require Publishers to Meet Quality GuidelinesAs of today, Google will require AdSense publishers to meet the same page quality guidelines it holds its AdWords advertisers to with their landing pages. According to the Inside AdSense blog, the guidelines are meant to "encourage publishers to, among other things, create sites with simple navigation and substantial, useful content."
The requirement has been added to the Site and Ad Behavior section of the AdSense Program Policies: Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.
Google recently began cracking down on so-called "made for AdSense" sites, and reportedly terminated several publisher accounts as of June 1.
In addition, publishers are now allowed to place up to three link units on a page, instead of the previous limit of one per page.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:47 PM | Permalink
May 23, 2007
Google Testing AdSense for VideoGoogle has announced a pilot with a small group of publishers to test streaming video ads. Writing on the Inside AdSense blog, product marketing manager Christina Lee said, "Just as AdSense adds value to the text content on your website and is useful for your users, we think these in-stream ads in video will add value to publishers' video content and help to deepen engagement with users watching the videos."
In this pilot, the selected publishers, with their own video content, will be able to control which videos get ads, and when the ads play in those videos.
This is different than the standalone click-to-play video ads Google offers to publishers in its content network. It's also different from the video distribution tests Google did with Warner Music and Sony BMG in January, and with MTV last August, both of which paired video content from those providers with video ads from Google advertisers.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:47 AM | Permalink
May 21, 2007
Google Cracking Down on AdSense ArbitrageSeveral AdSense publishers have received notice that their sites, which are mainly of the AdSense arbitrage/made for AdSense (MFA) variety, are being kicked out of the AdSense program as of June 1. According to Jennifer Slegg, the letter explains that the site involved has an "unsuitable business model," and most of the targeted publishers are earning significant amounts of money from AdSense. (Though how much of that money is being pumped back into AdWords to drive traffic to the site is not known, of course). Google will pay the publishers through the end of May.
Slegg notes that this could be good news for advertisers, since it should help clean up the content network: From a business perspective, it does make perfect sense for Google to make this move, since so many Google AdWords advertisers refuse to advertise on the content network because there are so many "Made for AdSense" style sites as well as those doing arbitrage. So in the long run, it could mean more money for publishers if/as advertisers return to the content network.
In the short-term, this could affect publishers not engaging in MFA sites, since these large-scale arbitrageurs will take their ads out of the program. These publishers could see at least a temporary drop in earnings, but a better-quality content network could bring in more advertisers in the long run, Slegg said.
The discussion is ongoing at Webmaster World and Search Engine Roundtable.
UPDATE: According to a Google spokesperson, this is part of an ongoing quality initiative on its content network: "At Google, we are always focused on how we can make the user experience as positive as possible while still providing value to our publishers and advertisers. As part of this effort, we continually conduct automated and manual reviews of publishers and sites that violate our policies. In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from the AdSense program."
It's not clear how many sites were affected in this batch of reviews.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:06 AM | Permalink
April 17, 2007
AdSense Adds Greek and RomanianJust received the annoucement that AdSense is now being offered in Greek and Romanian.
We're happy to announce that we've just expanded our product offerings for two long-awaited languages: Greek and Romanian. Starting today, Greek and Romanian publishers can monetize their content by displaying targeted AdSense for content ads on their pages. As an added bonus, Romanian publishers can now implement AdSense for search as well.If you're ready to get started with these languages, just log in to your AdSense account and follow the wizard located under the AdSense Setup tab. You can also contact the Greek team at adsense-el@google.com and the Romanian team at adsense-ro@google.com with additional questions.Posted by Frank Watson at 2:11 PM | Permalink
April 11, 2007
Miva Usurps Google in the Publishing IndustryHere at SES New York, I had the chance to sit down with Alex Vlasto, head of global communications for Miva. The company recently won a contextual ad deal (against Google) with Conde Nast. It is now positioned to be the exclusive contextual ad provider across the publisher's network of magazine websites.
Miva’s focus on certain verticals and web publishers allows it to make better contextual matches, which was a big selling point for Conde Nast. This is compared to more broadly applied publisher networks. Specifically its contextual placement works well with dynamic content, such as magazines, because it has rules and filters in place that are integrated with rotating content.
“There is contextual advertising and there is content advertising,” clarified Vlasto, characterizing the latter as the more considered ad placement around magazine and newspaper content.
So what did Miva do to win Conde Nast? It took screenshots of the AdSense placements across the publisher’s websites over the course of a few weeks in order to demonstrate where contextual placements weren’t as contextual as it might hope. The Vanity Fair website, for example, had contextual ads for brands that were of a “lower class” than those the magazine wished to associate with. This comes down to a difference in a contextual match and a cultural match. Contextual advertising can accommodate the latter to the degree that rules and filters are applied.
On the advertiser side, Miva's Precision Network will reflect this approach by being more attuned to certain verticals that advertisers can buy into. This brings more relevant traffic to vertical websites, according to Vlasto – a concept given more weigh in the online advertising space lately, as echoed in yesterday’s social networking session. In Miva's case, this is also an attempt to provide a different price point that’s a higher margin, lower volume spend than more widely distributed contextual ad networks, which it also provides.
This strategy isn't anything new though. Marchex has been working this angle for some time and has brought in a who's who list of publisher partners including Business Week, USA Today and Forbes. Marchex's Mark Peterson points out that this is in fact a strategy that was born at Industry Brains, a contextual ad outfit the company acquired in 2005.
Miva's Precision network, taking this strategy to heart, will continue to take a vertical approach to winning publisher partners, while pursuing in parallel its sweet spot of dynamic content. More appropriate than magazines, in this sense, are newspapers. Though newspapers are traditionally slow to develop online models (and form partnerships in order to do so), their dynamic content make them appropriate subjects for more considered contextual ad placement.
“If there is a newspaper story about a train crash, you don’t want to have contextual ads for train tickets,” said Vlasto, "And this type of thing happens more than most publishers realize."
Posted by Mike Boland at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 5, 2007
New Look for AdSense AdsA new, streamlined look for Google's AdSense ads, which have been spotted in tests recently, have now been widely released, according to the Google AdSense Blog.
The new formats remove the heavy top border with "Ads by Google," moving that text to a tab on the bottom corner. Borders between ads in a unit are also gone. A publisher's previously selected customized fonts and colors should not be affected, according to Google.
Early responses to the ads at Digital Point Forums is positive, though many publishers are reserving judgment until the effect the new ads have on CTR are evident.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:03 AM | Permalink
March 28, 2007
MySpace Making $30 Million Per Month From AdvertisingGuess the monster AdSense partner for Google is MySpace. According to a report just released, they are making over $30 million a month in ad revenue - 30-40% of which should be AdSense. Even Jeremy Shoemaker would be impressed by those numbers!
Loren Baker over at SearchEngineJournal has done a really thorough job analysing MySpace's use of Google ads.
Well worth the read. Nice effort Loren!
Posted by Frank Watson at 2:46 PM | Permalink
March 23, 2007
Google's New Text Link Ads -- Hotornot?As I was putting together the latest Search Engine Forums Spotlight, I came across some threads on various search marketing forums discussing Google's new pay-per-action ads. Along with the expected discussions (like one at Webmaster World) of whether it would be good or bad for advertisers and publishers, I also found some people continued to worry that a new ad format included in the program had crossed a line.
I thought Barry Schwartz did a good job of putting the argument to bed in a post at Search Engine Roundtable earlier this week, but it seems that lots of people are up in arms about this new format.
In a discussion on our own Search Engine Watch Forums (among other places), advertisers worried that the new in-line text links, which Google delivers via Javascript, were somehow sneaky.
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington says "They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here." Techdirt calls in-line text ads "fairly controversial and often irritating to users."
I personally don't see a problem with these ad units. They are clearly marked as ads when a user mouses over them. They are generated by Javascript, so there's no "selling PageRank " going on, which Google's Matt Cutts has often frowned upon. There is a chance that bloggers will go out of their way to blog about something just to sell it via the referral link, but that goes on every day with affiliate ads as well, and as I said, the ads are clearly marked as ads, so the blogger's intentions are clear.
Time will tell whether this ad unit sticks or not. At this point, it will only be shown on publisher sites in the beta test for PPA ads, which for now is a tiny group. If they are rejected by readers, then chances are most people will never even get a chance to see them before they are discontinued.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:15 PM | Permalink
March 20, 2007
Google to Test Pay-per-Action AdsWatch out Commission Junction. Here comes Google.
Google today announced a limited beta test of pay-per-action advertising, a new pricing model for certain AdSense ads on its content network that pits the company squarely against affiliate programs.
Under the new pricing model, advertisers will decide what kind of action they are willing to pay for, such as a sale, newsletter sign-up, or other conversion. The advertiser can set a value for that action that publishers will be paid. Google will monitor the conversions through conversion tracking codes on the advertiser's site.
Although a pay-per-action model shifts more risk to publishers, since they don't get paid unless a visitor clicks and completes the pre-defined conversion, the payoff will usually be higher than CPC commissions, said Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google's ad products.
"It does shift the burden of conversion to the publisher, but it's a higher value ad unit," he said. In addition, publishers have more flexibility in encouraging users to take advantage of the offer being presented, by recommending or describing the advertiser's service, he said.
Google has been testing various forms of these pay-per-action ads since June. Advertisers and publishers in the U.S. can sign up now to participate, and Google will begin inviting them to test the program over the next few weeks.
AdSense publishers can select individual ads, a "shopping cart" of ads, or search for ads by keyword. The new ad units are separate from the CPC and ads Google offers, and must be selected and placed separately. Publishers can review the details of the offer from the advertiser before agreeing to show the ad on their sites.
Advertisers can create text or image ads, or use Google's new text link ad format to create brief text descriptions that appear in the style of a publisher's page.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:00 AM | Permalink
January 25, 2007
AdSense Launches Ad PlacementThe AdSense Team sent an email earlier today detailling changes that were started last night.
Apparently now you can allow advertisers to select channels inside your site and get more specific in their selection of pages etc.
The Inside Adsense Team released this information: As you may know, custom channels are a great way to track the performance of individual ad units on your pages. Starting this week, with just a few extra steps you can make your site more attractive to advertisers by allowing them to target these channels as ad placements. Creating ad placements for more visible and desirable ad locations on your site increases their value to advertisers using site targeting and encourages those advertisers to bid more.Thanks to the feedback of publishers who helped us test out this feature early on, here are some answers to a few commonly asked questions that you may also have about ad placements:How are ad placements different from custom channels?Think of ad placements as 'enhanced' custom channels. To create an ad placement, you create and implement a custom channel just as you normally would. The only change is the additional step of providing attributes and an accurate description for your ad placement. On the 'Channels' page in your account, click the appropriate 'edit settings' link on the right. As you can see below, there will be a box labeled 'Targeting' on the next page which, once checked, will show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement. From there, you'll just need to provide some details on where the ad unit appears on your site:Advertisers will see the 'External name' and 'Description' along with the domain on which that placement appears, so a meaningful name and detailed description clarifying where the ads will show can make your placement more appealing. Be sure to highlight your most valuable and best-performing ad units as placements. For example, try a description like 'Ads will appear in a 300x250 rectangle embedded within articles on the Travel section' or 'Ads will appear only in the leaderboard ad unit directly above any page on the site.'If nobody bids on my placement, does that mean I won't get any money?Ads that are targeted through ad placements compete in the same auction against all other ads that are eligible to appear in that space, so you'll still be able to generate earnings. For example, suppose you created a 'Homepage, Top center' placement. When we see an impression from this placement, we round up advertisers who match the content of your homepage, as well as those targeting your site and this placement and include them in an auction. We'll then display the ad which our system has determined will earn you the most money, regardless of how it was targeted.What kind of placements should I create?Remember that advertisers will rely on your ad placement descriptions in order to decide whether to target their ads to your site. That said, here are a few tips to get started: - If you have multiple ad units on a page, let advertisers target the high visibility ones separately - If you have a wide range of topics on your site and you think certain topics will appeal to different types of advertisers, then break them out accordingly - Break out high visibility pages such as your homepage and any above-the-fold spotsFor more on ad placements, please visit our Help Center.
Posted by Frank Watson at 3:46 PM | Permalink
January 23, 2007
Google Tests Video for AdSenseGoogle announced last night on the Inside AdSense blog that it will begin testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers over the next few weeks.
Video content from Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment will be paired with ads from Google advertisers. The test will determine how scalable this method of video distribution and advertising can be, according to ClickZ. A similar approach was taken in August, when Google tested video ads with content from MTV.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 3:01 PM | Permalink
January 18, 2007
Google Updates AdSense PoliciesGoogle updated its policies for publishers in the AdSense program last night. Jennifer Slegg has a very thorough breakdown of the changes, with special attention to the competitive ad policy.
According to Slegg, the changes will cause some problems for publishers rotating ads from both AdSense and a competitive network, such as Yahoo Publisher Network. "If you are running YPN and AdSense on a 50/50 ad rotation using the same or very similar color palettes, you would now be in violation of AdSense policies. Likewise, if you are running AdSense on one part of your site, and YPN on another part, you would now also be in violation of the policies if you are using the same or similar color palettes," she writes. The rules also apply to ad units that mimic AdSense, yet are not contextual based, she adds.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:05 AM | Permalink
December 26, 2006
Google Adsense the New Gator?Rebecca Lieb writes over at ClickZ that Adsense may be in danger of going the route of Gator/Claria, as contextual advertising bloopers happen to good merchant sites.
Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 11:47 AM | Permalink
December 18, 2006
Google AdSense Outlaws Pics By AdsThe Google AdSense team sent out a letter today detailling their new position on using images to draw attention to the ads on a publishers page.
"We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers," the email stated.
The information can also be found at the Inside Adsense blog.
Details and examples are given so people cannot mistake what is being discussed.
Posted by Frank Watson at 2:21 PM | Permalink
November 28, 2006
Advertiser Details On Google Audio AdsDonna Bogatin over at Digital Micro-Markets has posted what look to be PowerPoint slides designed to explain how Google Audio Ads will work for advertisers. The PowerPoint slides show how Google plans to bridge the advertisers with the consumers, how they deliver the ads to the radio and how many people Google thinks they can reach with the ads. As we reported earlier, we are expecting Google Audio Ads To Be Tested By End Of Year.
How does Google deliver radio ads?
Step 1) Station inventory management system and studio log.Step 2) Google links electronically with stations to search for inventory that fits advertiser criteria.
Step 3) Inventory is paired with advertiser requests.
Step 4) Google delivers automated order to radio station and reserves inventory.
Google Audio's Current Footprint: * 800+ stations * 4200 stations targeted * Coverage in 19 of the top 25 markets
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:34 AM | Permalink
November 24, 2006
Google Sending Out AdSense Holiday GiftsIt is that time of the year again. We have our first report of a Google Adsense holiday gift from WebmasterWorld. The gift appears to be a 3.6 inch TFT digital photo frame. No pictures of the frame yet, but I hope someone emails one to me.
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink
November 9, 2006
AdWords Advertisers Can Site Target Specific AdSense Publisher ChannelsAs an advertiser, there are often times when you want to site target a particular site running AdSense, but your particular product or service is really only relevant to a specific portion of the site. Or you might only want your ads running in a specific ad unit, such as the one running above the fold front and center. Google has released a new custom channel targeting feature that will allow advertisers to do that.
Publishers will need to turn the feature on for each relevant custom channel in their account, or set up brand new custom channels, breaking down the site or ad units in ways they feel advertisers will want to target them. Then advertisers can access the channel information for specific publishers in order to pick and chose what to target on the site.
Since the feature has just been launched across all publisher sites (although it was available previously as a beta test) it will likely take some time before many publishers adopt this new feature. Publishers need to specifically turn on the feature for each channel they would like to use before they will be available for advertisers to target.
There is more detail on JenSense but Google has not released much information on it yet for either advertisers or publishers.
Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 10:11 AM | Permalink
November 8, 2006
Google Audio Ads To Be Tested By End Of YearGoogle positioning for move into U.S. radio from Reuters has Google saying that Google Audio Ads will begin testing by the end of the year. Google says over time, up to 1,000 Googlers might be involved. The article, as does Google to Boost Scope Of Radio-Ad Sales Business from the Wall Street Journal , touches on the idea that a deal involving a radio player like Clear Channel might kick start things. But rumors of talks remain that, rumors. Meanwhile, I still find myself amazed that Google is doing absolutely nothing in terms of podcasts. Online video, it can't do enough about, in hopes of grabbing ad money. But online audio it seems content to ignore, instead heading off into offline audio with radio. Setting up Google Audio feels like a missed opportunity.
Postscript: Donna Bogatin over at Digital Micro-Markets dropped me an email to say she wrote about this yesterday, before the Reuters story came out. >" underneath the image.
Publishers are unable to control if or when these ad unit styles appear on their sites. The unbranded ad unit does not seem to be used very often at all, however the image within the ad unit style is showing up frequently on many publisher sites.
It is always interesting to see what AdSense is testing, and what eventually makes its way to being a regular part of the program instead of limited testing.
Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 12:27 PM | Permalink
July 28, 2006
Google Testing Radio Ad Sales In DetroitGoogle rides the radio waves, from News.com looks at how Google AdSense for radio is now being tested in Detroit, before a planned rollout of the program to all Google advertisers.
Technically, Google's been running radio ads ever since it acquired dMarc Broadcasting in January. It's not like dMarc stopped doing what it was already doing when Google bought it. The real change is that Google is integrating the ability for any existing advertiser to make radio ad purchases on a bid basis.
For more on Google's radio plans, see Googleplex Irvine & "AdSense Audio" For Radio Ads and Speculation: Google To Begin Selling Radio Ads Through AdWords Soon.
Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:36 AM | Permalink
July 25, 2006
The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection PracticesLast Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and thus, potentially -- impossible to prevent some types of fraud through purely automated means.
The report is long, a 47 page PDF file. Anyone interested in click fraud issues should give it a thorough read. But given how everyone's always busy, I thought I'd highlight below a number of sections that stood out in my review of the document.
The report is by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University. To prepare it, he says in the Executive Summary at the beginning (page 1):
I have been asked to evaluate Googles invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Googles campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Googles employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Googles invalid click detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information narrated to me by Googles employees, I conclude that Googles efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this point.
Immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is that he makes no mention of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if he's only talking with Google, of course he's likely to come away with the idea that Google is doing everything just fine.
When you read the report, it's clear this isn't the case. Google does come under criticism. It's also important to realize Tuzhilin was not employed by Google to create this report. He's an independent expert appointed to my knowledge by the court. Exactly how he was selected is unclear, and I do think it would be a better report if advertiser data had been involved. But there's still plenty of good stuff here to digest.
Page 2 covers his background and materials reviewed from Google to prepare the report.
Page 3 and some of page 4 covers those he talked with at Google. Interesting details are that Google's click quality team consists of about 36 people, one-third engineers looking to design detection systems and the remaining two-thirds dedicated to doing manual investigations of suspected fraud.
Pages 4 through 6 cover the history of the internet, search engines and Google, most of which isn't that necessary for most experienced search marketers. Page 7 talks about three main ways of purchasing advertising:
- CPM - cost per impression
- CPC - cost per click
- CPA - cost per action
Again, basic stuff. But it's worth touching on because of some of the current debate that Google and other search engines will be forced to go to CPA pricing to fully eliminate fraud.
On page 8, Tuzhilin lends some support of this, or at least the problems that others have raised with CPC:
Although currently popular, the CPC/PPC model has two fundamental problems:
- Although correlated, good click-through rates (CTRs) are still not indicative of good conversion rates, since it is still not clear if a visitor would buy an advertised product once he or she clicked on the ad. In this respect, the CPA-based models provide better solutions for the advertisers (but not necessarily for the search engines), since they are more indicative that their ads are working.
- It does not offer any built-in fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general, as will be explained in Section 8 (it can be done relatively easily in some special cases, but not in general). For this reason, major search engines launched extensive invalid click detection programs and still face problems combating click fraud.
In response to these two problems and for various other business reasons, Google is currently testing a CPA payment model, according to some reports in the media. Some analysts believe that the conversion-based CPA model is more robust for the advertisers and also less prone to click fraud. Therefore, they believe that the future of the online advertising payments lies with the CPA model. Although this is only a belief that is not supported by strong evidence yet, Google is getting ready for the next stage of the online advertising marathon.
What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? over at Publishing 2.0 from Scott Karp is a good roundup and debate on some of the issues of CPA perhaps as the solution to CPC issues.
I've posted lots of comments in Karp's post, but my personal view is this. Currently, Google is offering all three major payment systems: CPC, CPM and CPA. It is offering all three not just because of fraud issues but because advertisers have different goals with advertising, where different payment models may be required.
Building brand? You want impressions perhaps more than clickthrough, and suddenly CPM makes sense. Really savvy with conversion tracking? CPA might make more sense for you, as a way for you to feel less likely to be exposed to fraud and more likely to really be paying only for key traffic. Fairly rudimentary with conversion tracking? Doing low-cost CPC ads might make a lot of sense, for your situation. And beyond the three big ones, I'm sure we'll see other options emerge. The unifying goal around all of them, from Google's perspective, will be figuring out a way to help advertisers track that the ads are working according to some type of metrics that the advertisers want.
Skipping down past background on how AdWords works and the AdSense program (AdSense For Domains doesn't get mentioned, though it's a major program), page 13 starts in on what Google can tell about clicking activities.
Google is apparently making use of conversion data that advertisers provide to determine if fraudulent clicks are happening. My understanding was that conversion data was supposed to be ringfenced and not used by Google for anything, not even in the aggregate. But perhaps the policy has changed or perhaps I misunderstood this. I'll check on that (and also note that confusingly, the report says on page 34 that "None of the filters uses the conversion information that Google collects"). Certainly Google made no such restrictions when it launched Google Checkout. But even with conversion data, the report notes using this info isn't perfect.
Google collects various types of information about querying and clicking activities, including certain types of post-clicking data about conversion actions on the advertisers website where the visitor is taken following the click. All this data accumulated by Google is extracted from various sources and contains comprehensive information about visitors activities on the Google Network.
As stated before, the conversion data the post-clicking data about conversion actions on the advertisers website constitutes an important piece of this collected data. In particular, if the advertiser formally agrees to provide this information, Google collects data on whether or not the user visited certain designated pages on the advertised website that the advertiser marked as conversion pages, such as the checkout page and certain form filling pages. This conversion data is limited to what the advertiser decided to provide to Google and is not as rich as the clickstream data collected by advertisers themselves on their websites. Also, many advertisers decide to opt out from providing this conversion data. In this case, Google does not have any conversion information and therefore does not know what happened after a visitor clicked on the ad. Nevertheless, this post-clicking conversion data is important for Google even in its limited form because it conveys some intentions of the visitors on the advertised website and provides good insights into whether or not the visitor is seriously considering purchasing the advertised product or service....
This raw clicking data described above is subsequently cleaned, preprocessed and stored in various internal logs by Google for different types of subsequent analysis conducted on this data.
One inherent weakness of Googles (or any other search engine) data collection effort that is important for detecting invalid clicks, is inability to get full access to all the clicking activities of the visitors of the advertised website. In other words, the conversion data that Google collects provides only a partial picture of all the post-clicking activities of the visitor on the advertised website. This data is important for detecting invalid clicks since better invalid click detection methods can be developed using this data. Unfortunately, Google (and other search engines) does not have full access to this data, unless the advertised website decides to provide its clickstream data to Google, which many websites are reluctant to do. However, this is not Googles fault this is an inherent limitation of the types of data available to Google.
While it might not be perfect, the report also notes at the end of this section that no one has the perfect collection of information:
However, this lack of full conversion data available to Google is compensated by various types of querying and clicking data that Google can collect, whereas advertisers and third-party vendors cannot. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between the types of data relevant for detecting invalid clicks that is available to Google, advertisers and the thirdparty vendors. None of these three groups have the most comprehensive set of data pertinent to detecting invalid clicks, and each of them needs to settle for the invalid click detection methods possible only with the data that they have.
On page 14, the report addresses the frustration advertisers feel over the relatively non-granular nature of Google's reporting versus Google's need to keep some things carefully protected:
The smallest unit of analysis is one day. For example, the number of invalid clicks on an ad detected by Google (or any other related statistic) can only be reported on a daily basis (although there are certain alternative methods of obtaining aggregation granularity that is smaller than a day). In other words, advertisers cannot know if a particular click on a particular ad was marked as valid or invalid by Google, and Google refuses to provide this information to advertisers.
This is a source of contention and dispute between Google and the advertisers, and one can understand both parties in this dispute. On one hand, the advertiser has the right to know why a particular click was marked as valid by Google (when the advertiser thinks that it is invalid) because the advertiser pays for this click. On the other hand, if Google discloses this information, it opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work. This means that unethical users will immediately take advantage of this information to conduct more sophisticated fraudulent activities undetectable by Googles methods.
This conflicting dilemma between advertisers right to know and Googles inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC advertising model to be discussed in the next section. More recently, Google tried to bridge this gap between Google and the advertisers.
Page 15 spends time looking at various definitions of click fraud, bringing us to page 16 which raises the bigger issue that it is impossible to know the intent of ALL clicks, which is crucial to understand what chunk of them might be fraudulent:
Unfortunately, in several cases it is hard or even impossible to determine the true intent of a click using any technological means. For example, a person might have clicked on an ad, looked at it, went somewhere else but then decided to have another look at the ad shortly thereafter to make sure that he/she got all the necessary information from the ad. Is this second click invalid? To make things even more complicated, the second click may not be strictly necessary since the person remembers the content of the ad reasonably well (hence there is no real need for the second click). However, the person may not really like or care about the advertiser and decides to make this second click anyway (to make sure that he/she did not miss anything in the ad and his/her information is indeed correct) without any concerns that the advertiser may end up paying for this second click (since the person really does not care about the advertiser and his/her own interests of not missing anything in the ad overweigh the concerns of hurting the advertiser). Therefore, in some cases the true intent of a click can be identified only after examining deep psychological processes, subtle nuances of human behavior and other considerations in the mind of the clicking person.
Soon after this, on page 17, comes the first real bombshell to me. As said above, you can't detect the intent of all clicks. Given this, there's no reasonable way to be certain that technological fixes for click fraud detection are working:
In summary, between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks, lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.
What? Didn't the report find Google was acting reasonably? Yes, and I think this is is because as the report goes on, it's because Google's not relying solely on automated means to stop click fraud, which might allow some clicks to get through, if that were only the case.
Page 18 picks of the issue even more strongly, and I've bolded this section because it deserves special attention. Note that the italics were originally included:
The last statement has one important implication: given a particular click in a log file, it is impossible to say with certainty if this click is valid or not in all the cases. This means that
- It is impossible to measure the true rates of invalid clicking activities, and all the reports published in the business press are only guesstimates at best.
- The invalid click detection methods need to be developed without a proper operationalizable conceptual definition of invalid clicks.
The important word above is all the cases since in some cases it can be stated with certainty if a particular click is valid or not. For example, it is easy to detect a doubleclick using relatively simple technological means, assuming that the doubleclick is invalid.
Again, it seems to be a case that automation can catch some, perhaps lots of click fraud, but it can't catch all of it because the intent problem. Also crucial in the above is the stressing that rates we've been given from various sources are simply guesses, since the intent of clicks aren't know to some of these other sources.
Indeed, in the case of the recent Outsell report, you don't even have to worry about figuring out the intent of particular clicks. Click fraud stats from that report come from half the panel entirely guessing about what click fraud rates they might have -- guessing, because that half does not auditing of clicks at all.
Page 19 deals with ways of identifying invalid clicks, at least according to operational approaches -- IE, automated criteria. Do the clicks show some type of:
- Anomaly from past clicking patterns for a site or ad?
- Violate certain predefined rules?
- Fall into certain classes of behavior that make them deemed invalid?
Page 20 explains that Google primarily depends on the first two approaches -- looking for anomalies and using rules -- but then gets into what it stresses as the "Fundamental Problem" of fraudulent clicks:
We conclude that there is a fundamental problem associated with the definition of invalid clicks for the Pay-per-Click model. This problem can be summarized as follows:
- There is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized in the sense defined above.
- An operational definition cannot be fully disclosed to the general public because of the concerns that unethical users will take advantage of it, which may lead to a massive click fraud. However, if it is not disclosed, advertisers cannot verify or even dispute why they have been charged for certain clicks.
This problem lies at the heart of the click fraud debate and constitutes the main problem of the CPC model: it is inherently vulnerable to click fraud.
Page 21 poses solutions to the problem:
- The trust us approach of the search engines. The search engines can assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to protect them against the click fraud. This is not easy because of the inherent conflict of interest between the two parties: the money from invalid clicks directly contribute to the bottom lines of the search engines. Nevertheless, it may be possible for the search engines to solve this trust problem by developing lasting relationships with the advertisers. However, the discussion of how this can be done lies outside of the scope of this report.
- Third-party auditors. Independent third-party vendors, who have no financial conflicts of interest, can work with advertisers and audit their clickstream files to detect invalid clicks.
These two approaches would still constitute only a partial solution to the Fundamental Problem because there is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized.
Page 21 continues on looking at how Google does click fraud detection, covering a range of general preventative measure and more active things done when clicks actually happen.
On page 23, a look at filtering systems begins, ending with this summary that's positive for Google, at the moment. It also stresses that filtering will always come under new challenges:
The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic tuning and maintenance rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network. It also demonstrates that various recent efforts of the Click Quality team to improve performance of their filters produce only incremental improvements. Thus, the Click Quality team currently reached a stability point since additional efforts to enhance filters produce only marginal improvements.
Having said this, the Click Quality team also realizes that this is only a local stability point in the sense that major future modifications in clicking patterns of online users and new types of fraudulent attacks against Google can lead to radically new types of invalid clicks that the current set of filters can miss. Therefore, the Click Quality team is working on the next generation of more powerful filters that will monitor a broader set of signals and more complex monitoring conditions. These new filters will require a more powerful computing infrastructure than is currently available, and the Click Quality team also participates in developing this infrastructure. Their overall goal is to make click spam hard and unrewarding for the unethical users thus making it uneconomical for them and turning many of them away from Google and the Google Network.
At page 28, the expert notes that Google's filters are relatively simple in nature, yet they work:
The structure of most of Googles filters, with a few exceptions, is surprisingly simple. I was initially puzzled and thought that Google did not do a reasonable job in developing better and more sophisticated filters. I was initially certain that these simple filters should miss many types of more complicated attacks. However, the evidence reported in the previous two sections indicates that these simple filters perform reasonably well.
Why? A variety of reasons, such unsophisticated attacks:
Although some of the coordinated attacks can be quite sophisticated, the majority of the invalid clicks usually come from relatively simple sources and less experienced perpetrators....Still, there are certain types of attacks that Google filters will miss; but these attacks should be quite sophisticated and would require significant ingenuity to launch. Therefore, there cannot be too many of these, unless perpetrators become much more imaginative....
The Long Tail / Search Tail even gets a mention, with the idea being that -- if I understand correctly -- most activity focuses around the same type of things that the filters work well to detect. IE, the filters do well at cutting off the head of click fraud -- and if tail activity gets through, it's relatively little in comparison:
Despite its current reasonable performance, this situation may change significantly in the future if new attacks will shift towards the Long Tail of the Zipf distribution by becoming more sophisticated and diverse.
At the bottom of page 29, the report starts examining whether Google is letting stuff slide to earn more money:
Since Google does not charge advertisers for invalid clicks, this means that it loses money by filtering out these clicks. Thus, there is a financial incentive for Google not to forgo some of these revenues and simply be easy Long Tail Left Part Frequency Rank 30 on filtering out invalid clicks. Therefore, it is important to know if any business considerations entered into the filter specification process or is it entirely determined by Googles engineers in an objective manner with a single purpose to protect the advertiser base. This is one of the important issues that I investigated as a part of my studies of how Google manages detection of invalid clicks....
The conclusion is that Google isn't trying to favor itself:
I have spent a significant amount of time trying to understand who sets these threshold parameters, how, and what are the procedures and processes for setting them. In particular, I tried to understand if it is an entirely engineering decision that tries to protect the advertisers from invalid clicks or any of the business groups at Google are involved in this decision process with the purpose of influencing it towards generating extra revenues for Google.
As a result of these investigations, I realized that it constitutes exclusively an engineering decision with no inputs from the finance department or the business units, except the following two cases:
- The first one was a special case when one particular IP address was disabled because of inappropriate clicking activities, and a business unit requested the Click Quality team to conduct an additional investigation since it was an important customer associated with that IP address, and restore it if the investigation results were negative. When I was explained what had happened, I felt that Googles actions were reasonable in this particular situation.
- The change in the doubleclick policy that was considered in Winter 2005 and implemented in March 2005. It turned out that the change in the doubleclick policy (i.e., not to charge advertisers for the immediate second click in a doubleclick) had non-trivial financial implications for Google. Being a publicly traded company at that time, this change would have had a noticeable effect on Googles total revenues with corresponding implications for the financial performance of the company. Therefore, this policy change had legitimate concerns for Googles management, and these financial implications have been discussed in the company. Still, despite its noticeable negative effects on its financial performance, Google decided to abandon the old doubleclick policy and not to charge advertisers for the second click, which was an appropriate action to take.
In conclusion, with the exception of the doubleclick, I found Googles processes for specifying filters and setting parameters in these filters driven exclusively by the consideration to protect the advertiser base, and, therefore, being reasonable.
Doubleclick constitutes a special case. For me, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid, as I argued in Section 8, and the advertisers should not be charged for it. It is not clear to me why it took Google so long to revise the policy of charging for doubleclicks. Nevertheless, this policy was revised in March 2005 despite the fact that the company lost noticeable revenues by taking this action.
I find the conclusion that Google wasn't trying to benefit itself doesn't mesh well with the expert's own concern/confusion/uncertainty about why Google took so long to change its policy on doubleclicks. Moreover, that entire policy isn't well explained. Way back up on page 20, there's this very brief mention:
It turns out that Google had a history associated with the definition of a doubleclick: at some point doubleclick was considered to be a valid click and advertisers were charged for it, while subsequently Google reconsidered and treated doubleclick as invalid.
And that's it until the section later in the report, where Google's effectively accused of footdragging on changing its policy, where business discussions about the change were made, but Google then seems to be given the all clear because eventually it did the right thing.
The entire matter is something that feels like it should have been explored more, but page 31 sheds light as to why this might have been difficult. Google's apparently had a complete staff change in relation to click fraud detection since it began charging by the click:
In this subsection, I will describe the history of development of Google filters. First of all, I would like to point out that most of the descriptions in this subsection are not based on documents provided to me by Google but rather on the verbal descriptions by the members of the Click Quality team based on their recollections of the past events and on the folklore evidence since none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.
The section continues with detection divided into these groupings -- and I've bolded a key part:
- The Early Days (February 2002 Summer 2003). These were the early days of the PPC model and of the click fraud characterized by extensive learning about the problem and determining ways to deal with it.
- The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003, formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003, launch of new filters and the intent to take the invalid click detection efforts to the next level. It ended with the development of the whole infrastructure for combating invalid clicks and the consolidation of Googles invalid click detection efforts. This stage was characterized by significant progress in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes for accomplishing this task. Although the Click Quality teams solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was under control by the end of 2005.
- The Consolidation Stage (Fall 2005 present). By this time, Google had enough filters and perfected them to the level when they would detect most of the invalid clicking activities in the Left Part of the Zipf distribution (see Figure 1) and some of the attacks in the Long Tail. They would still miss more sophisticated attacks 32 in the Long Tail, and the Click Quality team continued working on the neverending process of improving their filters to detect and prevent new attacks. The Click Quality team has also been working on enhancing their infrastructure and improving their processes....
What? Click fraud wasn't under control until the end of 2005, yet Google is said to have acted reasonably by the report? How does this make sense? The best explanation seems to be that as the report goes on, the author feels click fraud was an evolving problem, and that Google was reasonably reacting to prevent it even though it wasn't "under control" until the end of last year. In contrast, had Google been doing nothing, then it might have been deemed not to have been taking reasonable steps to gain control.
Page 32 looks at the early days and notes that for a year and a half, no new filters were added other than the three original ones that CPC-based AdWords started with. Why? Maybe click fraud was less understood at that time since it was so new (though Search Engine Watch was citing articles on the problem like this one from Wired as far back as 2001). That's one suggestion, along with Google having fewer resources, lacking the right infrastructure or click fraud being on a smaller scale. But these are all guesses, since as the author notes (again, I've bolded a key part):
Not a single person on the Click Quality team was either around or involved in the click fraud detection back in 2002. The only person from this era who is still at Google is on an extended leave and was not available for comments during my visits to Google.
It is hard to judge reasonableness of Googles invalid click detection efforts between 2002 and summer 2003 because there is simply not enough information available for this time period for me to form an informed judgment about this matter. One exception is the doubleclick policy that I have described before. As I have already stated, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid in my opinion, and Google should have identified it as such well before March 2005 (however, the detection and filtering out the third, fourth and other subsequent clicks was there since the introduction of the PPC model, and advertisers were not charged for these extra clicks).
Again, I get confused by the report declaring that Google operated reasonably when it also states that it can't judge if it indeed acted reasonably for part of the claim period.
The middle period finds progress with far more confidence, as covered on page 33:
The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003 and the formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003 (the first person was hired in April 2003 with the mandate to form the Click Quality team; several people joined the team during the summer of 2003, and the initial core team consisting of Operations and Engineering groups was consolidated by Fall 2003).
During this time period, two new filters were introduced in Summer 2003 and one more in January 2004. These three new filters remedied several problems that existed since the launch of the first three filters and significantly advanced Googles invalid click detection efforts. Besides the development of new and better filters, there was a separate effort launched to develop the whole infrastructure for doing the offline analysis of invalid clicks and managing customer inquiries about invalid clicks and billing charges.
Despite all these efforts, the new filters and the offline analysis methods still failed to detect some of the more sophisticated attacks (presumably from the Long Tail of the Figure 1) launched against the Google Network in 2004 and the first half of 2005. In response to these activities and as a part of the overall invalid click detection effort, Google engineers introduced some additional filters around Winter and Spring 2005, including the filter identifying the second immediate click in a doubleclick as invalid.
As a result of all of these efforts by the Click Quality team, a significant progress has been made in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes to accomplish this task. Although the Click Quality teams solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was under control by the end of 2005.
And overall filtering is given this conclusion at the top of page 35:
Google put much effort in developing infrastructure, methods and processes for detecting invalid clicks since the Click Quality team was established in 2003. These efforts were not perfect since Google missed certain amounts of invalid clicks over these years and it adhered to the doubleclicking policy for too long in my opinion. However, click fraud is a very difficult problem to solve, Google put a significant effort to solve it, and I find their efforts to filter out invalid clicks as being reasonable, especially after the doubleclick policy was reversed in March 2005.
Page 35 then begins looking at "offline" or non-automated ways to find click fraud that's gotten past filters. By page 37, it gets into systems applied to review what happens on some AdSense sites:
Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the AdSense publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms and Conditions of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various publishers and either immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are engaged in the activities that the system finds to be inappropriate.
Interestingly, the system is still relatively new, only about a year old, as explained on page 38:
The first prototype of the auto-termination system was built in the early 2005 and the system was launched in the summer 2005. Recently, Google has developed major enhancements to the current version of the auto-termination system deploying an alternative set of technologies.
Page 38 also starts a look at the manual review that the click fraud team does, with this positive summary coming on page 40:
I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Googles investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.
However, using humans also poses a bottleneck, as covered on page 41:
My only concern with these manual inspections is about scalability of the inspection process. Since the number of inquiries grows rapidly, so does the number of inspections required to investigate these inquiries. As stated before, Google tries to automate this process by letting software systems do a sizable number of inspections. Still, the number of manual inspections keeps growing significantly over time, based on the numbers that I have seen. This means that Google has a challenging task of expanding and properly training its team of inspectors to assure rapid high-quality inspections of inquiries in the