Internet Marketing Blog

Google has just rolled out hourly reporting for AdWords participants. The most obvious benefit is that you can see what time of day your users are searching for you and clicking on your ads. This information may be helpful for your organization if for no other reason than you can now tailor dayparting to show your ads when they are most effective. A second benefit is that you can now find out when your budget is running out if you are using the accelerated bidding method.

More information on hourly reporting can be found in the AdWords support pages.

I just noticed that our primary Google Analytics account has been granted 5 more profiles, bumping it up to a total of 10. A quick search didn’t turn up any news from Google or any obvious posts about this, so maybe they’re rolling these out piece-meal or I’m ahead of the curve on catching this. Feel free to comment if you have or have not received more accounts.

Google AdWords now includes a column in some reports that estimates the number of invalid clicks on your ads. More information can be found in the Inside AdWords blog and the AdWords Help Center.

Invalid clicks are those caught by the AdWords system that are not charged to your account. Their are a number of factors that may make a click invalid, but Google won’t reveal the specifics. Some indicators might include:

• Multiple clicks in a short period of time.
• Multiple clicks from the same computer or many computers sharing the same or similiar IP addresses.
• Repeated clicks over time from the same computer.
• Clicks on a large number of ads on the same page.
• Clicks on ads happen immediately after the page is loaded, indicating a person has not had time to really look at the results.

Invalid click report data is available from January 1, 2006 onward. The system will not allow you to generate reports for earlier periods.

The AdWords team has added the ability to browse the content network sites by category. The category list is pretty lightweight right now, with not enough specificity in many areas. It is not clear if they plan to expand the directory structure, so at the moment you will probably still find it useful to search by keyword. Another issue, created in part from the lack of a complete classification system, is that the limitation of only viewing 100 sites in a category means that you don’t get a complete list; you may be left wondering what other opportunities didn’t make it in the top 100.

More information can be found here.

Yahoo announced that it will delay the rollout of its new ad program that will include many of the core features of Google’s AdWords program, including ad positioning that factors in quality (presumably click-through-rate).

Yahoo’s advertising interface is long overdue for many improvements, some from a usability perspective, but also functionally. Chief rival Google AdWords is much more powerful, flexible, and — in most respects — easier to use. Our chief concern, however, is that the Yahoo system is simply overpriced for its value, and we often tell our clients to forego Yahoo entirely or spend significantly less on it than Google, even accounting for search engine market share. Yahoo’s antiquated bid-for-position system causes bid inflation and doesn’t reward intelligent, sophisticated advertisers with the performance they deserve.

We look forward to the new Yahoo advertising system, and we hope that we can take advantage of much improved functionality on behalf of our clients before the end of the year.

More information about the delay can be found here.

Google’s Personalized Search feature might be useful sometimes, but if you’re evaluating search engine rankings for an SEO project. Ideally you would be able to turn this capability off until you wanted to use it again, however the current instantiation only allows you to turn it off on a query-by-query basis, so your only option is to remove it from your Google Account entirely.

To remove Personalized Search, you can either go to this page or go into your Google Account and click on “edit” next to “My Services”. From there you will be able to delete Personalized Search.

Search Engine Watch recently evaluated a report from Outsell Inc. claiming that as much as 14.6 percent of all PPC clicks were click fraud and that this cost advertisers $800 million last year. Danny Sullivan obtained a copy of the report and takes it apart in significantly more detail, finding that these numbers are highly suspect for a variety of reasons, including:

• The report does not distinguish between search and content networks. The latter are thought to account for the bulk of click fraud.
• The numbers may include some affiliates and arbitrage, both of which would skew the results higher.
• First and second tier search engines are not separated by the report.

Andy goes on to say that while the extrapolated total figures are suspect, there is useful information about refund requests and experiences with the search engines.