september 2007

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This thing creeps me out.

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I recently rebuilt a number of campiagns in a rather large account. I broke a few big campaigns in a large amount of smaller ones to allow for better budgeting. Using the editor, I could work on them one piece at a time. One thing I found during my work, was that I could easily transfer my location targeting to my new campaigns. It isn't very intuitive, and after a bit of digging I found the answer on the Google AdWords Editor Help Pages:

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Check your email

Google just sent out their FALL 2007 issue of their retail industry newsletter.

Read More HERE

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Dr. Kourosh Gharachorloo, head of Google's Ad Traffic Quality engineering team, speaks at the AdFraud workshop at Stanford University on September 14th.

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TechCrunch (via the Motley Fool) is reporting that Google is looking to buy Sirius Satellite Radio.

Interesting.

I have been in the Google Radio Advertising program since Beta, and aside from just wanting to try it to see how it works, I have really had no desire to use it. It might be interesting if they do purchase Sirius, as it has channels that are somewhat more targeted than regular radio.

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From the Google AdWords Editor team:

We'd like to ask anyone still using AdWords Editor 3.5 to upgrade to the latest version (4.0) before October 3, 2007. After October 3rd, 2007, version 3.5 will no longer be supported. As you may already know, old versions of AdWords Editor are retired 60 days after new versions are released in order to optimize our resources and provide the best user experience for AdWords Editor users.

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I heard back from Google about the weirdness that occurred in my AdWords account and found that:

There were no apparent signs of an automated attack, and the clicks charged to your AdWords account are typical of normal user and system behavior.

That is good to know, but what happened? Why did analytics only show 1/3 of the clicks? My total traffic for the day was under the total number of clicks that I had seen for that single campaign...and that does not include organic traffic, direct traffic, etc.

So, what happened? Is it a Google Analytics error? I know that clicks does not equal visitors, but the totals should have been much closer. Any thoughts?

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I just noticed that I have a new feature in my Google AdWords Account. The new ad creation tool is interesting. I might have to try a few to see if they convert better. I wonder if the phrases they have selected convert well? If they used any historical data in the selection process?

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Click Fraud…We all know it exists. We all know it happens. The degree and amount is suspect. At the end of August I created a campaign designed to drive a ton of traffic over a short period of time. After considering a few options and tactics, I decided that a site-targeted campaign with a few high traffic sites targeted would be the best choice. I bid a bit higher than I usually would because I wanted to drive more traffic and the actual cost wasn’t a huge issue at that point. One of the sites I selected was Friendster.The first few days the traffic were decent overall, but on September 1st I took a look at my traffic numbers and saw it was still very low overall. I then went into my AdWords account and saw that that traffic alone was much higher what I was seeing in Google Analytics.After some digging I found that the site-targeted account was showing nearly FOUR TIMES as many clicks as what I was seeing in my Analytics account.Here is the traffic from the 31st in my AdWords account on the 31st of August for the site-targeted campaign for Friendster. (75,434) So, all the traffic came ...

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submit_url = 'http://adwordseditor.blogspot.com/2007/09/multiple-clicks-cost-you-money.html';While having some A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, AdWords will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate pageviews as one visit. This is a common behavior among visitors engaging in comparison shopping.

There is NO mention of the second and third (or more) clicks on my same ad being counted as invalid. I know that the particular campaign I was looking at had a 4% invalid clicks rate...but the data discrepancy was much much much higher when looking at my website analytics reports.

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submit_url = 'http://adwordseditor.blogspot.com/2007/09/new-report-interface.html';Google updated more than just the report center interface. The reports now have an "analytics" feel to them.

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While looking at some of the keywords driving traffic here, I noticed this result at the bottom of the page.