As part of our effort to provide you with more information on invalid clicks, we wanted to give you some additional background on how our systems, processes, and teams work together to manage click fraud for our advertisers, while also sharing what the overall landscape of invalid click detection at Google looks like.
Let’s dive right in with an overview of how it works. At a high level, we have a three stage-system for invalid click detection: (1) our real-time filters, (2) offline analysis, and (3) reactive investigations. The diagram below gives a more detailed explanation of what each does:
As you can see, the invalid clicks detected in the first two stages are the result of proactive work by Google. In stage one, we automatically filter most of these clicks before they even reach your account to protect against malicious activity and optimize your return on investment (ROI). The much smaller amounts of invalid clicks found in stage two are reflected in Click Quality Adjustments listed on your billing summary page. In either case, you don’t need to take any action or write to us to receive this protection. The third stage only includes the relatively rare cases where advertisers are affected by undetected click fraud. In those cases, an advertiser writes to us, we conduct an investigation, and if we find signs of undetected click fraud, we mark those clicks as invalid and give a refund to the advertiser.
So, how many invalid clicks are detected proactively vs. reactively? Here’s the breakdown:
Impact vs. activity
Click fraud is similar to email spam in a lot of ways. The most significant similarity is that the seriousness of the problem is not measured by how much spam is sent, but rather how much gets into a user’s inbox. When looking at click fraud, the most important measure is not the “activity” metric – which measures the volume of invalid clicks that occur overall – but the “impact” metric. The activity metric could go up or down significantly and the impact on advertisers would not change if filters are catching the invalid clicks. So far, we have only publicly shared this activity metric, which we have disclosed as being less than 10% of all clicks, and explain in more detail next. After that explanation, we want to talk about the impact metric for the first time. This measures what percentage of all clicks are clicks reported by advertisers which, after investigation, turn out to be invalid and have not already been caught by Google. Explaining these topics is complicated, but we’re going to give it a try. Here goes.
Activity - invalid clicks fluctuate constantly but average less than 10% of all clicks
Our invalid clicks rate – the activity rate – has remained in the range of less than 10% of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million/year in potential revenue foregone.
Because it is difficult to definitively determine the “intent” of a click in many cases, the number of invalid clicks that we filter also include those filtered for reasons separate from fraudulent intent. Cases of provable click fraud attempts constitute a small minority of the clicks we mark as invalid. There are many greyer cases of possible click fraud attempts (but without clear scientific “proof”), for which we still choose not to charge advertisers. For example, we have an automated rule which filters out the second click of all double clicks as a matter of policy. We mark this kind of activity as invalid simply to optimize advertiser ROI. Those clicks are included in our “activity” metric and are also a good reason we use the term “invalid” clicks instead of fraud.
This combined approach is the essence of click fraud management: the goal is to cast the net of invalid clicks sufficiently wide in order to have a high degree of confidence that actual malicious behavior is effectively filtered out. By proactively filtering clicks worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars every year, we are able to provide very effective protection against attempted click fraud.
Impact - less than 0.02% of all clicks are reactively detected as invalid
Our Click Quality team investigates every inquiry we receive from advertisers who believe they may have been affected by undetected click fraud. Many of these cases are misunderstandings, but in most cases where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been filtered out (and not charged for) by our real-time filters. Because of the broad operation of our proactive detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks.
Put another way, for every ten thousand clicks on Google AdWords ads, fewer than two are reactively detected cases of possible click fraud. This proportion has stayed within this range every quarter since we launched AdWords, even as the issue of click fraud has received more widespread media attention. In the cases of reactively detected invalid clicks, a refund or credit is provided to the advertiser, and we utilize the discovery as a feedback mechanism to improve our proactive detection systems.
What do these numbers mean for me as an advertiser?
It is important to understand that the network-wide invalid clicks rate is separate from an individual advertiser’s invalid clicks rate. The invalid clicks rate is what we call an open loop number, which means that the more invalid activity we detect, the more protection we provide. A machine attempting a click fraud attack can send any number of clicks, even exceeding the maximum number of clicks that are allowed based on an advertiser's daily budget, but our systems will automatically filter these clicks so that the advertiser is not impacted. For example, an advertiser with a $10 daily budget could be attacked by someone attempting click fraud consisting of $1 million worth of clicks. When our filters protect against that attack, the advertiser’s invalid clicks rate would increase dramatically – meaning we were filtering out a very high proportion of their clicks – and their campaign would be unharmed. Similarly, that attack alone would increase the overall invalid clicks rate on our network, even though it was limited to a single advertiser. In this manner, a large attack focused on just a few advertisers can actually manipulate Google’s overall invalid clicks rate for that day, so this is an externally manipulable number.
Thus, the overall invalid clicks rate, as well as its day-to-day fluctuations, has almost no relation to the invalid clicks rate for an individual advertiser. In order to provide the real data to our advertisers, we launched the invalid clicks report in the AdWords Report Center last year. This feature provides the precise number of clicks we are filtering out on each of an advertiser’s campaigns.
We are disclosing these network-wide figures in order to provide greater transparency to Google advertisers and the marketplace as a whole. These figures illustrate the significant level of proactive protection we provide, and how this has resulted in minimizing the actual impact of click fraud on advertisers. As noted above, these network figures do not have any bearing on what individual advertisers may experience, and you should refer to your invalid clicks report for that data.
Moving forward
Click fraud protection is something we take very seriously, and it requires a great deal of research and development to do effectively. We believe we lead the industry in terms of our level of investment as well as the effectiveness of the protection we provide, but we also look forward to continuing to innovate and invest in this area of our advertising system just as we do in others. It is clearly in the long-term best interests of both Google and the industry as a whole to effectively protect advertisers against click fraud. This is why we are also working with dozens of other companies to establish industry standards for click fraud protection, as one of the founders of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Click Measurement Working Group.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the pay-per-click advertising model is that advertisers can measure the performance of their campaigns extremely accurately, and thus the most important metric that both our advertisers and Google are focused on is providing the best possible return on investment.
Invalid Clicks – Google’s Overall Numbers
Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to share more information about how we protect you against click fraud. Last July, the invalid clicks report was released to provide you with the number of invalid clicks we detect (and don’t charge for) in each individual account. A few weeks ago, our Click Quality team provided a list of common concerns and tips related to their click fraud investigations and let you know how to request an investigation. Now, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, has an update:
Stuck in traffic?
There's nothing worse than getting stuck in traffic when you have some place to go, so I'm happy to tell you about a new feature on Google Maps that can help. For more than 30 major U.S. cities, you can now see up-to-date traffic conditions to help you plan your schedule and route. If you're in San Francisco, New York , Chicago, Dallas, or any of the other cities we now include, just click on the traffic button to show current traffic speeds directly on the map. If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing.
We can't make traffic go away, but we hope Google Maps traffic info helps you avoid it whenever possible.
AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 2 - Assessing Your Website and Goals
Two weeks ago, Stephanie L. from the Optimization team outlined the four topics of optimization that she would cover in our "AdWords Optimization Tips" series: Assessment, Structure, Keywords, and Ad Text. In the first half of Assessment, she encouraged advertisers to assess their industry and audience before beginning an optimization. Today, she will discuss the second half of Assessment -- different ways you can evaluate your website and identify your goals as you begin to optimize your campaign.
This post ends our discussion of Assessment, the first of four topics we will be covering in this series. We have touched upon a few high level tips today on how to achieve your goals for your advertising campaigns. Stay tuned for future posts of "AdWords Optimization Tips" when we will take a deeper dive on specific advice and tips on structure, keywords, and ad text. Until then, happy optimizing!
Know your website
Whether you are the marketing manager or webmaster (or both) of your business, you know the products and services on your website better than anyone else. And that means you are in the best position to evaluate your website and assess how a visitor may interact with and respond to the content on your site. Imagining yourself as your prospective customer and fine-tuning your site as necessary can result in a better experience for that prospective customer, and thus better results for you.
Some elements to consider as you evaluate your website are:Know your goals
- Site structure or sitemap: Are your products and services organized in a way that makes sense from your visitor's perspective? Specific landing pages can help these prospective customers find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if a prospective customer is searching for 'women's snowboarding pants,' the ideal landing page may feature women's snowboarding pants in all brands and styles. If she is searching for a specific brand of snowboarding pants, the ideal landing page may feature all types of snowboarding pants by that specific manufacturer.
- Layout and design: Visitors to your site may respond more favorably to a site that is straightforward, clean, and simple to navigate than one that is flashy or slick. Those who do not find what they are looking for tend to leave the site within the first several seconds.
- Ease of use: When visitors come to your site, they should be able to quickly understand how to navigate your site and find the information they're looking for. Navigation and search bars allow your prospective customers to look for more specific items or different styles. Clearly marked buttons that read 'Sign Up Now!' or 'Add to Cart' encourage further action from these prospective customers. On the other hand, broken links, inaccurate or unfinished landing pages and other obstacles make it more difficult for prospective customers to become actual customers.
Your goals, or desired results, are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when setting up a new account or optimizing an existing account. Are you more interested in branding your business, garnering clicks, or maximizing your return on investment? It is important to clearly identify and prioritize what specific goals you want to achieve and design your campaigns around those goals.
Depending on what your primary goal is, you may want to consider the following tips:Last but not least, it is important to determine how you will measure the impact of your optimization so you can clearly evaluate your campaign's performance before and after the optimization. If you are feeling extra scientific, you may want to test altered campaigns against a control group to see what works best for you. Google offers some powerful tools that can help you better track campaign performance, including Analytics, conversion tracking, and the Reports Center tab in your account.
- Maximizing clicks: If your aim is to cast the widest net to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general, irrelevant keywords will negatively affect your clickthrough rate, Quality Score, minimum bids and positioning.
- Optimizing for Ad Performance: One component of improving ad performance is maximizing your clickthrough rate. If this is your goal, the first step is to filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should ideally reflect a user's search as closely as possible. If you are running on a keyword such as 'San Francisco travel tours,' your ad text should also highlight travel tours in San Francisco.
- Promoting brand awareness: If you want to promote your brand, you may decide to run a cost-per-impression campaign in addition to a cost-per-click campaign. You may want to supplement your text ads and incorporate image and video ads in your campaign. You could also employ site-targeting to show your ad to people who aren't actively searching for your business but may still be interested in what you sell.
- Maximizing ROI: Maximizing your return on investment calls for a little more understanding about the sales cycle unique to your product or service, and how keyword searches can reflect which stage a user might be in that cycle. If you want to separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers, your structure, ad text and keyword lists can be designed to target specific kinds of users. For instance, users searching on variations such as 'reviews' or 'ratings' are probably still researching the product, and you can filter out such searches by including those words as negative keywords.
This post ends our discussion of Assessment, the first of four topics we will be covering in this series. We have touched upon a few high level tips today on how to achieve your goals for your advertising campaigns. Stay tuned for future posts of "AdWords Optimization Tips" when we will take a deeper dive on specific advice and tips on structure, keywords, and ad text. Until then, happy optimizing!
AdWords Editor 3.0 now available for Windows
AdWords Editor 3.0 is now available for Windows. With Version 3.0, you can:
Please note that Version 3.0 is currently available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista only. If you're a Mac user, we won't keep you waiting long -- AdWords Editor 3.0 for Mac is scheduled for release in a few weeks.
- Add or edit site-targeted campaigns
- Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns
- Edit another account while posting or checking your changes
- Pause or resume individual ads, keywords, and sites
- See the number of rows you've selected in the data view
Please note that Version 3.0 is currently available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista only. If you're a Mac user, we won't keep you waiting long -- AdWords Editor 3.0 for Mac is scheduled for release in a few weeks.
Wish I had Google Scholar as a grad student
From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.
Conducting research from the comfort of one's office or home is a wonderful convenience, but it's especially rewarding when you need to go the extra mile in accessing research publications.
When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I needed to go to the library with a reader (yes, an actual live human, not a computer:-)), find the relevant publications, and then arrange to have what I judged to be the most relevant articles read to me. Occasionally, I would scan the printed articles to OCR them and have my computer read it aloud to me. Mostly this was a failure since the articles I wanted to read were in the fields of math or computer science, and OCR dealt poorly, if at all, with technical material. More often than not, I would write to the authors of the publications in the hope of getting access to online versions so that I could save on reader time.
Turning the clock forward to today, equivalent access is a Google Scholar search away. What's more, thanks to publishers like the ACM who making journal publications available online, one can access the complete publication directly from within the search hits. Since the advent of Google Scholar, I have not had to send out email requests to authors asking for access to the electronic versions. And where authors have made these available from their websites, Google Scholar links to those as part of the result set.
So I wish I had had this as a graduate student. Though I have to say working at Google does feel like being in graduate school (but with better food and more money)—so maybe my wish has been granted.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol
This is the second in a short series of posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the standard for controlling how web pages on your site are indexed. This post provides more details and examples of mechanisms to control access and indexing of your website by Google.
In the first post in this series, I introduced robots.txt and robots META tags, giving an overview of when to use them. In this post, I'll look at some examples of the power of the protocol. These examples illustrate the detailed and fine-grain control online publishers have over how their websites are indexed.
Preventing Googlebot from following a link
Usually when the Googlebot finds a page, it reads all the links on that page and then fetches those pages and indexes them. This is the basic process by which Googlebot "crawls" the web. This is useful as it allows Google to include all the pages on your site, as long as they are linked together. Let's say you run the TheHighsteadPost.com website. Here's a map of part of the site:
When Googlebot crawls the index.html file, it finds the links to breakingnews.html and articles.html. From breakingnews.html, it can find valentinesday.html and promnight.html and so on.
What if you didn't want valentinesday.html and promnight.html appearing in Google's index? The articles in the Breaking News section may only appear for a few hours before being updated and moved to the Articles section. In this case you want the full articles indexed, not the breaking news version. You could put the NOINDEX tag on both those pages. But if the set of pages in the Breaking News section changed frequently, it would be a lot of work to continually update the pages with the NOINDEX tag and then remove it again when they moved into the articles section. Instead, you can add the NOFOLLOW tag to the breakingnews.html page. This tells the Googlebot not to follow any links it finds on that page, thus hiding valentinesday.html and promnight.html and any other pages linked from there. Simply add this line to the <HEAD> section of breakingnews.html:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">
However, there is an important caveat to NOFOLLOW that you should know about. It only stops Google from following links from one page to another. If one of the linked pages is also linked from somewhere else, Google can still find and index that page via that other link. For example if promnight.html is also linked from HighsteadCourier.com, Google can still find and index promnight.html when it indexes HighsteadCourier.com and follows the link from there to promnight.html.
Using NOFOLLOW is generally not the best method to ensure content does not appear in our search results. Using the NOINDEX tag on individual pages or controlling access using robots.txt is the best way to achieve this.
Controlling Caching and Snippets
The Robots Exclusion Protocol allows you to specify, to some extent, how you would like your web pages should appear in Google's search results. Usually search results show a cached page link and a snippet, two features that our users tell us are very useful. Here, for example, is the first result I got when I searched for "Mallard duck":
Underneath the snippet is the URL of the page followed by the "cached" link. Clicking on this link takes you to a copy of the page stored on Google's servers. This is useful in a number of cases: for sites that are temporarily unavailable; for news sites that get overloaded in the aftermath of a major event, for example, 9/11; for sites that are accidentally deleted. Another advantage is that Google's cached copy highlights the words a person searched for, allowing them to quickly see how the page is relevant to their query.
Usually you want Google to display both the snippet and the cached link. However, there are some cases where you might want to disable one or both of these. For example, say you were a newspaper publisher, and you have a page whose content changes several times a day. It may take longer than a day for us to reindex a page, so users may have access to a cached copy of the page that is not the same as the one currently on your site. In this case, you probably don't want the cached link appearing in our results.
Again, the Robots Exclusion Protocol comes to your aid. Add the NOARCHIVE tag to a web page and Google won't cache copy of a web page in search results:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
Similarly, you can tell Google not to display a snippet for a page. The NOSNIPPET tag achieves this:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">
Adding NOSNIPPET also has the effect of preventing a cache link from being shown, so if you specify NOSNIPPET you automatically get NOARCHIVE too.
Learn more
As usual the Google Webmaster Help pages have a lot of useful information:Next time...
The final post in this series will take some common exclusion problems that webmasters have told us about and show how to solve them using the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
You never know what you'll need to know
When people share their stories about how Google search has made a difference in their lives, we know we're doing our job. It's also given us an opportunity to learn about the breadth of information that you can find on Google. Such as how to find a lost tortoise -- as Jim Lyness did. Here's his story:
"After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night and into the afternoon the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife, Susan, and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door? My wife told me I was crazy. Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang -- we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys' bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter!
p.s. While our lawyers may not be happy with Jim's use of 'googled' and 'googling', we are very pleased that Jim and Susan were able to find what they needed by searching on Google.
Google Apps grows up
Back in 2005, Google Apps was conceived in a few lines of code, and then it was born in February 2006. Our team has had such a close relationship with it, you might understand how we have nurtured it as we would a child.
So first there was Gmail for your domain -- a limited service that helped organizations like San Jose City College offer personalized Gmail inboxes to all their users. As our little guy picked up new skills (Calendar, Talk, and Page Creator) it grew out of its old name and into Google Apps for Your Domain.
A quick learner, by October Google Apps had perfected 17 more languages, so we could help bring our communication tools all around the globe. Later in the fall, we improved our organizational skills with the Start Page, which brought all the Apps together into a centralized place. Then it was time to start school. Google Apps entered Arizona State University and stood out as one of those high achievers. Today, students and administrators at large universities like ASU and Lakehead are raving about Apps -- how it saves money and IT resources, plus make students lives easier with bigger spam-free mailboxes and a set of tools for working together.
Now, I'm excited to tell you that our baby has finally graduated and is entering the business world. Google Apps Premier Edition is a new version designed to take on all the challenges presented by businesses with complex IT needs. For $50 per account per year, you get the whole Google Apps package plus many new business-oriented features, including access to our APIs and partner solutions (so it’s easy to integrate with existing systems), conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of inbox storage, extended business hours phone support, and mobile access to your email on BlackBerry devices (just in case you can't get enough at the office).
Already, companies big and small, like Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, Prudential, and SF Bay Pediatrics, are talking about how this new version of Google Apps makes it easy to offer low-cost communication and collaboration tools to all their employees so they can get on with what they do best.
Google Apps also won't forget its roots anytime soon. The Standard and Education Editions will continue to be offered for free, and we'll keep working on all three flavors of Google Apps with the help of feedback from all of you. As a start, we’ve just integrated Google Docs & Spreadsheets in all three editions so that everyone can share and edit documents online. Since August, we’ve also added five more major features you've requested, including customized service URLs (mail.yourcompany.com) and domain registration for organizations that don’t yet have a custom domain. Our appearance has matured too, with updates to the administrator control panel that make it easier to setup and manage your services.
Quality Score updates are live
Last week, we released the Quality Score column and let you know that we would soon be making improvements to our Quality Score evaluation. Now, Avichal from the ads quality team is back with a quick update:
Today, we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days. As I mentioned last week, the goal of this change is to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users by making it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads. In addition, this change improves our ability to set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. As a result, you may see the minimum bid for your keywords increase or decrease based on the updated algorithm.
To better understand the quality of your keywords after this change, we suggest that you enable the Quality Score column. This will allow you to quickly view the quality of the keywords in each of your ad groups so that you can make improvements. For example, if you notice that the minimum bid increases for a number of your keywords, you may want to consider optimizing your ad group to make it more relevant or deleting the keywords that have high minimum bids.
Introducing the Retail Knowledge Center
We're always working to develop tools that can aid advertisers in their particular industry. Recently, we launched a new resource to help merchants get the most from their advertising. Jennie C. from the AdWords Retail team is here to tell us more:
We know that you want to keep up to speed on trends in your industry to make the most out of your campaigns. Now, to help you find more of the information that you need, we've created a new resource for our retail advertisers: the Retail Knowledge Center. Here you'll find a wealth of material including information about setting up and optimizing your campaigns, as well as recommended Google products for your business. You can also join a discussion forum, read case studies from other retail advertisers, and peruse recent industry news items.
If you have comments, questions, or suggestions on the Retail Knowledge Center, please share them with us at retail-knowledge@google.com. We're working hard to add similar information for advertisers in other industries. Stay tuned to Inside AdWords for updates.
This is National Engineers Week
It's that time of year: to celebrate the engineers who create the new technologies that revolutionize our world. Their work changes the way we work, play, learn, and communicate with each other.
As part of our ongoing commitment to raise awareness of these contributions (here's more on our our K-12 initiatives), and to get young students interested in engineering, we're hosting a Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day on February 22nd in several of our U.S. offices, including New York, Kirkland, and our headquarters in Mountain View.
Hundreds of middle-school girls will come to these offices this week to buddy up with an engineer, attend interactive workshops, take a tour, and, of course, have lunch. (Just like last year - see photo.)
Here's hoping the day will spark the interest of these young women to learn more about science, math and engineering -- and maybe even inspire them to pursue engineering studies, so that they too can change our lives. Here's more for students to do, and a page for teachers too.
Unexpected Minimum Bid Increases
Last Friday, during a routine infrastructure update, we experienced a technical issue that significantly increased the minimum bids for some keywords. Because the maximum CPC for these keywords was not changed, a number of impacted keywords became inactive for search, resulting in fewer leads for some advertisers. This technical issue was completely unrelated to the Quality Score updates that we have planned for later this week. We sincerely apologize for any disruption that it may have caused to your traffic. Below, we've answered a number of questions that we've heard since Friday:
When was this issue resolved?
This issue was resolved by our engineers on Saturday morning (PST) for the vast majority of impacted keywords. The minimum bids for these keywords have since returned to normal.
Will you be issuing credits?
Once we have completed our analysis of the impact, we'll automatically issue credits to advertisers who overpaid due to this issue. As soon as these credits have been applied, we'll email the affected advertisers to let them know.
I paused some of my ad groups because the minimum bids increased and they are still unusually high. What should I do?
If you paused any of your ad groups on Friday due to this issue, we recommend that you unpause them, but do not raise your maximum CPC. Unpausing your ad group should allow the minimum bid to return to normal without taking any other action.
Will this happen again?
Our engineers have been working tirelessly to understand why this issue occurred and to ensure that the proper measures are in place so that this is not repeated in the future.
Does this issue reflect the upcoming Quality Score improvements?
No, this issue is not related to our upcoming Quality Score improvements, which remain scheduled for later this week.
We greatly apologize for this issue. Please let us know if you have additional questions that you'd like us to answer on the blog.
When was this issue resolved?
This issue was resolved by our engineers on Saturday morning (PST) for the vast majority of impacted keywords. The minimum bids for these keywords have since returned to normal.
Will you be issuing credits?
Once we have completed our analysis of the impact, we'll automatically issue credits to advertisers who overpaid due to this issue. As soon as these credits have been applied, we'll email the affected advertisers to let them know.
I paused some of my ad groups because the minimum bids increased and they are still unusually high. What should I do?
If you paused any of your ad groups on Friday due to this issue, we recommend that you unpause them, but do not raise your maximum CPC. Unpausing your ad group should allow the minimum bid to return to normal without taking any other action.
Will this happen again?
Our engineers have been working tirelessly to understand why this issue occurred and to ensure that the proper measures are in place so that this is not repeated in the future.
Does this issue reflect the upcoming Quality Score improvements?
No, this issue is not related to our upcoming Quality Score improvements, which remain scheduled for later this week.
We greatly apologize for this issue. Please let us know if you have additional questions that you'd like us to answer on the blog.
Online child safety initiatives
A big topic of discussion lately is the increasingly large influence media of all kinds can have in the lives of children and teens. Last week I participated in a conference in New York about this important issue, sponsored by CommonSense Media and The Aspen Institute together with several organizations that have a stake in child safety. (Here are videos of the speakers.)
The conference organizers convened a panel of experts and executives to address the question "Does the Internet Change Everything?" I approached this question by suggesting a framework of four scenarios that characterize the online interactions of children and the content they encounter:
- When a child isn't actively seeking objectionable content online, and doesn't encounter any, no action is needed.
- When a child isn't seeking objectionable content, but comes across it inadvertently, ISPs and other online services, like Google, and child safety organizations can provide tools and resources to help families effectively monitor their child's online interactions.
- When a child is actively seeking out objectionable content online and finds it, parents are primarily responsible for devising a solution.
- When a child isn't seeking out objectionable content, but someone deliberately forces such content on them, this amounts to exploitation -- and requires government involvement and cooperation by ISPs and other online services.
In connection with the second scenario, we have invested in developing family safety technology and tools, including SafeSearch, a filter that uses advanced technology to block pornographic and explicit content from Google search results. We've also partnered with child safety organizations to educate families about ways to use the Internet and other types of media safely. These efforts include joining forces with CommonSense Media to provide their movie reviews in Google search results to assist parents in identifying healthy content. We also work with organizations like i-Safe and iKeepSafe to provide online public service announcements that promote access to resources about Internet safety.
When the fourth scenario occurs, we work closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to identify, investigate and prosecute child pornography and exploitation. We remove child pornography immediately when we become aware of its presence on our search engine or content services, and report all instances of child pornography to law enforcement through the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. We also respond to hundreds of child safety-related law enforcement requests each year, in addition to requests to preserve data related to these cases. Lastly, we donate hardware and software to improve NCMEC's ability to manage incoming reports of child exploitation and assist NCMEC in promoting its CyberTipline, a resource for reporting cases of online child sexual exploitation.
Keeping kids safe on the Internet is a huge task -- bigger than any single government, company or family. We're pleased to work with our industry partners, law enforcement and child safety advocates around the world (including the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK and the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Multimedia (FSM) in Germany) to address this issue.
As we develop new initiatives in this critical arena, we'll keep you posted.
Pause your keywords, sites and ad creatives
Have you ever needed to pause certain ads and keywords when your inventory was low? Or have you ever wished you could temporarily stop serving image ads on certain sites during the weekdays?
As of today, all AdWords advertisers can pause and resume keywords (for keyword-targeted campaigns), sites (for site-targeted campaigns), and ad creatives. As you can see from the picture below, this feature is functionally similar to the pause/resume feature on the Campaign Summary page - we've simply extended it to the keyword, sites and ad variations tabs.
This is yet another example of a new feature based on advertiser feedback. Thanks for your suggestions and keep the great ideas flowing!
As of today, all AdWords advertisers can pause and resume keywords (for keyword-targeted campaigns), sites (for site-targeted campaigns), and ad creatives. As you can see from the picture below, this feature is functionally similar to the pause/resume feature on the Campaign Summary page - we've simply extended it to the keyword, sites and ad variations tabs.
This is yet another example of a new feature based on advertiser feedback. Thanks for your suggestions and keep the great ideas flowing!
From Inside AdWords with love
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So with this photo, we'd like to send you our warmest Valentine's Day wishes!
With love, from the Inside AdWords crew
With love, from the Inside AdWords crew
Quality Score updates
At Google, one of our most important goals has always been to deliver high quality ads that provide value to our users. In August of 2005 we improved our quality evaluation with the introduction of the Quality Score, which sets minimum bids for your keywords. Since then, we've updated you on the inclusion of landing page quality into the Quality Score, and subsequent improvements to the landing page algorithm. Now, Avichal from the Ads Quality team, has an update on upcoming changes to the system.
Stay tuned to the blog over the next few days as we'll post again to answer any questions that you may have.
As you may have heard us say before, we believe that ads provide valuable information when they are highly relevant and targeted to a user's query. In order to serve high quality ads to our users, we use the Quality Score to set minimum bids for keywords based on keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, the historical performance of the keyword on Google, and the user experience on the ad's landing page. Keywords with a higher Quality Score are rewarded with a lower minimum bid, so it costs less for those ads to be eligible for display. Low quality keywords receive higher minimum bids, often making them inactive for search because their maximum CPC does not meet the minimum bid. In addition, since we also consider quality when we rank ads, higher quality ads benefit from higher placement on the page and a lower cost-per-click on average. So, high quality ads are not only more relevant for your potential customers, but can also help you improve your ROI by lowering your advertising costs.
We're constantly working on ways to improve our Quality Score evaluation and provide you with more information about the Quality Score for your keywords. Over the next week, we'll be releasing two changes focusing on transparency and quality, which I've outlined below:
Transparency - Later this week, we're releasing an optional Quality Score column that shows the minimum bid for all of the keywords within an ad group as well as a Great, OK, or Poor quality label for your keyword. You can select this column by clicking 'Customize Columns' in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign). Use the quality label to get a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or look at the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score. Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.
Quality - Next week, we're launching improvements to the Quality Score algorithm that sets minimum bids for keywords in order to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users. These changes should make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads. First, we're improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we'll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we're improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.
So, what does this mean for you? As a result of this update, you may notice that the minimum bids increase for some of your keywords and decrease for others. To better understand the impact of this change, we suggest that you implement the Quality Score column. This will allow you to better monitor whether your minimum bids increase or decrease based on our changes. If you find that the minimum bids for any of your keywords increase, making your keyword inactive for search, please consider optimizing your campaign instead of raising your maximum CPC to the minimum bid. We recommend changes such as choosing a keyword that is more specific to the product or service that you offer or editing your ad text to make it more relevant to the keyword before you simply raise your minimum bid. By improving your quality we hope to provide the highest quality ads to our users while also providing you with the highest quality leads to maintain great ROI.
Stay tuned to the blog over the next few days as we'll post again to answer any questions that you may have.
From Gmail with <3
Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com. What better way to share the love with the people you care about than with Gmail chat with <3. And Gmail is available in over 40 interface languages (though <3 needs no translation).
But seriously folks, good relationships are built on good communication. There's no reason you should struggle to reach the ones you love, and Gmail helps you communicate fast and easily.
Update: Just for the heck of it, we enlisted the help of an ensemble cast we think you'll enjoy. Check out our 4-part video.
Strawberries are red, stems are green...
You may have noticed today's Google Doodle on our homepage in celebration of romance and good food (something we consider extremely important).
When you look at the logo, you may worry that we forgot our name overnight, skipped a letter, or have decided that "Googe" has a better ring to it. None of the above. I just know that those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately. And if you're feeling grouchy today, may I suggest eating a strawberry.
A very happy Valentine's Day to everyone!
Test CPC Site Targeting
Emel M., from the content network team, has information about a new beta for advertisers interested in cost-per-click site-targeted campaigns:
Site targeting is a feature that allows advertisers to choose individual sites in the content network where they want their ads to appear. Currently, advertisers using site targeting place bids on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis. In March, we plan to begin testing a new site targeting feature to increase the flexibility and control advertisers have with site-targeted campaigns: cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
CPC bidding has often been requested by advertisers who would like to utilize site targeting, but are not comfortable bidding on a CPM basis. Here are two examples of how CPC bidding can enhance your site targeting experience:
- Increased flexibility. Select the content network sites you want your ads to appear on and choose the bidding option that fits your needs. If clicks are your goal, try CPC bidding so you pay only when you get the result you want.
If you're an AdWords advertiser located in the US and are interested in participating in the CPC site targeting beta, please fill out this short web form: http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/cpc_sitetargeting. Please note that we are only able to select a limited number of advertisers from all that apply. If you're selected as a beta participant, we will contact you within the next couple of weeks.
- Full control. Create new CPC site-targeted campaigns, or switch your existing campaigns between CPC and CPM at any time. As always, you retain full control over your budgets and bids.
To learn more about site targeting, click here.
Google Checkout update
Last June, Product Manager Eric Lange answered a number of our questions about Google Checkout. Today, we caught up with him again. Here's what we learned:
Can you give us a quick overview of Google Checkout?
We launched Checkout last year to improve the experience of online shoppers. Typically people start their shopping process with search, and Checkout improves that experience with the Google Checkout shopping cart badge -- an image next to ads that use Checkout that helps users identify fast, secure places to shop. Once they click through to the store, we also make it easier to buy with a single Google sign-in -- that way, shoppers don't have to re-enter their purchasing information every time they buy online.
You mentioned the shopping cart badge on AdWords ads - why are you using that?
When people begin shopping by searching online, they're looking for places to shop that are convenient and secure. The Google Checkout badge makes it easier to find these places by displaying a badge (or image) on the AdWords ads of participating Checkout stores. The badge is like a little sign on the AdWords ad that helps shoppers find stores that accept Google Checkout.
You've been testing different badges. Any updates to report?
Yes, we're constantly testing different badge images to see what provides the best experience for shoppers. Recently we updated the image of the badge from a shopping cart to a Checkout button because we find the new design helps people find convenient and secure places to shop more easily.
Where should advertisers go to learn more about Checkout?
Advertisers can take a closer look on the Google Checkout homepage.
About the Copiepresse decision
Today we heard that the Belgian court, which last year ruled against us in the Copiepresse case has reaffirmed its original decision. This judgment is clearly disappointing, and we intend to appeal it because we believe that Google.be and Google News are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users. However, we are very pleased that the judge agreed Google should be given notice of articles and other material that content owners want removed. As we have in the past, we will honor all requests to remove such materials.
It is important to remember that both Google Web Search and Google News only ever show a few snippets of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the web publisher's site where the information resides.
Here's a quick summary of the case: Copiepresse represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It sued Google last August claiming that our search engine and news site breached these publications' copyright. In September, the court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, ordering us to remove these publishers' content from both Google.be and Google News. We complied with that order and also posted the ruling to both home pages.
Today's ruling does not affect the current content of Google News because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That's why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal.
We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.
AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 1 - Assessing Your Industry and Audience
Last month, Ronnie C. shared his overall strategy on optimizing your AdWords account. To expand on his post and the existing optimization resources you can find in the AdWords Learning Center, we're introducing a series called "AdWords Optimization Tips." This densely-packed but informative series will highlight optimization strategies and best practices that can benefit every advertiser, whether you are just starting out with AdWords or have been advertising online for years. In Part 1, Stephanie L. from the Optimization team shares her favorite tips with us:
We hope that you have found these tips helpful and have picked up one or two new advertising strategies to try out. Stay tuned for the second half of assessment, and look for posts on strategies for structure, keywords and ad text as well.
An optimization can be as small as adding a few negative keywords or as large-scale as reorganizing your entire account in several phases. As you prepare to optimize, it helps to first take a step back and assess what kind of results you'd like to see, and how you will achieve and measure these results. The 'AdWords Optimization Tips' series will cover four major areas for optimizing any account: assessment, structure, keywords and ad text. Today, we're covering the first half of assessment -- knowing your industry and audience. While you are probably already researching and analyzing your industry and audience, we wanted to provide a few questions that may help you think about your AdWords account in a new way. We'll also offer some tips on how to begin researching the answers to these questions.
Know your industry
Whether you are in retail or finance, an independent small business owner or a marketer for a large corporation, it helps to begin with a holistic perspective on the products and services you offer and how they fit into a broader industry landscape. For example, one factor to consider is the scope of your product range -- do you offer a wide variety of products or a very specific type of product? What makes your business different from others in your market? The strategy you take when entering a competitive market like high-end jewelry may be very different from the way you might advertise a niche product only a handful of specialists offer. You may also take into account elements like seasonality (holidays, fiscal years) or industry trends.
To keep up with the latest competitive dynamics and industry trends that affect your online business goals, you may want to:Staying up to date with industry trends can help you better organize your campaigns, allocate your advertising budget across different products, time your campaign launches, manage CPC bids, and make your ads stand out.
- Try searching for your product/service on Google and look at both the natural search listings and sponsored links. Pay attention to what types of strategies, ad text, and promotions other similar businesses may be using in their ads, and try to think of ways to differentiate yourself.
- Join a trade association, subscribe to industry magazines, and possibly even attend trade shows to learn about the latest competitive dynamics in your industry and what trends may be impacting your sales at any given time.
- Keep up with the latest news that affect your industry through the Internet by subscribing to specific RSS feeds, reading wikis, online forums and product reviews to keep up with the concerns of your customer base and other businesses like yours.
Know your audience
Understanding your customer base and learning more about the audience you would like to reach in your advertising can often influence the way you structure an account, the keywords you choose to include, and especially the ad text variations you test. Targeting an upscale clientele focused on luxury items is very different from attracting bargain hunters. Try to think beyond age and gender, though these may still factor into your strategy. Is your product or service something everyone uses on a daily basis or something only a small subset of people, such as chemical engineers, can understand or describe? You may want to sell the same product to both Internet-savvy teens and their more technology-shy parents, but may need to have different advertising strategies to reach the two different audiences. Also, users in different regions (cities, states or countries) may respond differently to your products and services.
To really think like your customer, you may want to:Keeping an accurate profile of your target audience(s) in mind will help you choose the right keywords and ad text to reach that audience, and also help you filter out users who are unlikely to click through or convert for you.
- Use the Keyword Tool to help understand how potential customers could be searching for your product or service. A florist in Vancouver might look up 'Vancouver flowers' or 'flower delivery' to see what synonyms and keyword variations exist for these terms. You may discover that the term you use to describe your product/service may differ from the way your customers would describe it.
- Use Google Analytics to gain a wealth of information and knowledge about your audience, from their geographic location to their referring links.
- Familiarize yourself with the unique buying cycle of your industry by thinking about user searches, so you can adjust your keywords, ad text, or budget accordingly. For example, someone searching for 'hybrid cars' may not be as close to buying an automobile as someone searching for the specific make, model, and year of a vehicle.
- Be open to the idea that your true audience may not be exactly who you think they are. Some video games, for instance, have a surprising number of female fans, often mothers who originally bought the games for their children!
We hope that you have found these tips helpful and have picked up one or two new advertising strategies to try out. Stay tuned for the second half of assessment, and look for posts on strategies for structure, keywords and ad text as well.
Happy V-Day...Fido?
One of the things I love most about Google is that I get to learn little bits about human nature all the time. This Valentine's Day, the Checkout team wanted to better understand the habits of V-Day shoppers, so we worked with Harris Interactive to conduct a survey with a variety of folks. We found out all sorts of interesting things about the nature of the holiday, what people like to shop for, and who people shop for -- for instance, this year, the family dog is more likely to get a little something for V-Day than Dad is.
There's plenty more where that came from, and the findings might interest you. Read more on the Checkout blog.
Share your smiles with us
The AdWords Operations team (that's the team that supports AdWords advertisers) just keeps growing, and they will soon be moving house to accommodate their larger size. As part of the move, they're asking for advertiser photos to decorate their new building. Kerry C. from the AdWords Operations team is here to tell us more:
We're also hoping to share some of these stories and photos on the Inside AdWords blog. If you're interested in this possibility, include a note when you send your photo in. We're really looking forward to seeing your photos. Thanks for sharing!
Update: 2-9-2007 10:00am PST - Thanks to those readers who let us know that they weren't able to submit photos. We've now fixed this issue, so please submit away!
The AdWords Operations team will soon be moving, and we want to decorate our new building with photos of our advertisers as a way of recognizing that we owe our success to you. We'll be showing the photos in the new building because seeing your faces inspires us and reminds us that we're here to help make our advertisers more successful.
If you want to share your photo, visit this page for all the details. Along with your photo, we ask that you include your name, your customer ID number (so we can match you up with your account), your business name, and a description of the photo. High resolution images, greater than 5 megapixels, are best. We'd also love it if you could include a paragraph describing your business and how you are using AdWords. If we use your photo we'll also send you a small thank you gift. Thanks for helping to make our offices a happier, smilier place.
We're also hoping to share some of these stories and photos on the Inside AdWords blog. If you're interested in this possibility, include a note when you send your photo in. We're really looking forward to seeing your photos. Thanks for sharing!
Update: 2-9-2007 10:00am PST - Thanks to those readers who let us know that they weren't able to submit photos. We've now fixed this issue, so please submit away!
Congratulations are in order
I'm delighted to congratulate Alon Halevy and Peter Norvig, two Googlers who have been selected for the 2006 class of ACM Fellows.
This is a great honor, and a recognition of extraordinary contributions to the computing community. Peter, who was our first director of search quality and is currently director of Google Research, has been recognized for his many contributions to the disciplines of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. Alon, who recently joined us from the University of Washington and now leads one of our structured data initiatives, has been honored for his contributions in data integration and knowledge representation.
We'd like to thank each of them along with the other ACM Fellows for their hard work and innovative thinking. In many ways, these distinguished scientists and engineers have helped shape computing into something that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They've also raised the bar on what it means to be a great computer scientist or a great engineer, which makes our work that much more interesting.
AdWords system maintenance on February 10
Here's a quick heads up from our tech team:
On Saturday, February 10th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Voulez-vous...collaborate...avec moi ce soir?
For those of you who don't speak French: I don't either. But that's OK, because as I was writing this post in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I simply added my French-speaking friend Nick, who confirmed that my two years of high-school French have not paid off. The title aside, we wanted to let you know that Google Docs & Spreadsheets, our handy online document and spreadsheet editor, now comes in 12 more languages. That's 11 if you don't count English for the UK, where the only difference is the word 'color' (colour).
The other languages we've added are: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. If your favorite language isn't listed here, we've got an additional 18 languages in our spell-checker. Visit docs.google.com to try it out.
There's more: Google Toolbar 3 for Firefox is now out of beta and available in all the same languages. In this new version, you can open your documents and spreadsheets directly in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Give it a try.
Who links to your site?
At Webmaster Central, we are all about communicating with webmasters about their sites in the Google index. We want to provide as much information as we can to help webmasters understand how their sites perform and how to improve their results. And we want to get input from the site owners, who after all know their sites best. We spend a lot of time talking with, and getting feedback from, webmasters. One request we hear a lot is to show which pages link to a site. You could always get a sub-sampled list of backlinks by using the link: operator, but now, as the owner of a site, you can get a much larger list in the Webmaster Tools component of Webmaster Central.
Head on over to this post on our Webmaster Central blog for all the details, and then log into Webmaster tools to see what sites link to you. We hope this gives you greater insight about your visitor traffic as well as how your site is linked throughout the web.
Google Maps down under
Many Australians have used our maps and satellite images, so today we're especially excited to launch Google Maps Australia. We've expanded service to include Australian business listings, driving directions, and support for Google Mobile Maps in Australia.
The next time you're looking for an address, tiger meat pie in Sydney, cafes in Melbourne, or how to get to the beach, Google Maps can help you find the answer. If you're at your computer, go to http://maps.google.com.au and start searching -- you can type addresses or business searches like [cricket near melbourne] all into the same search box. If you want to access Google Maps on your mobile device, go to http://www.google.com/gmm from your Java- enabled phone or Palm device to get started.
A good part of the Google Maps team works out of our Sydney R&D center, and we're really pleased to offer the full functionality of Google Maps to everyone down under. Please let us know what you think!
Meet the Click Quality team
Over the past year, we’ve written about invalid clicks to let you know about the new invalid clicks report and provide answers to some of the most frequently asked invalid click questions. Now, we want to introduce you to the Click Quality team, who investigates your invalid click concerns. This team has been around for over three years and they provide protection in addition to our automated filters, which proactively identify invalid clicks and discard them before they make it into your account. Today, Julian from the Click Quality team joins us to let you know how you can request an invalid clicks investigation and shares some of the common suspicious click concerns that his team sees and how you can monitor them:
Working on the Click Quality team, I’m one of a number of people who investigate suspicious traffic to determine if invalid click activity has occurred. These thorough investigations analyze a number of factors, including IP address, duplicate clicks, and various other clicking patterns. It is rare that invalid clicks are not detected by our automatic filters, but when we find them we immediately credit the advertiser's account. If you'd like us to investigate suspicious activity in your account, please fill out this form. If and when you do, providing detailed information, such as your web logs, will greatly assist with our investigation, so we ask that you include any reports indicating suspicious IP addresses, referrers, or requests. Our team will respond to you as soon as we complete our investigation of your account. And, please be patient, as a thorough investigation can take 3-5 business days.
Our job is to look into advertiser concerns and complaints and we’re happy to answer any questions you have. However, before submitting an investigation request, you may want to do a little checking on your own because, over the years, we've found that in many cases the activity that the advertiser has pointed out isn't actually due to click fraud. I've provided a list of some of the more common concerns below, along with tips and tools to help you better understand and monitor suspicious activity in your account.
Concern: I’ve seen huge fluctuations in my spend, traffic, or ROI.Concern: There are discrepancies in my web logs.
- Review your account to see if you’ve made recent changes to your daily budget, maximum CPCs, or ad distribution preferences. Making changes to any of these can increase your reach and change your conversion rate as new visitors may have different buying patterns.
- Traffic on the Google content network can also fluctuate from day to day as your ads match new sites. To better control your spend on the content network, make sure that you implement content bids or set up a separate campaign that is targeted just to the content network.
- If you're not currently tracking your conversions, we recommend that you use a conversion tracking tool, such as Google conversion tracking or Google Analytics, in order to monitor your ROI.
Concern: I have multiple clicks coming from the same IP address.
- You may have noticed that the clicks in your web logs are different than the number of clicks that are reported in your account. If you find that there are fewer clicks reported in your web logs than in your account, we suggest that you run an invalid clicks report because many of your clicks may have been automatically filtered.
- If you've seen more clicks in your account than in your web logs, make sure that your tracking software is counting clicks from the Google Network. You can can make sure your tracking URLs are set up correctly here. Or, you can use auto-tagging to more easily identify AdWords clicks in your web logs.
Concern: My competitors are clicking on my ads.
- There are several legitimate reasons that you may see multiple clicks from a single IP address in your web logs. For example, if a user refreshes their browser after clicking on your ad, this may appear as multiple ad clicks in your logs, however, you are only charged for one click. Also, some service providers, such as AOL, assign the same IP address to a large number of users, so multiple users visiting your page may appear as a single IP (or a few very similar IPs).
- In order to determine if clicks from the same IP address are unique, you can use auto-tagging. Auto-tagging will show you if multiple clicks were the result of a user refreshing their browser or if they represent a new click on your ad.
I hope this list will help you better determine if suspicious clicks in your account are legitimate, or invalid. As I mentioned earlier, if, at any point, you'd like us to investigate suspicious activity in your account or have any questions, please get in touch with us.
- Our filters are able to recognize the vast majority of invalid clicks that come from a competitor who is repeatedly clicking on your ads. These clicks should be filtered out before they reach your account so you will not be charged.
- To determine the number of clicks that we've automatically filtered from your account, you can run an invalid clicks report.
Web APIs, web mashups and accessibility
From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.
Wikipedia defines mashup in the context of web applications as a "(web application hybrid), a website or web application that combines content from more than one source."
More generally, web mashups are created by leveraging web APIs to present data in new and innovative ways—often, such innovation comes about by combining data from a multiplicity of sources. However, notice that combining multiple data sources into new and innovative views is not the only possible use of web APIs; in particular, you can also leverage these APIs to produce alternative views of a given data source. Newer uses of web APIs such as those provided by Google Maps, Google Calendar or Google Search often fall into this category of providing convenient user access. Thus, it is possible to embed a Google Calendar or the map for a given location into one's website.
Moving from the above scenario to leveraging web APIs in the context of mashups for enabling better accessibility is but one step away. As an example, envision a very basic Google Maps mashup that embeds a map on a web page—but with zoom level set to twice the normal default. This might make a very interesting starting point for a low-vision user. Given the expressiveness of web APIs, we can go a lot further. I believe web mashups provide a very rich platform for building creative accessibility solutions with the goals of:
- Providing the ability to build highly optimized custom views for cases where a "one size fits all" solution does not work
- Experimenting with different accessibility approaches to discover solutions that work for inclusion into the mainstream
On groundhogs and "predicting" your AdWords performance
Earlier this morning, Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog didn't see his shadow and determined that winter would soon be ending. While we are fans of tradition here at Inside AdWords, we're happy that forecasting your AdWords performance doesn't require assistance from any furry pals or an early morning wake-up call. Instead you can look to various resources located right in the AdWords interface to help you determine how to better manage your account. Here are a couple of tools to check out:
The custom date range filter in the Report Center allows you to compare performance from any period of your choice. For example, if you run an online flower shop and you're interested in seeing how your Valentine's Days ads perform year-over-year, you could benchmark against last year by running a report for February 2006. Or, perhaps you own a bed and breakfast and would like to see how traffic to your site fluctuates with the seasons; to do that, you could create a report for all of 2006.
Google Analytics is another great tool to help you view past performance and compare different time periods. The handy date range comparison feature allows you to specify two different date ranges. Once selected, your reports will update, showing differences between the two date ranges. The % change column shows the change in values between your two selected date ranges.
While there may not be one single best way to "predict" how your AdWords ads will perform, one thing is certain: using the tracking and reporting resources within your AdWords account will give you more information and insight to guide your future decisions. It's also a lot easier to access and a tad more scientific than consulting your favorite groundhog. That said, we look forward to the end of winter and spring just around the corner -- thanks, Phil!
The custom date range filter in the Report Center allows you to compare performance from any period of your choice. For example, if you run an online flower shop and you're interested in seeing how your Valentine's Days ads perform year-over-year, you could benchmark against last year by running a report for February 2006. Or, perhaps you own a bed and breakfast and would like to see how traffic to your site fluctuates with the seasons; to do that, you could create a report for all of 2006.
Google Analytics is another great tool to help you view past performance and compare different time periods. The handy date range comparison feature allows you to specify two different date ranges. Once selected, your reports will update, showing differences between the two date ranges. The % change column shows the change in values between your two selected date ranges.
While there may not be one single best way to "predict" how your AdWords ads will perform, one thing is certain: using the tracking and reporting resources within your AdWords account will give you more information and insight to guide your future decisions. It's also a lot easier to access and a tad more scientific than consulting your favorite groundhog. That said, we look forward to the end of winter and spring just around the corner -- thanks, Phil!
Personally speaking
Google's goal has always been to give you exactly the information you want right when you want it. With the growth of the Internet and all the new information coming online every day, this might sound hard.
We're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways we're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, you're the only one who actually knows what you're really looking for.
We have two main ways of personalizing your Google experience. First, you can customize products and services like the Google Personalized Homepage. Personalizing your homepage gives you the at-a-glance information that you care about—such as your latest Gmail messages, news headlines, or to-do list—right at your fingertips, just the way you want it.
Second, we offer automatic personalization through things like personalized search and recommendations. Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you having to do any extra work.
Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google—one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage.
Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends.
If you don't want to see personalized results, just sign out of your Google Account. After all, the goal is to give you what you want when you want it. So give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
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