• Test Ad
  • Text ad Headline
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
• Local business ad
  • Headline (try business name in the headline, this is one of the few times that’s very effective)
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
  • Favicon
  • Business logo
• Image ad
  • Static
  • Flash ad
• Video ad
• Mobile
  • Phone only
  • Carriers
  • Mobile site only
  • Mobile + phone
• Keyword Match type
  • exact
  • phrase
  • broad
• Ad Groups (or campaigns)
  • negative
  • negative embedded
• Ad Position
  • Top
  • Right
• Max CPC
• Times
  • Time of day
  • Day of the week
  • Month of the year
• Bidding
  • Manual bidding
  • Auto bidding
  • Preferred bidding
• Landing Page
  • Homepage
  • Dedicated page
  • Microsite
  • Category page
  • Product specific page
• Websites
• Content network
  • CPC
  • CPM
  • Demographic
• Search network
• Google.com

When Google switched to using the minimum bids instead of disabled keywords, there was still one leftover item that was not fully transparent: A keyword that did not receive an impression for 90 days became disabled behind the scenes even if it showed as active within your account.

It seems Google has clarified when this happens, and ads the caveat that the word will go active again if people start searching for it.

Overall, I’m a fan of the keyword analysis info boxes within AdWords. I find the various alerts useful for a quick diagnosis inside an account. However, they would be very useful if you could run a report and see all of these alerts at a single time instead of having to view them one-by-one.

I recently had a long conversation with Google (including the content PM) about the content network.

Here are a few suggestions from Google about the content network (most of these should not surprise anyone):

• Only the first 50 words in an AdGroup are used to determine its theme
• When an AdGroup has a large keyword list, Google’s matching isn’t as good and can get confused
• If an AdGroup is only shown on content, then it can be very useful to use more general words
• All keywords are treated as broadmatch when matching the AdGroup’s theme for content matching
• The Google recommended content bid is usually 75% of the search bid
• The typical content CPA (which I’m not sure if I can share so no numbers) is not significantly different (less than 10%) from search and content
• Of course, this is significantly impacted by bidding content and search differently
• It can be very useful to use site targeting with CPC bidding for ensuring your ads are shown on the highest converting content match websites

Content match resources:

• Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately
• How to optimize a contextual search advertising campaign
• Block low quality traffic
• Peak behind the curtain to see to learn what AdSense sites are doing for you
• About smart pricing

On a side note, I finally responded to the comments about quality score and exact match impressions.

I had a long assumed thought confirmed by Google: Quality score is only based upon the exact match for a keyword.

Impressions and clicks that occur from expanded broad match do not affect your quality score.

While it is important to bid based upon conversion metrics; I often find it useful to use broad match combined with a search query report to help identify each keyword’s universe.

Google Trends is now updated daily.

In addition, Google made some changes to their traffic estimator tool to update that data more frequently, and give more accurate projection data.

Yesterday, I wrote about how LBAs were coming to Google Map mashups.

Then Pamela from Google clarified some of the information for Google mashup authors in a Google Groups Post. If you are using Google maps, you should read her post about how to monetize your mashup page.

In addition, the maps API doc for ads is here.

What is still unknown, is how these ads are being syndicated.

Are they part of the content network? The search network? Can one have LBAs on a maps page only, but not have them syndicated on the general content network?

I’ve seen lots of info for developers, but none for advertisers.

Google is usually slow with cross-product integration. I recently mentioned, while speaking at Google a couple weeks ago, that I was surprised that with Google docs adoption being one of their key focus areas, advertisers couldn’t save reports to Google docs.

It didn’t take long for Google to implement this feature (which makes me think they were already working on it) as they recently announced AdWords advertisers will have the ability to save Google reports to their Google docs accounts.

These third-party websites use the Google Maps API, which allows them to embed customizable Google Maps within their site. Google technology will only display your clients’ ads when they’re related to the surrounding content of the webpage. As with all content targeted ads, your clients pay only when someone clicks through to the website.

From a Google newsletter.

It’s not clear if you have Local Business Ads if you will choose to syndicate these ads to Google mashups, or if they will be syndicated if that campaign has the ‘content network’ turned on.

It is clear that Google is pushing LBAs and trying to find more inventory for them (which I applaud), such as showing LBAs on Google Earth.

I hope that you can have the option to syndicate LBAs to maps mashup API sites without showing them on the general content network. That would give the advertisers more control, while receiving primarily local based inventory.

Google didn’t keep the wraps on their affiliate like Pay Per Action ads for long. Introduced in March, these ads have already come out of beta.

Google announced today the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Since the initial launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta in March 2007, many advertisers who have used the new pricing model are pleased with the opportunity to have more ways to promote their products and services online.

Source: Google Press Release

Additional Resources:

• For Advertisers: Guide to creating pay per action ads
• For Publishers: Guide to creating pay per action ads (Search Engine Land Article)

• Have you ever wanted to block a competitor from being able to see your ad?
• Have you ever seen an IP address in your log files that seems to click your ad over and over?
• Have you ever said ‘I just don’t want people from these IPs to see my ads’?

The wait is over, now advertisers can block specific IPs from viewing their ads.

IP Exclusion

This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you don’t want your ads to appear.

You can exclude up to 20 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses, per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully.

An important note about IP address exclusion: Some large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address that is a proxy for many users, you could be blocking a large amount of legitimate, and potentially profitable traffic. Google takes no responsibility for this action.

Source, AdWords Help Files.

How to Block IPs

To exclude IP addresses, follow the steps below:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
3. Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
4. Select a campaign, and click Go.
5. Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
6. Click Exclude IP Addresses.

Once you’ve excluded IP addresses for a campaign, you can view or edit your list by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing excluded IP addresses will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. Click View/edit.

Source, AdWords Help Files.

Wildcards are available

In addition, you can block ranges of IPs using wildcards. The wildcard can only be used for the last 3 digits of the IP address.

• 123.4.5.67
• 123.4.5.*
• 123.45.167.1

Request for Google

The next step in helping advertisers verify their IP blocking would be to add the ability to see ads by IP address in the Ad Preview tool.

A note of caution:

Some hosts don’t assign unique IPs per user. If you block an IP address for a host which gives all of their users the same IP address, you will block that entire user range.

This is an especially important note if you see a lot of visits from Reston, VA and try to block those ranges of IP addresses. It is possible to block all AOL dial up users from seeing your ads.

The tool is very useful for blocking specific IPs, competitors, etc from seeing your ad. However, as with any filtering tool, make sure that you see an account improvements in items like conversion rate and cost per conversion so that the blocking is having the desired effect on your account.