Google Adwords Visit Recap
Sep 11, 2007 Google Adwords
As reported in yesterday’s post, Google visited our offices today to talk shop regarding Adwords campaigns, fraudulent clicks, and exciting new changes on the horizon. It sure is rare for Google representatives to make the long flight from Cali to Toronto, but I’m sure glad they did. They put to rest the concerns I may have regarding clicks outnumbering impressions, and hinted at some exciting new features due for release in the Adwords interface.
Needless to say, it’s every online marketer’s dream to have a personal audience with a Google representative, let alone several. There are just some things that can’t and probably shouldn’t be discussed in open forum at a conference such as Search Engine Strategies. Google sat down with my colleagues and I to address concerns we’ve had in recent months with respect to specific campaigns within Adwords.
Firstly, it’s important to point out that yesterday’s post is still relevant when analyzing your campaigns for the probability of click fraud. But rather than hitting up your account representatives for the maximum credits you feel are due, keep in mind that the Search Query and Content Placement reports are not perfect. According to Adwords Search Engineers, they are facing significant challenges reporting correct impression data from Google Adsense publisher sites. Apparently there is nothing wrong with the click data collected by their systems.
This almost sounds like, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
In another interesting revelation, Adwords Engineers disclosed to us by proxy that account credits are scrutinized on an ongoing basis to scrub campaigns of click fraud in much the same way we defined our “definite” and “likely” click fraud scenarios in yesterday’s post. This is good news, because it means there are no auto-generated credits applied to larger advertiser accounts based on a prerequisite fraud percentage. However, this puts the onus back on the advertisers or client center managers to reconcile credits manually.
When asked whether account credits will become more transparent, the entire team present was quick to state that doing so would likely divulge too many details of Google’s “Secret Sauce.” The possibility is there for Google to include line items in future account statements for fraudulent clicks detected by the advertiser themselves, but would not comment when that might be phased-in.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on new and exciting Adwords features and news, you won’t want to miss it.
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