Onestat.com reports that more people are searching 2 word phrases, followed by 3 word phrases. single word searches seem to be out of fashined, with just 11% typing in single word. The report compares July 2005 and July 2006 and seems to indicate that 3 word and 4 word phrases are on the rise. Onestat has also compiled countriwise list, sample provided here USA | | 1. | 3 word phrases | 28.83% | | 2. | 4 word phrase | 22.28% | | 3. | 2 word phrases | 20.43% | | 4. | 5 word phrases | 11.97% | | 5. | 1 word phrases | 6.19% | | 6. | 6 word phrases | 5.76% | | 7. | 7 word phrases | 2.59% |
SEO and PPC experts always believed in multi-word phrase targeting, here they get more support! V
Very interestingly, in adcenter, one can now choose any country to target. This might be little old, but i wonder if anyone has tried this and what are the results like? (We know msn adcenter has started beta in usa, france and singapore) 
 Atlast growing public outcry that 'Google doesn't care' has had a positive impact. After Eric being pulled for 'it will correct itself', 'let it happen', and usual G doesn't listen noise, Google has done something any business has to do. Firefighting - now it offers overview details of invalid clicks and their percentages. It took pains to explain its concept of invalid clicks and how they are different from fraudulant clicks. Fraudulant clicks have the intention to conduct fraud, and google says its not possible to conclude the intention behind a click. Whereas invalid clicks are multiple inadvertent clicking on ads, duplicate clicks etc. They seems to claim that the concept of invalid clicks includes fradulant clicks and thus they are taking more than reasonable measures to counter it. Moreover you can directly contact the click quality teamGood that Lane's Gifts sparked off this entire episode and G has become more mature shedding their usual dont care attitude. Good show G! v
Well G bought dMarc in Jan (for using its automated adserving in (unsold spots) radio) in July it has seen the world. (Beta ofcourse) Google on Radio. Now there is no search element here. Its just a way to offer its advertisers and radio stations more money and thereby making even more money!! Fantastic... keep listing to google radio
Google is testing its new hot product CPA (Cost Per Action), where promoters are paid commission on action (sales or generating a lead). Now advertisers can get rid of fraudulent clicks. I am wondering will they run these CPA ads on Google.com, for now they are inviting people who are running adsense on their site. Just a thought – If these CPA thing works well for all (all in sense advertisers + promoters + google) will it wipe out PPC (Pay Per Click) popularity?
Finally an independent researcher, Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University has sided with Google saying its 'efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable' Other intersting facts are its agreed to pay $90 million for overcharging its advertisers. What is more interesting is Tuzhillin says Google quit the policy of double billing the advertisers for seemingly inadvertent clicks on the same ads. This will lead to many ideas - its been cheating the advertisers so long without revealing how the calculations of clicks are made (G always hides some information in the pretext of 'competitive reasons' and 'fraudsters and trickers'. ) lets wait for some good news for yahoo too!
Google now has a strong user base for its increasingly demanded web analytics (Urchin). With a variety of reporting features which informs a marketeer how to improve traffic. And now it seems that Microsoft also wants to run with the same pace as google. They have announced a investment in one web analytics company named DeepMetrixSo who will benefit. we we we.... Enjoy the competition.. -Raj
Hi To All those people who want to access blogs from countries where bloging is blocked. here is a new solution. Firstly I feel the people who block dont know the place called internet. They should block or try to put down the blog which they feel as a security threat rather than blcking th whole domain. Ok here is the solution for all those people who want to access 1. search for the term " free proxies" in google 2. use the top site's information and you will find some IP address with ports somewhat in thie format XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX : XXXX 3. Now open IE. From your menu bar. Go to Tools-> Internet Options 4. Now click on Connection Tab 5. Click on Lan Settings. 6. Use any of the proxy listing you find and Happy Blogging -Raj 
New models of pricing everywhere. Search engines and websites: i. Pay Per Click (PPC) ii. Pay Per Impression (CPM) iii. Pay Per Call Affiliates, marketers, agencies i. Pay Per Performance ii. Pay Per Lead (CPL) iii. Pay Per Acquisition (PPA/CPA) Now consider the innovative (in online on a large scale, but otherwise a common approach): Pay Per Time - pay per fixed time in websites, based on bidding. Adbrite is one leading provider. one can bid for a day or specific time frame Pay Per Percentage (of impressions) - Microsoft thinks its the solution of click fraud and impression fraud, where an advertiser buys a percentage of impressions for any particular keyword(s) for a particular period. i think even this is not new. But now proven mathematically that its a viable option in online advertising buying! (is it??) The future is more and more accountable online advertising for sure and lot more innovations, media mixtures are going to emerge. For example, number of calls, or sms from online campaign as distinguished from on offline one. The problem is most of the advertisers use same phone number and one may not have too many short codes or phone numbers to distinguish the relative numbers. An automated, customizable solution is awaited :) v
Always wondering how to get rid of ODP listing and tried many things posted on various forums. Now you get way out of your old ODP description using NOODP. Nothing much to talk about it, already lots of information posted by industry experts. This is a positive move for webmasters to improve the search engine visibility.
Try following
Let’s see how it works!
 Andy, wrote in his blog about the headaches of tackling with new AdWords interface. And asked for pills to cure. What do you expect? Yes, they mailed him the pills he asked for!! Kya baat hein (what a cool thing), Google even wrote an email to confirm that! so you now know what to do when you get a headache! v
There was a great furor over Eric's statements on click fraud saying its 'self correcting' and 'let it happen'. I think its the first time that Google is quick to deny this and proactively take steps to alleviate the potential ramifications of the issue. They have provided a link in their official blog, and denied these charges saying they are 'out of context' remarks. Danny is with Eric at this post. The issue started with Donna of news.com posting the comments and now she replies strongly to the latest statements of G. Challenge to Google's Eric and Shuman: Be real men, don't selectively hide the 'world's information'Eric and Shuman at Google: If you are committed to organizing the world’s information, and making it universally accessible, then why do you covertly allude to me as “a blogger” and why do you not provide the world with a link to my “blog post?,” which you do not identify, although it is the subject of your latest post at Google Blog?Read it hereWe all know Google does take real steps to control click fraud. In our experience, the number of clicks Google reports has been consistently less than what my redirect urls or weblogs say. So it does charge me a bit lesser when i compare the numbers. Also we saw some intelligence in the way the clicks are filtered. Am sure G does take a number of steps to alleviate this problem if not totally eliminate. And sure that the public outcry will make the G trio (Larry, Sergei and Eric) have more smiles than frowns - as usual :) v
The Landing Page Quality Score is creating havoc across the AdWords advertisers. Some of them complaining their monies are getting drained while G is happily making more money and telling us 'its a perfect economy', 'self correcting' and 'let it happen' . I think Google is playful but costing us all lot of unwanted incremental spends. If G wants to punish MFA (Made For Adsense) sites, it has to come with some solutions which are less painful to the larger mass of advertisers. I suggest they need to have incremental levels in punishing the sites. Say an advertiser spends 10kUS$ a month. With the increase in the min cpc, to get the same clicks he has to spend 50kusd the next month, then it needs some closer scrutiny. This scrutiny can be a better, costlier algorithms, may or may not coupled with human intervention. Or they can serve a notice saying they are going to increase cpc and wait to see for any positive changes on the site that its system can ratify as to a positive change. Then a mail can be sent to the advertiser saying, they are now ok with the landing pages etc. This may lead to mis-use, but i think since no human intervention is needed, they can make a set of iterative layers to keep checking, mailing, confirming, taking action on the cpcs. The scale and scope of AdWords is much too much to piss off too many advertisers who will just wait for a better competitor and when its there, we dont want G to be a Netscape :) v
 My colleague, Raj pointed out me this new (may be we are seeing for the first time) feature from Google where it tells whats the local time anywhere in the world. It actually reduces one step for the user to go to the timeanddate.com interesting? v
USD 1.3 Billion is the estimated click fraud impact. GYM - Google, Yahoo and MSN have different views on it. Overall View:Google - Let It Happen, its a perfect economic situation - EricYahoo - We will do 100 things to win your confidence back MSN - We have no clue on what it means :) On Reimbursement of advertisers:
GOOGLE "we will offer credits which can be used to purchase new advertising with Google."
YAHOO "we will issue a 100% credit, which can be used however the advertiser wishes to use it." Acknowledgement of click fraud problem:
GOOGLE “We have said for some time that we believe we manage the problem of invalid clicks very well…for the clicks that are not caught in advance, advertisers can notify Google and ask for reimbursement… believe that this settlement is further proof of our willingness to work together with advertisers to reimburse invalid clicks.”
YAHOO Detailed six-prong, plan to “move forward to work more closely with our advertisers and others across the industry to fight click fraud.” Well while Google thinks its engineers are enthusiastic to play to control the fraud phenomenon, Yahoo has a clear path to assure confidence. Over a time period, we will see who gives what to the advertisers. Am sure the percentages of click fraud will affect my media budgets very soon. v
Google Says from Next Week, its going to be different in minimum bids. Product manager at AdWords, Andrew is quoted to have said they are planning to implement landing page Quality Change algo from next week. What this means is if you are i. a made-for-adsense site or ii. an arbitrage site iii. doing random keyword buying You will be forced to pay TOO MUCH for clicks. The minimum CPCs will shoot up to make it unviable for you to buy the keywords. This is noticed by us for the last 2 weeks, where the minimum CPC was increased by 800% for certain keywords. To Quote Andrew, "As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance. From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we're launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages." Hello World welcome to the world of keep paying more to Google! v
 There is a news about bomb blasts and right next to it is an ad about FIFA with its sponsor. Am not sure if anyone will click and go for the goodies promised, but am completely put off with this scene. What a terrible Paid, Unwanted Negative Brand Association?? v
Yahoo is coming up with new interface. Hmmm very interesting. While I dint have a chance to have a screenshot of the interface, they say these features are new:  | Easy-to-Use Control Panel
A completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what's working and what's not--at the level of detail you choose--so you can take action and get even better results. | | Fast Ad Activation
Most new ads will go online within minutes, allowing you to connect with customers quickly, and easily make changes to your ads whenever you need to. | | Geo-Targeting
Display your ads broadly or narrow your geographic distribution to better target your customers, customize your ads and control your costs. | | Campaign Budgeting, Forecasting and Scheduling
Create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending. Review forecasts of your potential clicks based on your bids and budget and see how many clicks you're leaving to your competitors. | | Visibility
Understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors with the new Quality Index displayed for each ad. You'll also see the bid range necessary for premium placement at the top of the search results page. |
While these are good, am still not clear on several important things. 1. Geo targeting : is it worldwide or within USA (for many people global=usa) 2. Credit card approvals : if its worldwide, any credit card to be useful anywhere. For instance we cannot pay by an international credit card to run a campaign in Korea. We need to have a Korean Credit card. Simple to fix, but it seems only competition can lead cos to take action :) 3. Visibility is am sure a replica of Position Preference of AdWords It should have ROI driven capabilities to surge aheaad in the race, not just features cut copy pasted ;) v
 Google has tried playing around with interfaces before, now we see the same in india too. The links to images, web etc have come to left and the ads are not too distinct now. Lets see what my numbers change today !!
Newly introduced tabs inside an adgroup tries to simplify the interface. Its a good move, but i think they need to do that at a campaign level too. Say you want to see the relative performance of search vs content at a content level, how do you do that? or say you want to see content vs content only in all campaigns or search vs search. A tabbed interface 'summary, 'search', 'content' at the campaign level, how about that? v
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