Now it’s time to start tuning your sites not only for visitor stickyness, reducing abandonment
but to effectively increase your bottom line…

per WMW thread here the AdwordsAdvisor confirmed

* Landing page load time will become an additional factor in determining landing page quality in the near future. An exact date has not been determined.

• A Inside AdWords blog post has always been planned to announce this in advance, to explain why it is occurring and outline the potential benefits to users and advertisers.

• At some point following the blog post, landing page load time will begin to be reported on the Keyword Analysis Page.

• Then, following that, several weeks will pass before load time starts to actually be factored into the Quality Score – so that advertisers will have time to make adjustments to their pages if they wish.

As an aside, now that the page load time initiative has been mentioned in this and other public forums, the Inside AdWords blog post is likely to be posted sooner rather than later – perhaps as early as this week. Once it has been published, although the WebmasterWorld terms prohibit me from linking to it, I will post the text of it here.

So now it’s really time to enable the CSS compression in Drupal and get rid of extra load on pages…

Blogoscoped has put up a nice picture to
show the differences between before and after.

Now I this this is one of the most major change rolled by google for it’s prodcts in the last years…
Apparently this will corrupt a lot of adsense scraper spam business models.

On the other hand this will def. increase the value of a click as it should avoid those “accidential” clicks
from ad pages with 3 huge ad blocks, and in turn increase the overall value of the Google Adwords program for Google.

What it does offer:

• permutations of keywords (like all 50k+ cities) thru your keywords, ads and landingpages
• generation of proper ad groups (Google Adwords only allows 2000 lines per group, so if you are bidding broad,exact,phrase that means no more than 666 REAL keywords)
• a datafeed script that allows you to populate your landing pages with product info from merchants (good if you are to promote video recorders or other retail productc)

Thereby a close to perfect match between

Keyword >>> Ad Text >>> Landing Page

which in turn means a good CTR (click thru rate) to your ads and (jopefully) a better QS (quality score) on Google Adwords (GAW).

SpeedPPC also allows tracking on the keyword/ad/landing page level…

What it also promised is to lifts conversion rates by dynamically changing the landing pages based on the original search keywords used. That means injecting the keywords into the landing page – which isn’t new or hard to do at all. but still.

For roughly $ 500 this tool is not cheap.

For $ 500 you can buy nice things, but keeping in mind that this is a one-time investment (compared to subscription based tools) this new SpeedPPC could offer a nice all-in-one-solution for stomping out full “long tail campaigns” and this would be perfect for things like bidding on “lawyer in city” …

I read, that SpeedPPC has a promotion for $497, which implies that they want to raise the price, so maybe today is a good day to buy that tool… give it a shot!

Update Feb’08 : I came across Efficient PPC today and it looks like it offers the same functionality minus datafeed integration as Speed PPC

why no YSM? because you need a gold account for importing files, that means you have to spend 500+$/mo

WOW… I thougth that must contain interesting news….

The essensence of the post:

• steal the publisher-ID and put it on crap sites
• click on the “competitor” ads

hmmm … not really astonishing news – altough that post is well written, I’m surprised how many people find these trivial infos worthwile a digg.

The first problem, stolen Publisher-ID on crap sites, happened to me already more than a year ago when spam scraper bots crawled the sites that I had Adsense on. Soon I received a mail about an adsense ban about “invalid clicks” … and that was it.

I went thru the appeal process I think 2 or 3 times but obviously that doesn’t help in this case. There is no proof availalbe that the spam scraper bots are really owned by some hackers in China, Korea or other states without western-law standards…

Obviously this is a teaser campaing for one of his new (info?) products as it’s hosted on convertlinks.com (which domain just went 2+ years old – links will start to work).

Some topics or findings he touches:

• get 2 SERP entries for 70% probability of click-thru
• demographics show: highschool kids only click 33% on organic search, so PPC is good for that target group… higher educated and therefore those with buying power people click 55-65% on organic results… so if you are selling to those you know what do improve
• then he goes a bit into detail on the long tail keyword phrases, low hanging fruits or just 3+ word keyword search phrases that convert much better and how to target them
• conversion testing after around 16 min is another topic- some nice samples about security logos in the wrong place impacting conversion negative were quite interesting… that part is really worth watching

that first video is here

Then there’s a 2nd video I didn’t watch in full as it again had a pretty slow start, but it later on at minute 13 or so talks about LSI or latent semantic indexing which is a technology search engines use today…

if you every wanted to understand what LSI is, they have some nice, simple samples in there… GO SEE IT!

so the second video is here

After the videos they send you to a signup page for their autoresponder – and well I signed up again… I get so many unqualified spam these days that one or two single targetted sales mails really don’t make a difference … I thank them for putting me on a list that targets my needs and of course I use a qualified email that I can anytime – like “brad-fallons-new-video@mydomain.com” … hehe

The problem is, that anyone who mails to that list name, send a mail to hundreds or thousands of affiliates of that program!

So what I received today is really the top adsense spam I ever saw…

[img_assist|nid=1083|title=A scummy mail asking to click on adsense to stop spam - can you believe it?|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=160|height=102]

A mail coming from some really crappy and shitty looking T-Shirt site, asking me to

click GOOGLE ADSENSE below to sign up

Not only is that website really shitty, and the pitch to click on adsense to create a signup really stupid – the affiliate network is abused for all that.

I really don’t understand why legit webmasters creating good content are being kicked from Adsense for “invalid clicks” obviously on their own site, when click spam like this or big scraper site networks that people brag about openly get away with it.

Heck probably even this click spam being sent thru a wrong configured affiliate mailing list gets away with it…

Hello dear Adsense-Click-Fraud team – did you notice?

What’s notable is the fact that ebay does not close this auction, which is obviously an attempt to support click-fraud…

If you read up the forums some people complained about it already, but it seems ebay does not care.

The auction is in a pretty german english – but the message is frigthening

You simply can enter an Internet address to the appropriate field, to this you enter the number of desired clicks and time interval between the clicks. The X-TREM Blaster takes care of the clicks for you or to the start.

So you could really point it to only one site and cause a nice traffic spike there. That then increased the CTR and causes all alarm bells go off at Google. And if you are unimportant enough I suspect you simply get a “you are banned for invalid clicks” mail from Google, because it’s obvious that the surge of clicks came from those proxies the tool uses….

Another sad story to be added to the “Google Bowling”-repertoire … and 38 people already bought that tool!

[via Google Adsense Buster]:

I’ve just closed my account as being a Publisher and I am waiting on my last months check. We were doing around $10,000.00 a month with the AdSense type of sites and decided to get out because I felt the business model was really bad.

[via AdSense Bad For Your Business]:

Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their Adsense CPC network.

The new Google advertising program shall be called the Content Referral Network and will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action – see definition of CPA campaigns

So this differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click … now they need to buy or fill out a signup form or whatever…

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

What does this mean for web publishers?

• the average spam scraper webmaster will have a hard time to get people to by stuff with his non-credible sites
• those with professional visitors, traffic that might be in buying mood could be winners…

[via Monetize]:

What I am missing currently is ANY link to a google website with this information… be warned… might turn out this is a fake message in a few days…

[img_assist|nid=1010|title=Search results with Google-Co-Op enabled|desc=Search result for the keyword "drupal" with Google Co-Op enabled using the subscribed link example for the technology weblog http://weblog.cemper.com enabled. The above green box links with the free premium result directly to the Good reasons for drupal #2 weblog post Subscribe to My Google Co-Op Profile for testing this.|link=node|align=left|width=640|height=453]

[img_assist|nid=1010|title=Search results with Google-Co-Op enabled|desc=Search result for the keyword "drupal" with Google Co-Op enabled using the subscribed link example for the technology weblog http://weblog.cemper.com enabled. The above green box links with the free premium result directly to the Good reasons for drupal #2 weblog post Subscribe to My Google Co-Op Profile for testing this.|link=none|align=left|width=160|height=113]

Publishers are not permitted to alter the behaviour of Google ads. This includes implementing the AdSense ad code in a floating windows. We therefore ask that you do not use www.adimpact.com to place your Google ads in floating windows. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding.

I would assume we see an Adsense TOS and publisher guideline update within some days…

questions?