Google is testing new fonts for some publishers in its AdSense ads. The image at right shows Microsoft’s Comic Sans font, which accompanies Microsoft Office (or Windows). I didn’t alter the JavaScript for the ad, but I came to the ad from a Google Search, so I suspect that was where Google noted in my environment variables that I have Office and Windows loaded.

I checked Webmasterworld and found that I was not alone. Others have noted fonts such as Times New Roman and Georgia, but I was not able to replicate such fonts by reloading the page. I don’t use the Comic Sans font anywhere and I agree that it makes a professional page look amateurish - I belong to a nonprofit organisation where another volunteer keeps using it in conference flyers.

Nevertheless, many AdSense publishers have blended these ads into their pages so well that a visitor might accidentally click an ad that looks like a menu selection. By changing the font at random, Google can reduce this possibility. While it may seem that Google is reducing its income from such accidental clicks, the advertiser will appreciate getting a higher conversion rate because the clicks will come from people who intended to click the ad.

“AdSense Advisor” in another Webmasterworld thread confirmed that this is a test and they are monitoring the results. I hope that Google retains the random fonts but omits Comic Sans from the repertoire.

Popularity: 14% [?]

When you are trying to optimise your Google AdWords campaign so that your ads rank high for less money, you usually are sharpening your ad copy, improving your landing page, playing with the bid and so on. If you worked at Google Maps, you wouldn’t need to work so hard.

At least in Australia if you search for <placename> <word>, e.g. Toorak dentist, Werribee cafe, Narre Warren restaurant, the first (almost always) AdWords result is an ad for Google Maps.

You can see this in the image on the right. Another interesting discovery are the two Menulog ads - one is the gTLD .com and the other is the ccTLD .com.au. Nice technique to remember if you need to display more than one ad. Just buy a few ccTLDs, since the algo won’t know if the various domain names in different “countries” are the same entity.

My next search was for a cafe in my old stomping ground, San Mateo, CA. Both Google and MenuLog were confused (click image on the left). I wasn’t logged in, but both remembered my previous search. Google Search showed the right results, but AdWords didn’t want me to leave these shores, choosing to show me an ad for Toorak cafes, and Menulog.com.au hedged its bets by showing me an ad for Armadale cafes, and Menulog.com showed me Toorak cafes. OK, these are broad match ads for the word “cafe”, but why show an irrelevant city in the wrong country? Since Google isn’t paying for its top-ranking ads, I think it could have shown a PSA or none at all.

Yes, cafes are in a tough category for AdWords. Either you phrase match <placename> <cafe> for thousands of placenames (not practical) or load a whole bunch of negative keywords (not practical) — I’d rather not see this prime position taken up by Google Maps ads at all. You can see these ads for many location searches, such as dentists, restaurants, etc.

eBay can’t handle the place name Narre Warren, a Melbourne suburb. Search for Narre -Warren (that’s a negative Warren) and eBay will exhort you to buy a Barre, whatever that is. MyLocal gets too familiar — look for Narre Warren cafe and it will tell you to go to Narre Restaurant. Local search doesn’t seem easy for some companies. TrueLocal still wants me to go to the solitary cafe in Redfern. Menulog wants me to go to Barre, WA - apparently there is a cafe/restaurant of this name in Perth.

Popularity: 32% [?]

This isn’t new, but new to me. I got my first phishing email that purported to be from Google AdWords. It came to one of my accounts at a US non-profit I am involved with, so I didn’t even need to think if it was genuine.

Subject: Submit your payment information
———————————————————————————
Dear Google Adwords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.

In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information. Please sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.

Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed, any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

———————————————————————————-
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

———————————————————————————-

Google Adwords Team

The real URL beneath the one in the email points to www.adwords.google.com.3ppi3o.cn/select/Login - even when you hover on the link, your eyes will notice the left part of the URL (shown in green), but the domain name is further to the right (shown in red). It hosts a realistic copy of the AdWords login page, but Firefox knows it is a phishing site and blocks it. So does Internet Explorer 8.

The email was apparently sent via a Yahoo account from 189.59.233.22, which is allocated to Brazil. I didn’t bother to investigate if it was spoofed, sent via an open proxy or whatever. If you get one of these, don’t get caught out.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I don’t know why this had to be a secret, but the RTM version of SpeedPPC3 adds support for a raft of other PPC ad networks. (For those of you in the advertising industry but who never actually use the damn technology, substitute “SEM” for “PPC” and it will make more sense).

Jay Stockwell’s SpeedPPC 3 now supports 11 known ad networks (I can’t call the additional eight “well-known”.):

• ABCSearch
• Affiliate Radar
• Ask
• Enhance
• GoClick
• Google AdWords
• LookSmart
• Miva
• MSN adCenter
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Search123
• ValidClick

Actually, SpeedPPC 3 now handles 12 or more ad networks - It will support any other service that can accept a file upload. Now there is a fourth tab marked “Custom”, which covers the minor 8 players plus any Custom ones you want to process.

For example, I created one for Sensis BidSmart and the settings were saved for future use. Such configuration details are appended at the end of the CustomOutputs.xml file. Get your copy of SpeedPPC here.

Popularity: 27% [?]

by Ash Nallawalla

When I first read the description of SpeedPPC and saw the price of $497, my immediate thought was that this product was too cheap. I had seen an online service that charges a relatively higher, recurring fee to do what SpeedPPC 3 does for a one-time fee. I nearly told SpeedPPC creator Jay Stockwell that he is nuts - actually I met him at Pubcon 2007 and I suggested more diplomatically that he should check out what the competition is charging for less functionality. He gave me a sneak peek at the beta version 3, which is still being polished as we speak. Here is my report.

By now you must be wondering what the hell is SpeedPPC and do you care about it. If you do not use pay-per-click (PPC*) ads to advertise on Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter, then you won’t care about the rest of this review.

* which Google misleadingly refers to as “SEM” although SEM includes SEO, but that’s another story.

What Is SpeedPPC?

SpeedPPC is both a system and a methodology. It is not a single program but a set of Windows program, website templates and PHP scripts.

Dynamic Creatives

SpeedPPC takes your list of keyphrases (Google calls them keywords) and enables you to multiply them into additional combinations, e.g. “dentist” can be combined with a list of suburbs, e.g. “dentist richmond”, “dentist kew” and so on. This known as the “dual core” method. You can specify different bids for Exact, Phrase and Broad Match. SpeedPPC also creates the creatives, which are the actual ads you see on the ad network and their partner sites.

You can upload the creatives and the keywords with their bids using the Google AdWords Editor. The SpeedPPC campaign builder will also build your Microsoft adCenter campaigns, but you’ll need to use their online interface to add them (via a bulk upload CSV file).

The next important feature is that you can create a unique landing page that uses each keyphrase prominently. This keeps the Google Quality Score as high as possible, which gives you the cheapest cost per click. This feature is not entirely in the SpeedPPC package as such, but in a separately downloadable PHP script and matching templates. You install the script and it gives you a custom page for each keyword.

For example, to create the templated landing page at left, you embed the HTML inside the supplied PHP script, then you call it from the ad network’s Destination URL with a call such as:

http://www.example.com/template-speedppc.php?seed=Car-Parts&expansion=all-car-parts&final=car-parts-america

Click the above image to see where the above variables end up in the template.

A closely related feature is the Affiliate datafeed landing page creator. This enables you to have a unique keyword and landing page pair per product in the datafeed (see image to the right) - affiliate heaven!

You upload the supplied script and make a MySQL database on your Linux server and follow the simple instructions to upload your datafeed file.

A fine set of narrated videos help you to understand the product very quickly. PDF manuals are also provided.

What’s New?

• The first thing you notice about SpeedPPC 3 is the completely changed interface.
• The next feature I noticed is that I could load a campaign of over 30,000 keywords, whereas the first release was limited to 1900. The next improvement is the speed! With the old version, processing 1900 keywords took more than 30 minutes and it was not advisable to load large campaigns. This version pumps out the 30,000 keywords in as little as three minutes! You should not normally need to run such large campaigns, but I was trying to test its limits.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing support is now included, which will please many advertisers who run campaigns on Yahoo. Microsoft adCenter support is still present, so all the three biggies have been covered.
• Advanced Ad Building enables you to mixmaster your headlines, description lines and display URLs. SpeedPPC will build text ads that represent every permutation of these.
• We all need to copy ads and modify them. Now you can copy them from one box to another with the click of a button.
• The Keyword Library enables you to reuse the same keyword lists for new campaigns. The benefits are obvious.
• You can clean up keywords, say, by removing invalid characters or extra spaces. For experienced users, there is an option to remove all spaces between keyphrases, which results in joined words. Why would you want this, you may well ask. Some people accidentally run two words together in a search query and if you target competitive niches such as debt consolidation, this little trick could get you a few cheap clicks.
• The My Campaigns panel displays all your SpeedPPC projects in one window even if they are stored in different directories on the PC. This is useful if you need to organise your PC to suit campaigns or different clients, instead of having to place all of them in one directory.
• Certain tasks such as Excel export can take a few minutes to complete, but you can open a fresh instance of SpeedPPC and build a new campaign simultaneously. No more coffee breaks for the staff!
• You can export your campaign in CSV format and now in Excel too.
• The status bar shows the total quantity of seed and expansion keywords

Conclusion

SpeedPPC 3 is a powerful tool for PPC advertisers, particularly those with thousands of keywords and who are targeting multiple locations for each keyword. Although there are many free tools to mix keywords with another variable, they don’t address the tricky issue of building unique landing pages for each unique keyword. Not only will this improve the Google Quality Score, it will be a better user experience and, therefore, it should lead to more conversions. If you are a regular PPC advertiser, you should grab a copy before Jay wakes up and raises the price.

Product home page: www.speedppc.com

Popularity: 21% [?]

First came the news from ICANN last week that domain tasting will largely disappear. Not totally, because the practice hasn’t been banned, but it won’t be free anymore. The ICANN Board passed a motion to

include fees for all domains added, including domains added during the AGP,
and encourages community discussion involved in developing the ICANN budget,
subject to both Board approval and registrar approval of this fee.

The AGP is the five-day “Add Grace Period” during which a registrar was not charged the $0.20 ICANN transaction fee (originally intended to cover typos and errors). A reseller usually got a shorter period of grace from the registrar. A few registrars and individual domain tasters took advantage of this period to register tens of millions of speculative domains each month to see if there was any type-in traffic that would be shown AdSense or similar ads. If there was no traffic, the domain name would be cancelled within the AGP at no cost to the registrant.

Now the party is over, with all gTLD transactions to cost $0.25. This won’t stop domain tasting, but it will be severely curtailed.

Google Puts Boot In

While domain tasters were drowning their sorrows in some virtual pub, Google is about to change its AdSense policy before the end of February, reports Jay Westerdal in the DomainTools Blog:

A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less than five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks.

Most domain tasters used AdSense or Yahoo! PPC ads to monetise their temporary assets and they kept the domain if the type-in traffic kept coming and clicking the ads. This means a domain taster will only be watching a visitor counter and not the cash register for the first four days and pay ICANN 25c for the privilege by cancelling before the fifth day ends. Jay believes that Yahoo! will also implement a similar policy.

This is great news for the rest of us. People will buy domain names more thoughtfully and for long-term reasons. Google will regain some of that lost “Do No Evil” cred.

Popularity: 29% [?]