Inspired Impressions

I normally don’t trust reports that are created by companies that just so happen to offer services that alleviate the issues pointed out in the reports. That’s why click fraud has not really been a big concern to me as long as I operated with tier1 search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) I’ve been using PPC for a lot of years and feel the tier1 engines have a lot more to lose by allowing click fraud than they do by implementing procedures to stop it. Tier2 engines are a different story for another post.

Google recently launched click fraud reporting in the adwords interface. It is pretty limited, but it’s a step in the right direction. Hopefully, they will open it up a bit more and allow us to get a bit more granular.

The new click fraud reports by themselves weren’t really postworthy, but Google’s recently released analysis of how third parties track click fraud certainly is. Among key findings about 3rd party cilck fraud audit companies are:

• Failure to properly identify user’s browse behavior vs. actual ad clicks
• Fictitious clicks generated across multiple PPC channels
• Duplicated click activity within fraud reports
• Severely overstated, fictitious clicks

For example, in one particular report from ClickFacts, there were 2261 reported events; however, over 1800 of these were duplicated events. In this same case, ClickFacts reported 6 unique click events and duplicated each one 9 times resulting in 54 “click fraud” events. when Google compared this to their logs, they found only a single click for the entire month from that IP address or search query and a charge of $0.57. Remember these reports come from the company that released widely published reports claiming industrywide 36% click fraud.

ClickFacts response to Google’s challenges was to limit the amount of data they submit to claim click fraud as well as to severely reduce their sample size for click analysis.

Another report from Adwatcher claimed the advertiser received about 12,000 clicks for the month;however, in actuality, the advertiser only received 6,800 clicks, of which 800 were attributed as invalid by Google.

The report was very interesting and an easy read. Of course, if you torture data enough it will surrender whatever you’re looking for, but I don’t believe it’s in Google’s long term interest to profit from click fraud, and as such, I believe they are going to a reasonable length to combat the reality of click fraud.

Here’s Google’s email reply to a request for Conversion Tracking with Google checkout:

…As for persisting analytics tracking, that’s something that isn’t possible with the way Checkout currently works.  However, we’ve heard loud and clear from many merchants that this is something that we need to somehow enable.  We have nothing to announce at this time, but we’re working on some things to address this particular problem…

Hopefully sooner, rather than later.

One thing that has changed is the new Google Checkout. We’ve been working with GC (Gbuy as it was known in beta) for a while now. I really like the UI for the customer experience. Checkout is easy and pretty much painless.

On our backend, it is pretty straightforward and foolproof. Just a series of XML passing back and forth between us and Google updating the order status and injecting orders into our backend.

It has a lot more legs than MS Passport and I think it will prove to be a value add for Ecommerce in general, and particularly the consumer.

Having said all that, here are my issues:
Once a customer places an order, there is no way to edit the order. If the customer requests expedited shipping after the order was placed, you have to either give it (expedited shipping) away at no additional charge, or cancel the order and reprocess it in your internal order management system.

When an order is placed by the customer, their credit card/debit card is authorized to ensure available funds, and to hold such available funds. If the order is not charged within 3 days, Google will re-authorize the card and then capture the funds, resulting in 2 auths and a capture. This presents problems for debit card owners over weekends and holidays. Google stated that they are working on this to extend the timeframe for re-auth.

Orders tend to get in a state of “reviewing”, meaning the funds have not been authorized and the merchant cannot process the order, quite often. It seems these orders are being subject to a manual review. Based on customer feedback, I think this happens more often when the original auth fails and the customer has to go back and edit the credit card information.

Google has a Payment Guarantee Policy that should cover fraud as Google performs the AVS and CVN matches and doesn’t give the merchant any additional billing information. Some orders have a full match on the AVS and CVN, but Google still denies their eligibility for the Payment Guarantee Policy.

From Google:

“Google relies on a variety of proprietary systems–including internal data sources and advanced risk modeling–to evaluate the risk levels associated with transactions. If the risk level for a particular transaction is too high, Google will not cover the transaction under the Payment Guarantee Policy.”

These orders are still covered under the Chargeback Resolution Policy, but that does not guarantee you will receive your funds back for chargebacks.

The last drawback I’ll talk about, and it is big, is that there is no way to persist your website metrics through checkout. We use Omniture analytics and there is no way to report that a visitor that used Google checkout completed a transaction. There’s not even a way to use Google adwords conversion tracking in Google checkout. This results in a low conversion rate whereby, we have to do manual ‘cipherin’ to figure out the true conversion. I hope Google allows us to place code on the “thank you” page in the near future as this is a real pain in the ass.

Overall though, I think the product is great. Although it may be in beta for the next 3-5 years, they’ve already made some strong improvements to the product. I have high hopes for the future.

Google finally launched dayparting which can be a very effective measure for cost savings and improved ROI.

Be careful when implementing as you may decide that since sales are slack during a certain time of the day that your ads should be turned off during those hours, when those clicks could actually lead to sales during a repeat visit during a different time of day. Ensure that your analytics package is tracking the time of the click and not just the time of the sale to ensure you're dayparting most efficiently. I use Omniture Sitecatalyst as well as Google conversion tracking. Out of the box, Omniture doesn't tag the visit with the time of day, so I use a custom metric to assign the hour of day, 21:00 for example, and measure the revenue/conversion rate per keyword off of that metric.

I do love Riya, but Picasa has been my application of choice to organize my thousands of digital photos on my home computer. I've always wished I could see those photos from the web, either from my office, or to share with remote family.

Google finally "webalized" Picasa. It's about time. They only offer 250 megs of storage free with an option to upgrade to 6 gigs for $25/yr, and the application is still in limited, invitation only, testing. Philipp Lenssen notes that there is no such thing as a private album, just public and "unlisted". Album titles are appended to the URL of a user's "homepage" so others can merely guess at album titles such as "untitledalbum" and discover your hidden albums. Keep that in mind when uploading photos.

Aside from the privacy implications, it is a very welcome addition to the Google portfolio. link to Picasa Web

Thanks to Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped (who received from James Boulter), Google is testing feedback buttons on Google Adwords.

I don't see consumers saying this "link was helpful" because by the time they discover that, they are already on the advertiser's website and hopefully, completing a transaction. I see this as a collecting negative feedback only, which isn't so bad either. This ends up as a tool for Google to penalize those with poor relevancy which indirectly benefits those with marginal or good relevancy.

Posted at the Search Engine Watch blog…

New Google AdWords Dayparting & Ad Scheduling Coming
The new features will allow advertisers to schedule the ads to show on weekends or weekdays only, or on other set days the advertiser specifies. Dayparting is also included allowing advertisers to schedule their ads during specific hours, such as to run late at night or at lunchtime only.

Internet Retailer recently reported the value of dayparting over here at Golfballs.com and the addition to the Google UI will be very welcome. As Jennifer says, it's a move to catch up to Microsoft adCenter's dayparting and demographic targeting options.

I find that Gmail is incredibly slow in rendering with my FireFox browser. Not sure if it is FF in general or if it's extenstion related, but I found a workaround that speeds up Gmail considerably.

I use a "User Agent Switcher Extension" for other areas of my job including SEO and debugging internal applications. This extension allows you to change the information that you send to the host website and specify whether you're using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or anything else that you want.

I found that if I use the extension to change my user agent to something like "Googlebot 2.1", Gmail reads my request as an "unsupported browser" and switches to an alternative mode which renders many, many times quicker.

Another benefit to claiming that you're Googlebot 2.1 is that you can sometimes get into password protected areas on news websites.

I've been beta testing MSN adCenter (PPC Search) for quite a while and have not been impressed with the application so far. They've made tremendous improvements to the UI now that it is out of beta, but it seems that every feature that should be a positive tick for MSN works out to be a negative for the advertiser. It seems they're putting revenue potential ahead of their customer's requirements and expectations.

MSN has a great set of ad targeting options, at least they could be. One example is the demographics targeting or, "Incremental Pricing for targeting" as they call it. This sounds great. I'm in the golf industry so I would like to target the "Males" "35+" demographic.

At issue here is that AdCenter only allows a "positive bid increase" in multiples of 10%. Doesn't sound that bad at first until you think about the 10-100 or so keywords I'm bidding on within the same "order" (an order is the same as an adgroup on Google), all at varying levels of CPC. If I already know the maximum CPC I'm willing to pay for the keyword phrase "Titleist Pro V1", how do I determine what percentage to increase my bids for males only? For the 35-50 demographic? For the 50-65 demographic?

If I assume I can increase my bids 30% for the term "Titleist Pro V1" for those given demographics, how does that affect the keyword phrase "Titleist golf ball" that is also within the same adgroup and subject to the same increase? So if I increase bids by a percentage for a given demographic, then my individual keyword bids should be lowered to maintain my target CPC. What happens when MSN can't determine the demographics of the searcher? I assume I'll get outbid because my base CPC bid is too low.

It would be easy for MSN to offer "negative bid percentages" rather than forcing me to place positive bid percentages for the demographic options. This way, I could maintain my set Max CPC on the keyword level and decrease my bids by 70% for women and 18-25 year olds. No offense to women or young people… you get my drift.

Naturally that would seem to decrease my adspend on adCenter, but it would actually play in the inverse as the more optimal my campaign is running, the more money I'll throw at it. That's why Google commands over 50% of my Search budget and second tier engines get 0%.

One way to get to the true ROAS is to use adCenter's conversion tracking tool in addition to the Omniture Analytics package I currently use. This way, I could manipulate the incremental pricing and keyword CPC until I hit my target ROAS. Again, great in theory, but adCenter does not track conversion on the keyword level, but on the Campaign level. If you're not familiar with adCenter's heirarchy, it's: Campaign>Order>Keyword. So adCenter tracks at the most macro level it possibly can which is of little to no use to the advertiser, but good for MSN's short-term revenue.

MSN conversion tracking also advertises their adCenter services on all checkout confirmation pages, regardless of how the customer was referred.

So I won't be using MSN's new targeting options or their conversion tracking. Google will continue to dominate my adspend and I'll hope that MSN gets it together and builds their applications for their advertisers and consumers and not primarily their pocketbook, because when advertisers and consumers win, their pocketbook will follow.

Last month I wrote about Google buying @Last software, the makers of 3d modeling application Sketchup. Google relaunched Sketchup today, and the best news is that it is now FREE. There's a pro version for $495, but I'm not sure yet what the difference is.

Google seems to be positioning the application as a tool to enhance Google Earth. You can create your own 3d models and upload them to their searchable 3D warehouse. Interestingly, Google hasn't branded the 3D warehouse as such, but is using just a standard Google logo, there's not even a "beta" indicator. Even Froogle is still in beta!

I really like how Google has implemented the use of tags for the objects available on the 3D warehouse search engine. I haven't uploaded an object, but I assume the uploader chooses tags when uploading. Leave it to the Internet though, someone already created an object called "sex house" and tagged it with obscene tags. And no, I wasn't searching for "sex", I searched for "White House" 

I love these things. Marketing Sherpa released a study (pdf link) today with a WalMart.com heat map. What's a heat map you say? The detailed technology is beyond me, but users wear special goggles or glasses while viewing a web page and a computer records where their eyes focus and what they click on.

Users on the Internet usually follow the same patterns of either a triangle or "F" pattern. What that means is that most of the content on the right side of the page and content below the fold might as well not even exist. Less is more.

WalMart.com heat map from Marketing Sherpa:

Google Search Page heat map from Did-It.com. Yes, they have a goofy and annoying home page, but that's another topic:

Take a look at the Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006 (pdf link) from Marketing Sherpa, it looks like a great deal of valuable information.

Also of particular interest is that "fewer than 50% of merchants we surveyed said they track loyalty, lifetime value, or retention costs." If we all know that it's cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a customer, then why is the ecom industry so far behind in using the proven segmentation models that catalog marketers have used for decades? More than likely, small to mid sized Ecommerce companies lack the statistical or catalog industry background to implement even the simplest database segmentation methodology. The ecom industry is currently focused on analytics, conversion rates and multivariate testing, and I only hope that evolves into customer segmentation and retention, at least for the companies I work for and not the competition.

I had recently switched from the 30boxes.com calendar to Kiko but hesitated to put too much into Kiko's calendar because I wanted to see what Google was going to produce.

Just when I got used to Kiko…WHAM! Google launches their new calendar. So far it looks simple to use; drag and drop, quick add, reminders via SMS, etc. It also has the ability to share calendars with others. From what I hear, if I have access to more than one calendar, Google Calendar will layer all shared calendars on the same view. If an email is received in your Gmail account that references a date/time, Gmail will ask if you want to add it to your calendar.

So far the only real dissapointment is the lack of an RSS feed. Okay, I found the feed. It seems there is more than one "settings" option, one for all calendars and one on the calendar level. The feeds are on the calendar level.

I exported my Outlook calendar and then imported into Google, it seems that when Google imports your calendar it imports using the Pacific Time Zone, so all of my times are off by 2 hours. You may want to keep an eye on this post to see if there is a resolution prior to importing anything.

www.google.com/calendar

I received 2 requests by email to participate in surveys today. One from Google regarding a beta service and the other from MSN regarding Adcenter. See if you can determine which survey request is more compelling and which I will take time out of my day to complete.

First Google's:

Hello Brandon,

We hope you're enjoying the XXXX Google XXXXXXXXXX. As part of the next phase of this test, we'd like to invite you to participate in our phone survey regarding XXXXXXXXXXXX. By participating in this survey, you'll help us continue to enhance this product for you. In addition, we'll give you a $100 AdWords credit in exchange for your time.

Survey details:

- We're conducting phone surveys from XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
- This 30-minute survey will address XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
- You'll receive a $100 credit in your AdWords account within three days of completing the survey.

To participate in this survey and claim your $100 AdWords credit, please respond to this message with a date and time when we may call you. If you have any questions, please feel free to respond to this email.

Now MSN's:

Brandon,

Microsoft really appreciates your company’s participation in the pilot phase of the roll out for their new pay-for-performance advertising product, adCenter. As a critical part of this pilot process, Microsoft has engaged our firm, Sacerdote & Co., Inc. to gain feedback from early users, customers like you, on their current pilot experiences and future requirements.

The feedback process is a very short 2-part written survey covering satisfaction and technology. Afterwards, we will want to have a telephone discussion with you about a few of your responses to the written survey, in order to better understand your opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the current offering and what Microsoft needs to do to make it a compelling offer.

Please return the written surveys to us at XXXXXXX or fax it to XXXXXXXX. After we receive your written surveys, one of our associates will contact you by telephone.
If you have any questions, please call XXXXXXXX at Sacerdote & Co., Inc.

Please direct Microsoft-related questions to XXXXX at Microsoft. Thank you so much for your time. Your feedback is a critical part of Microsoft’s product development.

So let's see… One offers $100 and the other offers… nothing. Hmmm 

Google launched Google Finance. I really like the way the graph operates. Mousing over a point in history highlights the day you are on and dynamically refreshes a snapshot of the days metrics.

If you scroll the graph to the past, the news section also scrolls to show relevant news. clicking on a news story scrolls the graph to the point where the release occurred and highlights the day's trading.

If you mouseover the names of the management, a window blows out to show more details and a photo of that person. To not be so Google oriented, I linked to Costco's (COST) financials rather than Google's.
Google Finance: Costco Wholesale Corp.

This is a great application. Sketchup is by far the easiest to use 3D modeling software on the market, not that I’ve had that much experience with other similar products, but after viewing the tutorial I was able to build a simple house complete with people and pets in under 10 minutes. And it was fun!
Google announced the purchase today and I’m trying to figure out the relationship and how the acquisition will help Google. There’s a plugin for Google Earth available, but that seems relatively minor in the grand scheme.

Any thoughts?

Google has a web page creator called Googlepages where you can “Create your own web pages, quickly and easily.” Problem is the webpage is built with the URL subdomain being [google username].googlepages.com. Your Google username is your Google account ID and is also your gmail address. So spammers can simply go to http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A%7E.googlepages.com and extract about 13,000 gmail accounts (as of today).

Thanks to DaveN at DigitalPoint for posting this.

Until Google fixes this, I wouldn’t suggest creating your new webpage at Googlepages.

It seems the Web2.0 revolution is to build a company with no revenue and position it to be a buyout. Having said that I've enjoyed using Writely for the past month as it is a very good and intuitive online word processor. It's just that this great app, along with so many recently released great applications, don't seem to have a revenue upside.
More at the Writely Blog

Google has a new "CL2" calendar using AJAX. Here's the details from TechCrunch. Sounds like it will be a while before it's released though.

I've been trying out a new calendar from 30Boxes that works reasonably well. What I like about the company is that they have active discussions with their users and make improvements fairly quickly based on feedback.

And yes, I've been gone for about a week and a half. Sorry for no posts, but I was vacationing in the Seattle area. I'll post a couple pictures later.

Wow. Great article. It’s been a while, but I remember when I used to use Google (or Alta Vista in the old days) to look at website visitor statistics from other competitor sites. Take a look at some of the information George Kurtz was able to view when presenting at a Security Risk Conference.

“You almost get bored finding all these password files. It used to be fun in the old days when you found a password file. Now you just go to Google and find thousands of them,” Kurtz said. Full article

Now that Gmail offers “clips”, or RSS feeds, that are driven by the content of the email in your inbox, it’s interesting to see the clips that show up when viewing your spam folder. Here’s a screenshot. Note the feed right below the search box for “French Fry Spam Casserole.”