according to SERoundtable you can view the story here

Thanks Google

This is pretty unheard of.  My daily routine of firing up Firefox and checking email then Adwords was cut short this morning when I got the following error message that Adwords doesn’t support FireFox 3.5

What? Seriously? Hey Adwords, at least give me the link to switch to the old interface which would be much easier then me hunting down an older version of Firefox.

Sheesh..how lame!

Google is slowly rolling out the recently announced new UI for Google Adwords.

Get yours by signing up here

PS- I’m back from South America and will hopefully be posting a little bit more here.

If you log into your adwords account today you may receive a pop-up alerting you that a new ‘Beta Interface’ is available. If you don’t have the notification look to the upper right hand corner for a ‘Beta Interface’ link and it may be there for you..

You can see the interface in the screen shot which looks like a mutation of Google Adwords and Google Analytics. This is a much needed improvement in usability and efficiency. I love the ease in which you can navigate through the campaigns and ad groups, the graph and the expanded view.

I just finished taking my Adwords Professional exam in order to re-up my “Adwords Professional Certification” and I have determined that Google wants you to fail! I have some beef with this thing and here is why.

First off, I had to pay $50 AGAIN to re-certify myself. I’ve already had to do this once, why did I have to pay again? Does Google really need my $50? I’m not sure why, but that just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t have to pay to renew my license, why should they make me pay to renew their made up certification? Ok, my real beef isn’t with the cost of the re-certification, it is the exam itself.

While Google has a great resource center for you to study adwords and take some practice quizzes, it doesn’t help much when the questions aren’t updated on the actual exam! I finished this exam with a pretty good amount of time leftover so I went back through and looked at some of the questions that I thought were ridiculous and even took some screencaps of some to prove that I’m not completely crazy.

For example, this question regarding Google image ads: As you can see the question asks for 3 responses. Now, A & B are pretty obvious but C is definitely wrong because image ads don’t show on Google searches, and D. is definitely wrong because according to the Adwords Help Center that maximum number of allowed images is 500 not 50!

Another example is this question which as you can see by the red highlight boxes says “Select ALL that Apply”. I may not be the world’s smartest man but I do know that with RADIO buttons you can only choose 1! Its not a major issue but just a real annoyance to me.

Finally, near the end of the exam it was asking about mobile ads which I admittingly have little experience with at this point in time, so when I ran into these questions I tried to consult the Adwords Help Center, the only problem with that was…. IT’S IN ITALIAN! Yes, the English section on Mobile ads is in Italian which I personally don’t think is the most conducive to helping people pass this test. I’m from NORTH CAROLINA, not Milan!

For some reason, Google wants you to fail!

Todd Malicoat has an excellent, albeit it slightly less bitter, post with some tips about re-upping your certification for those who need to prepare.

If you are wondering, don’t worry, I got a 95.6%

Here are some more bogus questions for the Adwords Professional Exam:
Item 79 of 111 Using AdWords, advertisers can target their ads by _____.
A. postal code
B. telephone area code
C. latitude and longitude
D. a user’s age as specified in their user preferences on Google

–I’m pretty sure you can target by postal code and Latitude and longitude!

Item 103 of 111 When you have multiple ads in the same Ad Group, you can view all of these ads _____.
A.on the Campaign Summary page
B.below your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page
C.above your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page
D.next to your keyword list on the Ad Group detail page

-An example of an outdated question. If you want to look at all of your ads at once, Google has put them into a nice and neat TABBED format. The answer is B since this was the old way, but if you haven’t been using Adwords for that long, you’d have no way of knowing this.

Which statement about ads created with double byte characters is true?
A.They must not use single byte characters.
B.They must have 16 characters per ad text.
C.They must use single byte characters for punctuations and currency.
D.They must be triggered only by keywords created with double byte characters.
Good luck finding that answer in the help center, I think I guessed B.

Grouping keywords in a single Ad Group that shares a central theme helps improve performance the most when ads are shown on _____.
A.AOL
B.Google
C.search pages
D.content pages
Does anyone want to explain the difference of A,B and C to me?

Your client wants to target potential customers in France, and English speakers around the world using only one campaign. Which option would reach this audience?
A.Target all countries and all languages.
B.Target the country France only. Target languages English and French.
C.Target the countries France and the United States. Target ads to English only.
D.Target the United Kingdom and the United States. Target languages French and English.
None of these seem like the right answer to me.

If you manage several AdWords accounts and have created a standard password for all of your client’s accounts, which additional information is needed to access the client account?
A.a customer ID number for the account
B.a unique password created for the account
C.the unique login email address for the account
D.the credit card information on file for the account
Thats what the MCC is for!

What is a benefit of using broad matches with negative keywords, instead of exact match keywords by themselves?
A.Your ad will attract more traffic.
B.You don’t have to update the keyword list.
C.You can create keyword lists more quickly.
D.You can be certain which keyword the user searched.

A & C seem correct here.

And Finally, even the tutorial quizzes need to be updated, one answer says that if on invoicing you have 15 days to pay to avoid suspension of your account when in the Adwords help system is says “oogle reserves the right to suspend or close down your AdWords account if we do not receive payment within 30 business days of the monthly invoice date and/or you exceed the monthly credit limit.”

Google has just added a nifty tool to its Adwords tools portfolio, the ability to block IPs from seeing (and clicking) your ads. In your Adwords tools section you will see a link for ‘IP Exclusion’ which will allow you to put in IP addresses that you want to block from seeing your ads.

You should see something like this:

This is no doubt a response for the long time complaint from advertisers that “my competition is clicking on my ads to spend my money” and a welcome response in my opinion. This is not the answer many are seeking sophisticated click-fraud, but I suspect it will help make advertisers feel better and also eliminate a lot of the petty click-fraud that no doubt happens by less than ethical competitors.

There are two main reason why you should do this:

• 1. To prevent even the temptation of clicking on your ads by your competition.
• 2. To stop ad copy-cats.

The first one is pretty obvious, if you can help fight potential click fraud in anyway possible, Why wouldn’t you? The second reason may not be so obvious but you’d be amazed how often the competition will monitor your ads and see if you are up to anything new and copy what they like. I’ve personally seen this on ads I have written for competitive industries and its pretty annoying to say the least. Anything that I can do to keep them from seeing (and clicking) on my ads, even if only temporarily, I am more than happy to do.

The big question many people will face will be: How do I find my competition’s IP address? Off the top of my head I can think of three ways to do this. First, the most ethical way would be to analyze your log files and find IPs and hostnames that are associated with your competition and use a combination of trace routing and IP location finder applications. Here’s a free trace routing web app for you to use [link to IP tracing app.]

Secondly, use your analytics package to block a range of IPs that have not delivered quality traffic to your site. A slightly more risky way, as you may block future customers or people in a research phase of a buying cycle. I wouldn’t recommend this for most people

The third and maybe less ethical way, would be to use a little “social engineering” mixed with some web savvy-ness. You could use a blank unrelated domain and send an email and link to a few secretaries or employees of the competition, and nab their IPs, with log files, analytics software, or a small piece of code to output their IPs to a destination of your choosing. This method would probably be more accurate than the other twos but I’m sure people will have ethical questions about this type of competitive spying. I’d bet you could probably call someone in the company and ask them for their IP, which is not an uncommon way for hackers to compromise corporate networks.

However you decide to find out this information, I highly advise the use of this tool that Adwords has given us.

Read more in the Adwords Help here.

Barry of SERoundtable is reporting that Google is going to increase the data advertisers are able to see in relation to their ad performance on the content network.

An Adwords Rep posted this on the SEW forums:

Since our network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of pages, information reported in the Placement Performance report consists of vast amounts of data. To provide this information in a scalable way to all our advertisers as soon as possible with the full launch in June, we are providing reporting for certain segments of our network in a consolidated way.

This includes sites that are participating in our AdSense for domains and AdSense for error pages programs. We realize that advertisers would like to see site-by-site metrics for all segments of the content network to be able to effectively optimize their campaigns. For this reason, we are working on ways of providing this information on a site-by-site basis as soon as possible.

This means that advertisers will be able to see how your ads are performing on portions of the content network such as Gmail ads.

While the type and amount of information that we will be giving is only pure speculation, this is definitely a step in the right direction to make the content network a little less craptacular. Even as the content network’s #1 enemy, this news is extremely interesting. I think the truth will finally come out about the quality of traffic driven from the content network, especially Google’s own network which we have limited control over.

With Google becoming more transparent and actually helping advertisers these days, would it be greedy of me to ask for the same type of reporting from the Google SEARCH Network?!?

The web is a buzz with news of the Google Adwords Quality score update. So far none of my clients have been affected so I can’t personally say what everyone is all torn up about but there is a 6 page (and growing) thread on WebmasterWorld regarding the change.
People have been complaining of keyword prices jumping up to 20x their original cost and quality scores going from ‘Great’ to ‘Poor’ at the same time.

Loren at SEJ has more coverage

According to Google, only a small number of AdWords advertisers will notice an increase in their minimum bids and the majority of advertisers will not be effected.

Publishers however are sounding off in forums (and these publishers probably have much more aggressive AdWords campaigns than the majority of AdWords advertisers)

Unfortunately, the Google Adwords blog has yet to mention any news of the update but I’ll keep an eye on it if anything changes or they decide to speak up.

I fired up my Adwords Editor this weekend and was prompted to update to the new Adwords Editor Ver. 3.5. I quickly got excited b/c the AE is one of my favorite tools but this update didn’t include much to tickle my fancy. That’s not to say there aren’t some cool updates included (official release notes) but they are not features I will find particularly useful outside of the drag and drop functionality.

Version 3.5

New features:

* Image ads: View, add, and update your image ads on the new Image Ads tab.
* Drag and drop: Copy or move items by dragging them to their new locations.
* Region and city targeting: Choose additional location targeting options for your campaigns.

Other updates:

* New keyboard shortcuts are listed in the Data menu.
* The Delete Multiple tools and Add Draft Campaign are now accessible via the tab tool bars.

Also, miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

All of those are fine and dandy but I have my own Adwords Editor wishlist:

Thats it for now. I’m sure I’ll put more in as I stumble across them. Do you have any suggestions for the AE team?

Exploit Prevention Labs has uncovered a nasty nasty little scheme to steal your bank information via Google Adwords and IE7.

Essentially what is happening is the hacker (proper term in this case is phisher) is bidding on terms such as “BetterBusinessBureau” or “Modern cars airbags required” and presenting what appears to be the BBB.or or Cars.com. After the searcher clicks on the ad, they are redirected through the URL smarttrack.org which then tries to install some spyware using an exploit in IE7.

The installed spyware then digs through your browser for information to report back to the hacker. The hackers are specifically targeting information for 100 different banks worldwide.

This is a very dangerous exploit and although Google has already taken down the account, I am concerned that they did not catch this redirect before it went active. This is just one of many reasons to keep your system patched with the latest updates, or even better, switch to FireFox!

Read More at Exploit Labs