I have 20+ more Google Wave invites to give out. If you’re willing to offer a link you’ll get higher priority just be sure to fill out your email section in the comments and I’ll get in touch.

If you’re interested in a Google Wave invite, leave me a message why you think PPC Lab is the bomb and I’ll send one your way. Ok you don’t have to lie, you can just tell me why you deserve a Google Wave invite. I’ve got a “whole mess” of them to give out.

Ever since Google’s official acquisition of DoubleClick Perfomics, lots of people in the search community protested about conflicts of interest on Google’s part. They also are worried about their competition, DoubleClick Performics’ Search Marketing, not playing fair. It seems like Google decided to do the right thing. They’re keeping the affiliate marketing side of DoubleClick, and selling off the Search Marketing unit.

This move is definitely good for Google’s reputation. But if Google didn’t sell off Doubleclick’s search marketing department, personally, I think the only “unfair” thing about them would be the fact that DoubleClick’s sales people can persuade potential clients to pick them over another major agency because they are the only search marketing company owned by Google.

But as far as the effectiveness of SEO goes, I don’t think they have a major edge comparing to other agencies. As I’ve stated a year ago,

So…….if you have inside knowlege about Google’s algorithms, spend
a year disecting every little line, what conclusion would you get?
“We need more quality back links with keywords as anchor text!”.

All is fair; SEO isn’t a “secret”, there isn’t much “insider
knowledge”, I think we know what it takes to rank well for specific
keywords for specific sites.

On the subject of “playing fair”, I don’t think Google will give
Performatics special treatment. Google refused “manual manipulation”
when “Miserable Failure” hype came around, it certainly wouldn’t
manually put their clients first for specific keywords.

Last week I posted about Google embedding search boxes within search results pages and the issues it could cause by being poorly targeted ads not to mention the ability to bid on competitors SERPs.

Well the NYTimes story today quotes a good spokeswoman as saying that the company has removed the site search box from the SERPs from a couple of unnamed companies.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

While this is good from a site owners perspective, at least those who feel they are negatively impacted by the search box, it does nothing to help us advertisers from being able to prevent our ads from showing or from preventing our competition from showing their ads. We will keep a close eye on how this story continues to develop but for now you can read more on the story at SEJ and WebMasterWorld

We’ve all seen the rumors that Google has been testing various new search engine results pages (SERPs) but here is one that I haven’t seen before, a search box embedded within the SERPs. My buddy, Scott, pointed out to me that pulling up the query “Nasa” resulted in an embed search box *see image*.

This actually strikes me as useful because far too many people don’t understand the usefulness of the ‘site:’ search command. But while useful to users, this change could have an adverse affect on Adwords performance from an advertiser standpoint. Call me a pessimist but we could potentially see inflated ad impressions (resulting in decreased CTR) from users who are not in the buy cycle. If someone is searching a site, they are probably looking for something specific and not an ad so I’d rather not have my ads shown. Hopefully, if this becomes more widespread, there will be an option to be excluded from showing ads during a users’ embedded search search, which is essentially the ‘site:’ command. But given Google’s track record, there won’t be an option for exclusion and we’ll all be defaulted to participate!

I have no idea what is going on lately, and I have confirmed that my friends are experiencing the same problems, but Gmail is letting through tons of spam. Its not like its sneaky spam, its the obvious stuff that any spam filter should catch (Viagra, Cialis, Penis Enlargment, discount software). Most of it is slipping through on my Google Apps accounts, but my @gmail.com address is receiving some spam as well. I’m getting between 5-20 spam messages that don’t get filtered out per day and its annoying.

Hopefully Google will check them selves before I have to switch to *gasp* Hotmail!

Anyone else noticing an increased amount of spam in their Gmail / Google Apps account?

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.”

found via SharpLogic

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?!?

Maybe they should put me in charge of Google, well at least their Content Network department. Last year I went on a little rant regarding the poor quality of Google’s Content network and the fact that Google loves splogs and a year later Google announces plans to clean up their Content Network by starting to shut down Made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites. A step in the right direction for sure but by no means the purification of the content network.

I applaud Google for finally taking an action rather then completely and consistently turning a blind eye to it all but they still have a ways to go. There are tons and tons of extremely low quality sites out there that are not participating in Adwords Arbitrage but are too poor in quality for me to ever put my ads on but they continue to display Adsense ads.

So go ahead and put me in charge of the Content Network division and I’ll show you how to really clean it up. Now if I could only get my dogs to listen to me like this!