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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.

Search Engine Land is reporting that Google is bolding expanded match keywords in recent searches.

This should really come to no surprise to my three loyal readers as we here at PPC Lab (ie Me) ran into Google’s expanded match testing well over a year ago so it was only a matter of time before these words had bold added to them.

What does this mean for you and me? Well, In my own opinion this helps out the slack account managers, ones who don’t use proper account organization and structure along with ones who do not use many ad variations. That wouldn’t be any of my readers would it?? This new bold text will make it harder for advertisers to make their ads stand out because the user will see more bold text on the page.

We’ll keep an eye on this and see what type of trends we see as this is rolled out more prominently.

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!

I read this little piece on SEW today that was a complete blasting of Microsoft adCenter and in my opinion, completely unnecessary. Sure, MSN has had its ups and downs with the recently launched adCenter but don’t you expect that from nearly every early version of just about any product? I understand that it is slightly different because it is more directly dealing with money, but MSN has been quick to take care of any financial errors the system has encountered. Its growing pains 101. I’m sure that $500 Dyson vacuum you bought your wife 3 years ago had its issues, but did you completely throw it out the window? Why should Microsoft be held to any different standard? For people are who are the early adapters and must have the first generation everything, you’ve come to expect bugs and less then perfect performance. In an ideal world all first versions would be the final version but this is not the case and some things require a bit of patience and understanding.

Ahhh thats an interesting word, “Understanding”. Let’s take a look at Mr. Wright’s complaints and see if I can understand.

First MSN’s explanation:

* Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.
* Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating Web sites and other distribution outlets.

to which Mr. Wright responds:

Ummm. Ok, let?s recap. Now AdCenter will be serving my ads based upon some mysterious criteria that is most likely top secret and designed to increase revenue for Microsoft ? and most likely decrease revenue for my clients. I have no idea when an ad is going to be served in AdCenter?s contextual network, and I have no control over the bids in this contextual network, nor the ability to track the effectiveness of the contextual ads. And I was notified of these changes on the day that the changes took place, leaving me with no time to consult with clients and make budget adjustments accordingly. And if I don?t like it, I should take my ball and go home.

Man, this really sounds shady, the search engine bidding on words for me that I have no control over, completely unfair. This does sound kind of familiar, oh yeah, Google has been doing this for over a year now. Like I always say about basketball refs, if you are gonna call a foul than call the foul, just call it both ways. If you are gonna call out Microsoft, be sure to point your finger at Google as well.

So we all understand what MSN and Google are doing, but what can we do about it other them e-complain on our blogs? Thankfully one of the search engines offers us a way to control this advanced keyword matching. In the reporting center, one of these engines offers you a way to capture the exact query a user typed in. Want to guess which one? If you said MSN you are correct but you don’t win anything. MSN allows a query string parameter that you can insert into your destination URLs in order to pass the query information onto your analytics software. This information can then be used to adjust your bids and campaigns in order to actually SAVE you money. Pretty nifty eh? I can’t wait for Google to offer us this type of information.

Regarding the second part of Mr. Wright’s complaint about MSN putting your ads on their partner sites and not having control over this, everyone does it. Google puts your ads in Gmail, Reader, among the millions of made-for-adsense sites in their content network (re: Google Loves Splogs). Yahoo puts your ads all over the place. And as for MSN, they put it on MSN controlled sites only. Maybe it is just me but that does not seem like an issue to me, at least we know the quality of the content is high quality and not splog worthy.

This post may seem like I am an MSN homer, but I am not. I have no affiliation with them and in fact have ripped them several times on this blog, but I don’t like to see anyone unjustly attacked in a public forum such as the SEW article. I applaud MSN for not taking the easy route that many have suggested and just mimic Google Adwords but have created a very powerful tool that will continue to mature and get better with age.

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?

It seems like every other day Google is introducing a new feature into their Adwords accounts with the most recent feature being preferred cost bidding. This means that advertisers can choose to let Adwords control their Max CPC in order to keep their CPC constant. It sounds pretty confusing but think of it as a portfolio approach to managing your accounts.

When you enable preferred cost bidding, the Adwords system automatically updates your maximum bid several times per day to reach your preferred cost setting. This is basically a bid management feature for advertisers who prefer the certainty of knowing their actual CPC or CPM. Since the bid management feature works by changing your maximum bid in the background, all the ads can still be ranked like before, using the max CPC and Quality Score.

I don’t know anyone who has tried this probably because it is an approach that requires minimal management but requires the advertiser to have solid data on conversion ratios and cost data because without this data its hard to make an accurate decision about where you want to set you preferred cost.

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