Google published a new feature where you can compare the visitor trends for multiple websites:

The feature also suggests related websites and keywords. Very interesting, not only for search marketers. This is another indicator for me that Google’s search algorithm will put more and more emphasis on data from the Google Toolbar and less on on-site factors and incoming links.

Google released a new version of their AdWords Editor a couple hours ago. You should definitely update. A list of new features can be found here.

I’m super busy with client work so I don’t have time to blog at the moment. In the mean time I would like to recommend you a post by Timo Aden of Google. He is explaining the secrets of the new version of the Google Analytics code. The post itself is in German but if you read the code you should understand what he’s talking about. Go to Timo’s post about the new code.

Usability

Even though Tradedoubler has made a huge step in the right direction, AdSense is still better. For example, Tradedoubler forgot to translate some of the interface words into local languages. Here’s an example of a mixture of a German interface with English wordings:

1:0 in favor of AdSense

Flexibility

Tradedoubler AdMatch lets you do way more stuff than Google AdSense. I like the fact that Tradedoubler also employs the product databases of its affiliate programs. However, Tradedoubler’s inventory of advertisers is minimal compared to Google’s. So even though Tradedoubler offers more in terms of looks, Google offers you way more matching ads.
2:0 in favor of AdSense

Technical Performance

I’m not impressed by AdMatch’s performance. It takes longer to load than AdSense, especially when it needs to examine a URL for the first time. Also, on Internet Explorer 7.0 on my Vista machine, AdMatch fails to display the ads under certain conditions. I can see that text is moved down and space reserved by the ad, but I can just see a blank space. I could reproduce that error on another machine.
3:0 in favor of AdSense

Conclusion

AdMatch is buggy! And Tradedoubler doesn’t have enough ads to be able to provide a good match for all these content sites out there. AdMatch is worth a try for those who run Tradedoubler affiliate programs already. Don’t use it if you make most of your money from contextual advertising!

Google is working on an ad-serving platform for the masses. The so-called Google Ad Manager, currently in private beta, is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, creating a counterpart to DoubleClick’s DART.

The service is going to be free. The underlying purpose of Google Ad Manager is the further spread of AdSense on publisher sites. Just like Google Analytics is supposed to help AdWords clients optimizing their campaigns, Ad Manager is supposed to help AdSense clients to deliver more ads and collect more information about your site.

It’s a done deal now. After four months of investigation the EU gave their approval for the creation of probably the largest group of online advertising companies. I’m not a big fan of this decision because I don’t like monopolies. But it seems Google presented the EU a good case. Well done, guys.

I used to think I would never say that, but: Thank you, Microsoft, for trying to acquire Yahoo! Monopolies are bad for markets and Google needs to be challenged. The timing couldn’t be better. Yahoo! had announced job cuts and lately and their advertising revenue used to be better too. Windows still sucks though.

Urchin Software, the stand-alone version of Google Analytics, went into private beta testing. It runs on Linux and Windows machines, Vista is not supported though. There is a 90-day testing period. The full license costs 2995 dollars.

mocoNews reported that the Google AdWords Conversion Tracking doesn’t work properly for mobile ads. This is something that I had told Google over a year ago already. The Google AdWords Conversion Tracking is hardly suitable for the mobile internet. Why? Because it’s based on cookies.

These days roughly half of the browser handset in use do not support cookies. If you were Google, how would you know which keyword and ad triggered the conversion without cookies? Exactly, you simply wouldn’t know. Yes, as mobile phones get replaced regularly more phones will support cookies. But as pay-per-click is often a narrow-margin business Google’s conversion tracking becomes useless for mobile.

The Javascript in the Google conversion code might be another hurdle. But firing the pixel in the noscript image tag is enough to transmit the conversion to Google. It seems to me that the Javascript code is there only to display a Google ad and to collect more user data. That’s why they make the full code mandatory (see their terms & conditions).

But what’S the solution to the problem? Either Google offers their advertisers a batch-tracking service. Or the advertisers will have to use a third-party tracking service that records the click and conversion data and matches them through the AdWords API.

Google AdWords has several targeting functionalities already, for example by the location of the user. Now a demographic targeting feature for Google Adwords has reached beta status.

The interesting thing is not the feature itself as many advertising networks have had this for a long time). But I’m asking myself how they acquire this information. Geo-location can more or less be determined by the user’s IP address. But how do they get the gender and age of a visitor?

The answer is very simple: Google gets it from their AdSense publishers. Large sites have agreed to pass their user information from their databases on to Google. They say it is going to happen in an aggregated form. But hey, if you use any of the Google services that require a login, they know who you are.

I wonder how much more Google will be able to do once the DoubleClick takeover has been finalized. Then they won’t even need the AdSense publishers to get all the user information anymore.

To me all this sounds like a move against Facebook. Facebook allows demographic targeting on their site, so far the Google content network doesn’t. Google is afraid of losing advertising dollars to Facebook and needs to come up with new features. See, competition is very healthy for the market.