In most countries I’ve been to I can see advertisement for alcohol everywhere in the offline world. Most major sports events are sponsored by beer brands. It seems that Google want their share of the advertising budgets of those companies.

This move also gives retailers a chance to sell good wine and spirits via AdWords. These can be luxury items with high profit margins for vendors. I suspect this results in good bid prices and higher revenues for Google.

Tell me when you see some ads with the Budweiser frogs or the Jäger deer.

The cool thing is that you can customize the background and use your own pictures. But in order to make that work you have to be logged in and let Google collect all sorts of information about on the side.

I still like the Bing backgrounds better though. What do you think?

What would Google do? What did Google do? Go mobile.

Google call it “view through to conversion”. And as far as I understand them, this is going to be available on the content network only.

They are using a 30-day cookie for postview. I hope nobody optimizes based on these numbers

I can understand that they want to improve their user experience and get rid of affiliate spam. However, with this new rule they also keep advertisers from absolutely legitimate testing.

For instance many advertisers test example.com vs. uk.example.com vs. example.co.uk vs. example.net. I’ve seen huge changes in click-through rates just by choosing the right domain for a specific audience.

And when it comes to mobile ads, advertisers would like to be able to test whether m.example.com or example.mobi or even just example.com generates the highest click-through rate.

With the new policy in place all these tests are going to be outlawed. I suppose they don’t want people to create multiple ad groups per keyword or use multiple AdWords accounts. But at the minute I think these are the only options.

I’ve just been forwarded an email from a partner who is doing a lot of PPC in the mobile content industry. Google will require mobile content providers and their affiliates to put the price and billing interval for subscription services in the actual AdWords ads. Quote:

In the coming weeks [...] we will require text and image ads for these services to display the price and billing interval (such as per week or per month) in the ad text, e.g. ‘£5.99/month’. We will no longer accept text or image ads that don’t contain the price and billing interval when promoting mobile content services. When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy.

The guy is seriously scared and concerned about his income now. For more than five years he has been living off mobile content stuff as an affiliate. The only advise I can give him is to move on to other niches. Mobile content has become a somewhat outdated product anyways. I wonder for how much longer people will actually be willing to pay money for this.

Anyways, I just wanted to take this instance as an occasion to reiterate three fundamental principles in affiliate marketing:

1. Never ever ever rely on Google alone. It’s never good to bet all your money on one horse. If you want to generate additional profit from AdWords campaigns, that’s fine. But the core of your business must be independent of the big G.
2. Do not copy but innovate. Focus on niches that are up-and-coming and not the ones that are going down the hill. This way you will generate much more sustainable profit.
3. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. Invest in new ideas and test them to prepare yourself for the future.

Here’s a screen shot of the reports section of the AdWords interface. Unfortunately it’s in German because it was sent to me by a friend. But you can figure out yourself that it covers click-to-call (telephone), video and audio ads. Click on the image to see the full version.

Internet Explorer

The current version 7 of IE blocks all third-party cookies by default. That means that pages loaded via frames cannot drop cookies at all if their domains are not equipped with a proper P3P policy. Many advertisers haven’t taken care of that, so all the iFrame affiliates will have more and more difficulties.

Internet Explorer 8 is going to introduce a private browsing mode. Cookies are not rejected right away but are treated as session cookies and deleted when the user closes the browser window. Some people refer to it as the “porn mode” but it was originally designed for the use of the internet on somebody else’s machine. Another new feature is giving users the ability to delete all cookies except those of bookmarked websites.

Mozilla Firefox

The current Firefox does not block third-party cookies. But it’s very easy to tell the browser to delete all cookies on closure. And a lot of people actually do this. Also, there are many plugins that filter out banners and cookies today already. The funny thing is that sometimes these impressions are still counted by the delivering ad networks even though nothing is being displayed.

Google Chrome

This sucker is quite ironic. It allows users to switch to a “stealth” mode making it difficult for ad networks to re-target ads and track conversions. However, the browser software itself collects data and passes it back to Google. As a result Chrome only allows Google ads to work, the other ad networks can be blocked. In my mind Chrome is the biggest spyware ever, nicely packaged I have to admit. I hope they’ll get sued over this.

Solution for Online Advertising Networks

For many years the effect of rejected/deleted cookies has been unkown. Now we finally have a profound data basis. AffiliateFuture, an affiliate network based in the UK, observed a 7% increase in tracked conversions after they introduced flash cookies. I think with the introduction of new browser generations the effect will be much higher.

Online advertising networks can’t rely on traditional browser cookies alone anymore. They must also incorporate technologies such as finger-print tracking and the use of flash cookies. Not one of these methods alone will work. They have to be used simultaneously.

Mobile Tracking

A lot of browsers on mobile phones do not support cookies, Javascript and Flash. So none of these methods can be used to track well on the mobile internet. That’s why for example Google’s conversion tracking is useless for mobile ad campaigns. The way to go on mobile is server tracking on the side of the advertiser and batch imports to the ad network.

Installation

I can only speak for my Windows Vista machine. You download a small executable file which then loads more data from the internet. What I didn’t like is that the damn thing attempts to install an autostart routine on your computer. Thanks to Spybot that didn’t happen to me. However, it managed to place an icon on the desktop and the taskbar without asking me. Looks like Google are using double standards to push their own product.

Rendering

Even though it uses a different browser engine the appearance of all sites I’ve checked so far hasn’t changed. I also have the impression that pages are rendered and displayed even faster than on my Firefox 3. JavaScript works fine and Flash objects played without any problem. But Java applets didn’t load. I’m told to install a plugin. Seriously, most people would give the browser a miss here.

Plugins

Speaking of plugins, I can’t find how to install them. Apparently they’re not part of the beta release yet. I’m interested to find out whether we will be able to use our beloved XUL-based Firefox plugins.

User Experience

It’s modern and minimalistic, something that’s generally good. However, Chrome got rid of the traditional “File, Edit …” menus and offers very few buttons. There isn’t even a print button. I don’t have a problem using the good old Ctrl+P but I think a lot of people will struggle here. Conservative users will also have problems creating and accessing bookmarks.

Conclusion

The current version is nice for geeks to play with but nothing for the majority of Google’s user base. Firefox still rules.

However, I decided to remove Google Analytics from all my sites step-by-step. Why? Google won’t delete your websites’ data if you unsubscribe from Google Analytics. I hate data being collected and stored outside my sphere of influence. Using Google Analytics is like forwarding your server log files to your competition. I’d like to be in control of everything, especially when it comes to sensitive data.

As a Google Analytics alternative I’m using Piwik, an open-source web analytics package. It’s a free PHP/MySQL application that runs on standard LAMP servers. The front end consists of a fancy Ajax interface. The software also offers an API so that you can export data in a customized manner or put live statistics on your website. One Piwik installation can collect data for unlimited websites too. Seriously, it looks like Piwik is the way to go.

A while back Google changed their editorial guidelines and introduced special rules for the promotion of mobile content such as ringtones, mobile games and mobile applications. Prime targets of the new rules are promoters of subscription services. Under the new guidelines Google requires them to display the price and the billing interval prominently on the page where the user enters personal information (such as a phone number or an email address). In addition to that, the page needs to be equipped with a checkbox that the user has to activate.

After the introduction of these new guidelines some advertisers and affiliates got slapped. However, I think many of the bad apples haven’t been found yet. That’s why Google simply switched the burden of proof. It’s not the Google employees that need to scan their AdWords system for active phony offers. Now any Google ads and keywords promoting mobile content need to be reviewed and confirmed by Google to be running.

That’s sort of how they handle ads for pharmaceuticals. The difference is that pharmacies can submit an ID and they’re exempt. For mobile content advertisers every single keyword, ad and landing page has to be approved individually. I’m sure Google are working on an algorithm to automate this. But for now I would say it’s a manual process.

Google’s main concern is the user experience. Trust translates into traffic and yields AdWords revenue. It seems they prefer not to accept money from advertisers that run rip-off campaigns in order to secure the core of their business: trust.

Google is following a long-term strategy and can live without the ringtone industry very well. On the other hand, most mobile content advertisers are after short-term profit and depend highly on AdWords for instant traffic. I think we’re starting to see how Google is using its power to take down a whole industry.

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.

Affiliate marketers can use it to find hot trends, promising niches, but also diminishing markets. Let me show you some examples (all data for the United Kingdom):

“presents” and “gifts”:

It’s no surprise that people look for these terms in December.

Facebook vs. MySpace:

Facebook is extremely hot in the UK at the minute whereas MySpace is becoming old.

The fall of “ringtones”:

Mobile content is not nearly as popular as it used to be.

So if you’re thinking about a new project, do your research on Google Trends. I’m not saying that you can’t be successful in declining markets. However, if you want to create something really big, you need to create something that people are interested in.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Für die etablierten Affiliate-Netzwerke sehe in Googles neuem Pay-per-Action allerdings keine all zu große Gefahr. Wenn Affiliates bei Google Adwords Traffic einkaufen, müssten sie ihren Google Conversion Code beim Merchant unterbringen. Mit anderen Worten, eine Result-Seite würde mit hunderten oder tausenden Conversion Codes gefüllt werden müssen. Ich glaube das tut sich kein Programmbetreiber an. Es mag sein dass sie das für eine beschränkte Anzahl von Top-Affiliates tun. Die große Masse wird allerdings weiterhin über die klassichen Affiliate-Netzwerke laufen müssen.

Meine Gründe warum die Technik von DoubleClick schlecht ist:

1. Das ganze System läuft nur auf Pacific Time. Wenn ein deutscher Advertiser seine Reports nach mitteleuropäischer Zeit generiert, hat er viel Spaß mit dem Vergleich der DoubleClick-Zahlen.
2. Es ist alles immer noch Pixel-basiert. DoubleClick hat bis heute kein vernünftiges System zur Backend-Synchronisierung von Sales.
3. DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) basiert auf einer unausgereiften XSLT-Technologie. Die beliebteste Browser-Funktion, das Betätigen des Zurück-Knopfes, ist tabu. Ansonsten verliert man sämtliche Eingaben. Wie soll ein Nicht-Techie damit arbeiten?
4. Der Support ist formalisiert wie bei einer Behörde. Das Lösen von Problemen kann Wochen dauern.