Elinor Mills of CNET News.com has reported that Google will be announcing plans to allow advertisers to block certain IP addresses from clicking on their ads.

From the Story :

Google, king of pay-per-click advertising, will allow advertisers to specify which Internet Protocol addresses–numerical addresses assigned to individual computers–will be blocked from receiving the ads. The move is designed to stop rivals from using click fraud to eat through a competitor’s advertising budget and to prevent them from bidding on the ad’s keyword for the purpose of using it in their own ads.

Also beginning in March, Google plans to give advertisers more information on how much money they are saving by filtering out fraudulent clicks, a Google spokesman said. Before July, Google will provide a standardized interface for advertisers to report click fraud and request investigations.

Advertisers with good analytics or click fraud prevention softwares can easily identify fraudulent IP addresses. The ability to block these IP addresses will definitely help in reducing click fraud and increase the ROI.

Aravindhan

Tags : Google Adsense, Click Fraud

Search marketing conference is to be held on Australia by Search Summit and Search Engine Room. Google webmaster central is heading the conference and the topics to be covered are bot obedience, site architecture, building Sitemaps and also a fun session from Adam Lasnik. The conference is on March 1,2 by Search Summit and March 21,22 by Search Engine Room.

Know more on Google Webmastercentral blog

Mark

SEO Tags : Search Marketing, Google Webmastercentral, Search Engine Room, Search Summit.

The Quality score column was launched by Google, the column gives you an approximate idea of the keywords you use. Great, ok, poor are the status given for each keyword. Login your Adcenter account, enter into your campaign and then into an adgroup. Select your keyword tab and click customize columns. The Quality score column will display the details.

Great - higher relevance and minimum bid is required,Ok - not upto the level and moderate bid is required and poor - totally irrelevant and the keyword can be removed instead of high bidding. Know more about Quality Score.

Quality Score column seem to be very much helpful for the advertisers targeting limited number of keywords.

Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Google Adcenter, Quality Score ratings 

Quality sore of a keyword mainly depends on the key term relavance. How much is your ad relevant to the keyword which is entered as a serch term is more important. In Adwords help center I came accross a question “What is a Quality score and how is it calculated?” from which the main factors influencing Quality score are

Performance variables like keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, overall historical keyword performance with Google, and even the user experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad. We put all of these factors and more together to create a Quality Score

And the formula used for the calculation of Quality score was also given.

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)*

*Where the interactions between the Quality Score variables change as we continue to refine how to measure and define quality in AdWords.

These factors according to Google affects your Quality score. The quality score is likely to be changed everytime when the relavance factors are affected. Know how your Quality score is used. Eventhough the formula changes often these factors will always have a impact in your Google rankings.
Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Google Adwords, Quality score calculation, Keyword relevance

Last week, Alexa has enhanced their Traffic Report with finer geographic details. Now we can find out the percentage (%) of the traffic from various geographic locations.

Also Alexa provides the break up of the rank of the site in different countries.

Along with the above data and with a few more tweaks, Alexa Traffic Report is much better than it was earlier.

DSarathy.

SEO Tags : Alexa, Alexa Traffic Report, Traffic Ranking

Google states that Ads provide valuable information when they are highly relevant and targeted to a user’s query. In order to serve high quality ads to users, Google use the Quality Score to set minimum bids for keywords based on keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, the historical performance of the keyword on Google, and the user experience on the ad’s landing page.

Higher Quality Score Keywords are rewarded with a lower minimum bid and Low quality keywords receive higher minimum bids so it costs less for higher Quality score ads to be displayed in Google searches. High quality ads are not only more relevant , but can also improve the ROI by lowering advertising costs.

Quality Score column will be added to Google Adwords that shows the minimum bid for all of the keywords within an ad group as well as a Great, OK, or Poor quality label for your keyword. The quality label can be used to get a quick overview of the quality of the keywords, or look at the minimum bid for a granular understanding of Quality Score. Google Ads Quality team says,

First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data.Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads.

Lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads will improve the quality of ads served by Google. Choosing a keyword that is more specific to the product or service that you offer or editing your ad text to make it more relevant to the keyword is what Google recommends before you simply raise your minimum bid. Related Information from Google’s official post regarding updates.

Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Quality Score Algorithm

Search Engine Marketing(SEM) spend in North America was $9.4 billion in 2006, up 63 percent over the $5.75 billion spend on search in 2005, writes Kevin Newcomb of SearchEngineWatch, citing data from Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization’s(SEMPO’s) “State of Search Engine Marketing 2006″ report. The spending is projected to grow to $18.6 billion by 2011 in North America.

According to SEMPO, 86 percent ($8 billion)of total spend was towards paid search and 12 percent ($1.1 billion) was towards search engine optimization. More than 76 percent of surveyed advertisers said they used search engine optimization and 71 percent said they used paid search.

Google adwords continues to dominate and it is being used by 96 percent of respondents.Yahoo was second most popular and used by 86 percent respondents. MSN was used by 68 percent respondents, up from the 29 percent of respondents doing so in 2005.

There was also a shift towards search marketing from other types of advertising. The hardest hit was print advertising, with 20 percent of respondents reporting a shift;direct mail at 16 percent; TV advertising at 13 percent; and print newspaper advertising at 13 percent.

Aravindhan

Tags : SEMPO, SEM, SEO

Concept of Yahoo for advertisers lately was higher bidding gives the higher position for the ads. Many variable terms like “Quality ” has now been added to the Yahoo search after Feb.5th. This move gathered many praises and criticisms from many advertisers and searchers. It has become a big deal for advertisers now calculate their position in Yahoo search but searchers get more relevant results and was highly benifited with this change.

Yahoo will also have the same relevance as that of Google and will be more helpful for users to search through.

One more news from Yahoo to include today, Yahoo Search Builder back in August released Yaoo search Builder. Many issues came with the search box provided. Now Yahoo has introduced “super-narrow” search box option, with 192 pixels, and will be more helpful for users those provide Yahoo search in their websites.
Mark

Tags : Panama, Yahoo Search Builder, Relavance

Click Forensics, LLC is the leading provider of third-party technology and services that help online advertisers, agencies and search providers to better identify pay per click fraud. The company runs the top independent click fraud detection service in the industry, the Click Fraud Network , which monitors online advertising campaigns for click fraud free of charge.Click Forensics also provides an enterprise-class solution to help advertisers with campaigns of 100,000 clicks or more per month to track click fraud.

Click Forensics report has announced that the overall industry average click fraud rate was 14.2 percent. Google denies it and says the bad clicks are just fraction of the percent. Also Google said that Click Forensics doesn’t not know how to measure click fraud. Many had given their own comments and have supported Google. Comment your views.

Mark

Tags : Click Fraud, Click Forensics Report, Google

A few days ago; there was a discussion in Search Engine Land regarding the Google Custom Search Engine. Barry Schwartz made a mention about the CSE which he had made to search SEO / SEM forums. MarkZZ of ZZMarketing commented that he had created a similar CSE for the same purpose. I replied MarkZZ saying that we at RankQuest had launched a service called SEOLens on Nov 17th 2006, more than 3.5 months before.

To me it is not the question of who invents? Or who’s idea it is? It is only an answer of who had executed well to win the hearts of the users / customers.

DSarathy.

SEO Tag : SEOLens, Google CSE, Custom Search Engine, SEO, SEM