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I wonder if Google is as green and carbon friendly as they would like you to think. With their latest move in censoring Water4Gas.com and ebooks and web sites promoting any such product that uses water to give your car better gas mileage, they look rather suspect. Believe it or not I received and email the other day from the powers that be at Adwords letting advertisers know that they will no longer be allowed to run these types of ads in their pay per click network.

What’s the reason given for this business hampering move on Google’s part? The email stated they won’t be allowing this kind of advertising because of customer feedback and “business considerations.” What!? Business considerations? Who is Google in bed with on this one? What about the business considerations of the people trying to make a living selling ebooks and information such as this now that they don’t have access to approximately 25% of the world’s online advertising market?

This is exactly why I have a problem, as do thousands of others, with the way Google operates. They have their tentacles into nearly everything that has anything to do with being “on the grid” and they can just arbitrarily decide they don’t like your product and immediately 25% of all online advertising is no longer available to you. And you have absolutely no recourse. I don’t know what percentage of their business an operation like Water4Gas.com gets from Google Adwords, but I assume it’s a lot since they are a product sold through Clickbank. Any way you look at it, Google’s decision will have a devastating impact on this business and others like it.

As with any product, there will be people who think something like this is an outright scam and others that benefit from it. Products like this one are legitimate and after talking with an engineer friend of mine who has actually built some of these systems, he assures me they do work. I can understand where people may have a problem with Water4Gas.com because what you are actually buying is an ebook showing you how to build one of these systems, not any physical parts as the landing page kind of makes it look. You have to get the parts and assemble the kit yourself, but it does work.

Regardless of what you think of water for gas type products, a decision such as this from the mothership Google should trouble the hell out of you. Now that Google is in the affiliate business with their acquisition of DoubleClick, what product, advertising strategy, ad network or affiliate network is next on their hit list?

In 30 seconds anyone can go to ClickBank.com and find several products that are ripoffs, but look them up by searching with their domain name and you will find plenty of ads on Google. Or look up anything related to making money in real estate, mlm’s, online, trading stocks, whatever, you name it and I’ll bet you can find someone running a scam and advertising it via Adwords. We all must have some discernment in the purchases we make. If you don’t know that by now I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to show you. Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Google has way too much power. When are they going to protect us from themselves?

I know it exists somewhere. That small, yet butterfly effect straw, placed on the unsuspecting camel’s back inviting closer scrutiny, congressional hearings, government intervention or a huge class action into the affairs of the mothership Google, is out there. All the little flags keep popping up, one more business ruined, many more cases of click fraud, one more tweak in the algorithm that damages commerce, one last utter absurdity that drives someone important to the brink of insanity.

Or maybe it will be the one hack or mistake that releases too much personal data or one sensitive government database indexed and opened to the public in an attempt to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and the tool we use every day to find information in this vast library known as the internet will get the colonoscopy they deserve.

If I weren’t so anti-government, and the US government weren’t so inept at what they do, I’d be championing the cause. Why? Because Google is an unyielding monolith that exists only to organize that which has already been created and is working as diligently as possible to mold the world’s information and our access to it as they see fit.

If you think the notion of a Supreme Star Chamber of 9 black robed men and women deciding law for an entire nation seems absurd, what must you think of a single company that controls nearly 50% of what the entire world searches for online and the order in which they are able to find it? And what must you think of that same company who takes in 25% of all advertising revenue spent online, yet doesn’t have to clearly define what they actually expect of their advertisers? What must your average legislation writing bureaucrat think of it?

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m on a rant. Another run in with the absurdity that is Google Adwords is the cause. I often wonder why I continue to even try to to business with a lifeless algorithm and equally lifeless canned responses to email inquiries once I actually make contact with a real human. Oh, that’s right, I do business with them because they’re virtually the only business in town.

The latest judgment by the almighty algorithm came as I was attempting to set up a PPC campaign in two different Ad Groups, bidding on nearly identical keywords, sending traffic to the exact same landing page in both Ad Groups. Not similar pages, the same page, with the same url. The only difference was the tracking sub-id so I can tell which keyword is converting. Both groups ran for 5 minutes and I get an email alert from Adwords telling me my landing page url is wrong in the second Ad Group. No, it’s not wrong, how could it be, it’s the same url? Please, I’m losing my mind, can I get a human being to look at this.

So in an attempt to humor the lifeless entity disapproving of my advertising, I switched the .us ending of the url to a .com and get another 5 minutes to run my ads until they’re again switched off for the same reason. I then switch back the url to the correct .us suffix thinking that maybe a human will take a look at it this time and only end up getting another 5 minutes of ad time before the email once again lets me know of the supposed url error. At this point I’m livid enough to start swearing, drinking and writing bad checks and have to walk away from my desk before I end up on YouTube in the next computer and office destroying video frenzy.

I find it beyond amazing that it takes only 10 minutes to disapprove my ads twice with the effect of shutting down half of my advertising, but it takes 3 days to answer an email inquiring into what is an obvious error. Of course there will be no easy resolution as the first email I see hopefully from Adwords tomorrow will be the usual nonsense response that won’t even deal with the issue and instead will be a rehash of some policy found buried deep in the bowels of Google’s Adwords help files.

After 3 or 4 emails traded between myself and the helpmeister from somewhere near the molten core of our planet I’ll probably just decide that’s it’s better to do my own landing page and be done with the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just spend my money at Yahoo instead.

As reported by JohnChow.com and originally on ProBlogger.net as of Nov 15th the folks at Google Adsense have made the clickable portion of their ads smaller by a huge degree. As you can see above, the title and the url are now the only clickable portions of Adsense as opposed to the entire area around the ad.

Many people are lamenting this change and finally throwing in the towel with respect to using Adsense as a source of revenue for their blog or websites. Bloggers such as John Chow are commenting that this new change will “bitch slap” your earnings and many of the comments on his post about this reflect that same sentiment.

I’m taking exactly the opposite outlook as I believe this this will eventually turn out to earn publishers more money. Here’s why: when I run an Adwords campaign I never use the content network option and I’m assuming many smart Adwords advertisers don’t either. Why, because the traffic and conversions are just plain crappy. Even though you can have different, and lower, bids on the content network, the traffic is not as quality as when people searching for specific keywords through search engines. That’s why I only target Google’s search network when running Adwords. It’s hard enough making money with Adwords!

The whole point of Google making this move is to benefit their advertisers which in turn will eventually benefit those that use Adsense as a revenue stream. It will work out this way because if Google can provide a better value to its advertisers there will be more money for publishers in the form of more cash per click and more advertisers willing to use the content network. It might take six months or so before the word gets out that Google’s content network might actually be a good value again, but it will eventually happen. Heck, I might even start using it again.

By the way, I haven’t noticed a drop in my click-thru rates at all since Google reduced the size of the clickzone on Adsense. Really, the only people who have to worry about this are those that run made for Adsense sites or people who are purposely trying to trick others into clicking on their ads.

Alan

Tags: google adsense, adwords, problogger, john chow, search network

Pay per click search marketing is a complete scam as Google and Yahoo run it. I find it truly amazing that Google and Yahoo both make the bulk of their revenue from something that so many people continue to lose money on.

That’s right, PPC advertising is a loser for most companies and individuals that use it.

I’m certainly not a big time player in the world of PPC, not with the $7,203.62 I’ve spent on Google Adwords in the last 3 years or so. But I have spent enough time, energy and money to know that making any money with the traditional bidding on keywords model is an extremely difficult task.  I’ve run more than 30 ad campaigns, totaling more than 100 ad groups and bid on more than 50,000 keywords to date and maybe, just maybe I’ve broken even. I certainly haven’t made any profit to speak of, and I’ll bet the average pay per click spender like myself, which numbers in the tens of thousands are in the same boat. 

One of the most egregious problems I see with PPC from Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing is that some advertisers are allowed to run apparently any kind of campaign they want, while the rest of the small time spenders are locked out of the game.

Here’s a great example:
I’ve been trying to run an ad campaign over at Yahoo promoting iPod downloads. Anything with the word iPod in it is subject to a review, so your campaign doesn’t start immediately. After three days of waiting, my reviewer at Yahoo informed me my ad needed to say I was promoting something that was iPod compatible. I complied and resubmitted my ads. Another review came back and said I was promoting a product that was not acceptable because Yahoo no longer allows advertising for P2P sites. Oh really, just take a look at a search for iPod movie downloads over at Yahoo and see what you find. There are at least 2 ads in this search that directly link to peer-to-peer file sharing sites and most of the rest are so-called review sites, which are scams, that link to these sites.

Somebody is obviously allowed to advertise these products, however it’s not me. Here’s part of the email I got back from the Yahoo person that reviewed my ad campaign.

“Advertisers are not able to advertise their website if it promotes P2P file sharing any longer. At one point, we did allow this type of website to advertise on the Yahoo! network. We have recently revised this guideline, so the sites you still see advertising may not have been removed as of yet. We will submit a sales complaint to have our editors review their site to ensure they are abiding by our guidelines. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.”

Does that sound like a big fat lie or what? As long as the playing field isn’t level and some advertisers get special privileges such as this and Yahoo and Google continue to lie about this, there will be black hat affiliate marketers and SEO’s trying to buck the system. Power to them!

Alan

Tags: ppc scam, google adwords, yahoo search marketing, black hat seo, affiliate marketing