Being the AdWords guru that you are, you already know why you’re not supposed to mix search and content campaigns when it comes to AdWords. Well you might be surprised to find that your search only campaign’s ads are being displayed on Parked Domains even though you have disabled the content network.

Have a look and see. Within your AdWords account, visit the tools section under the Campaign Management tab. Then click on the Site and Category Exclusion link. Select your search only campaign and you will see that under the Page types your ads have been showing for parked domains.

The question is whether you want this type of traffic on a search only campaign? If you have conversion tracking setup, you will be able to see if you are receiving any conversions from the Parked Domains. If you aren’t, you could easily exclude them all right from this interface.

If you’re wondering what a parked domain is, Google explain that a Parked Domain “is an undeveloped webpage belonging to a domain name registrar or domain name holder“. More like a Made for AdSense site if you ask me. If you are curious, you can run a placement performance report on this particular search campaign in order to see which sites Google are calling Parked Domains. You might be surprised at what you find. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Some of the Google AdWords accounts we’re handling are showing a useful new keywords feature.

Go into a campaign, and next to the Opportunities for improvement, you might see a link to Diagnose keywords:

When you click on the link, you are taken to the Ads Diagnostic Tool, where you can choose specific keywords, campaigns or ad groups, and can filter by Google domain, display language and user location.

There’s also this:

Option 2: Search Results Page URL

Use this option if you are concerned about a particular search results page that you believe should be showing one of your ads. Copy and paste the URL from the address bar on the search results page where your ad should be showing.

The results are extensive, and list keywords under reasons, for example:

The keyword phrase that you have entered has a low search volume and is not showing any of your ads.

We’re showing your ad only occasionally based on your budget.

Although your ad is showing, its rank is not high enough to place it on the first page of search results.

Your ad isn’t being shown for this keyword because there may be other ads that are ranked higher and have similar keywords.

It’s a fantastic tool but it’s a little slow. I just ran the tool in one campaign with just under 3,000 keywords, and it took about five minutes. Hopefully this will be improved with time, and personally I’d really like to see this fall under reports, where it could be scheduled.

I’ve often criticised Google for adding superfluous features, but this is an extremely useful addition. Well done Google!

The BBC News website are reporting that Last.fm are going to charge some of their subscribers for streaming.

“Internet radio and social music site Last.fm is to start charging listeners outside the UK, US, and Germany. Users outside those three countries will pay 3 euros [around $4] per month to listen to Last.fm Radio, the site’s streaming music service.”

The article is packed to bursting point with grinnables.

“The other content on the site, such as biographies, videos, charts, and “scrobbling” – the site’s musical profiling – will remain free for all.”

Last.fm is used to listen to music. A quick look at their main website page suggests that the no-pay-no-music accounts will be able to see what others are listening to, read the playlists they can’t listen to and see the names of all sort of new music they won’t be able to hear. Very tempting.

Lst.fm have been trying to make ends meet through advertising, but this clearly hasn’t worked. Perhaps they’re now trying to only target adverts at the three countries with the highest ROI?

Isn’t the point again being overlooked? Last week I put forward the idea that Facebook advertising doesn’t work because the people logging into their Facebook accounts aren’t interested in what’s being pushed at them. I just went into my Facebook account to test my idea on myself (it’s always good to have unbiased testing) and it took me a while to even find the ads.

I looked at a friend’s profile, and saw an ad for a bank I already use, an ad to get a flat stomach (I could just eat less) and an ad for a 1970 t-shirt. At least it’s available in all sizes.

And Facebook have an advantage over Last.fm, in that their site users are at least looking at their website pages in some sort of browsing mode, in theory. Last.fm’s users are there to listen to music.

Anyway, back to the BBC, quoting one of the Last.fm users, who thinks that the site should introduce a free quota service:

““This would allow people like me (who have been contributing to the Last.fm database for years now) not to feel completely abandoned. Don’t forget that last.fm is what it is because of us,” he said.” Right, that should work.

Don’t forget that Last.fm is what it is because of us?

What is it, aside from a loss maker?

Last.fm have been trying to create revenue with ads that don’t work. Spotify, on the other hand, interrupt their users with ads every few songs. For me the Spotify system works. There aren’t too many ads and their choice of music is staggering. If a competitor comes along tomorrow that offers the same range with no ads or fees, I’m not sure I’ll switch. The Spotify price is worth paying.

Yet I’m also intrigued that Spotify don’t display ads in their application. It could be because they understand I’m not going to notice or click them, but could it also be because their existing system – audio ads – can’t be tracked with the same accuracy?

This issue is a step backwards for advertising. The music industry’s refusal to adapt is incredible, and it’s going to start hurting everyone.

A quick glance at this morning’s BBC news website leaves me less happy than before I arrived. The main stories on the front page include murdered soldiers, a missing woman, falling education standards, a dam burst that killed dozens and the fact that steaming hot tea has been linked to cancer.

Pushing aside my mug of steaming hot tea, I realised that my mood had been affected by simply scanning this one single page. As a UK resident I don’t see advertising on the BBC news site, but if I did, it would be a great spot to push life insurance, health insurance or even holidays, but probably not tea.

If you’re selling software online, you’re selling solutions. People don’t buy software for the sake of it, they buy it to perform a function or solve a problem.

The person who’s fed up of their accounting software crashing isn’t looking for your company’s outlook on life. They’re not interested in pictures of your last team paintballing day, an analysis of what you’re hoping to achieve over the next twelve months or your company mission statement. They are looking for reassurance that your product will solve their problems, and will do everything that they need from it.

That’s it.

A 60 day trial version of your software is a good idea, so that they can start working with it immediately to see if it works for them.

Pointing out that your solution can import their data is a great idea, so as to lessen the pain of moving to a new application.

And offering them a competitive upgrade discount is a fantastic idea.

Throw in a 30-day ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee and they’ll probably reach for their wallets, more or less immediately.

I went to the BBC for news and got exactly what I wanted.

Will I get what I want from your company’s website?

If you are running an AdWords keyword campaign, using keyword types other than exact match and you’re not using negative keywords, you need to read this. If you are familiar with negative keywords you might find this blog post useful because I will explain how to identify new negative keywords that you never thought of.

What are negative keywords? They are your means of filtering out unwanted searches and impressions. For example, if you offer email software which is not free, you could setup a negative keyword -free so that anyone searching for free email software would not see your ads.

Why should you use negative keywords? The above example is an obvious reason why negative keywords are a good idea. It is also true that you could clearly state in your ads that your software is not free, however that does not stop anyone from clicking on your ads. This is why it is best to filter out any searches that you definitely find irrelevant to your campaign.

So how do you find negative keywords? While you are performing your initial keyword research, you should also have negative keywords on your mind. As you find keywords that fit your campaign, keep an eye out for keywords that do not fit, and consider adding them as negative keywords. For example, if you were doing keyword research for email software, you might run across keywords like email software for mac or email software for osx. If your software does not run on a mac, you would possibly want to add -mac and -osx as negative keywords.

Advanced negative keyword searching: Don’t think that the search for negative keywords is over. You need to always be on the lookout for negative keywords. Here are some great methods for finding new negative keywords:

1) AdWords search query report:
You can find this report under the Reports section of your AdWords account. A search query report will show you the keyword searches that are triggering your ads. If you have never seen this report before, don’t be alarmed. You will notice that many keywords that you’re currently not bidding on are in fact triggering the display of your ads. This is because you are either using phrase or broad match terms in your campaigns. This is why you need to constantly be on the lookout for new negative keywords.

You and Google have a similar agenda here. You each want more clicks. Yet you want more clicks because you want targeted traffic, while Google want more clicks because, well you know why. Google call their approach expanded broad match. Taking our example of the email software, you might bid on the term email software and not on the term email client software or windows email software. Expanded broad match will help identify those additional terms that might be useful.

Keep in mind that expanded broad match does not necessarily mean more. It could mean less. Google might go from your keyword email software to just email or just software. This is why, it is important to always be on the lookout for negative keywords. You could use these negative keywords -[email] or -[software] which will stop your ads from displaying for those specific searches.

2) Your raw web logs:
As you may have noticed, the AdWords search query report is useful but seems to leave out some data. This can be seen by the rows which say “other unique queries”. If you want to see what all those other unique queries are, have a look at your raw web logs. With many web log analysis tools you can setup filters to show you traffic having a particular URL parameter. Every AdWords ad in my campaigns use some form of URL tracking. For example, ?source=adwords This way I can group all that traffic in one report so that I can extract the keywords that are actually being searched on. This method is by far the most accurate form of negative keyword research that is available. You will be amazed at the traffic that Google actually sends you. Don’t just think negative keywords. This approach can be useful for finding new keywords that you are not currently bidding on.

3) The AdWords keyword tool:
You can find this under the Tools section of your AdWords account. Just enter your words or phrases into the search box and click on the Get keyword ideas button. Then once Google return some results, choose “Negative” from the drop-down menu under the match type column.

4) Google suggests:
This tool has been around for a long time but was recently made available to everyone on the home page of Google. Just start typing your keyword into Google and you should see a list of potential searches. Are some of those keywords relevant or irrelevant? You know what to do.

TechCrunch are running an article on Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.

The article claims that the expected drop in internet advertising revenues hasn’t just been caused by the recession, but because of three reasons:

Consumers don’t trust advertising.

Consumers don’t need advertising.

And this is something new?

I remember when my parents bought our first VCR. It was a huge noisy box, and the ‘remote’ control was attached by a 10 foot cable. We used the video recorder a lot, and while I remember fast-forwarding the adverts (at triple the speed!) I don’t remember fast-forwarding the recorded programs so that I could watch the adverts.

When we see, hear or read an ad that makes an impressive claim, as most do, we don’t automatically assume that the claim is correct and run out to buy the product.

And would you complain if your TV viewing wasn’t interrupted by ads?

The issue of whether we actually need ads is slightly more complicated. Consumers may feel that they don’t need to have product information pushed at them, but the fact is that many of their magazines, TV programs and favourite websites need the ads to exist. If advertising truly dried up overnight, so too would much of the content they support. And if consumers were give the choice to either have ads or pay a monthly fee, which do you think most would choose?

The other issue to consider is the context and means of delivery. There are after all ads, damned ads and relevant ads.

Google AdWords is the obvious example. The person searching at Google should find precisely what they’re looking for in the ads, and the amount of revenue generated by AdWords suggests that the model works for all involved.

So in the case of AdWords, consumers do trust, want and need the advertising. It not only doesn’t interrupt them, it assists them. At the right time, in the right place.

Every day brings another prediction of The Death Of something. Advertising is adapting and will continue to do so. Product placement in movies, tv programs and video games is just the beginning. Watch this space.

I assume that by now you have a Twitter account.

And I assume that you’re following me – http://twitter.com/thedavecollins

I also assume that you’ve noticed the ads that are being displayed. Maybe you haven’t. They’re small, discrete, easy to miss, and free.

Apparently the ‘advertisers’ being displayed there aren’t paying for their ad spots yet, but the countdown has probably begun for Twitter to begin making money. Gasp – how dare they?

Let’s not dwell on the fact that these adless ads look unnervingly similar to AdWords ads. The question is whether they’re going to work.

Assuming you have a Facebook account, how often do you click on their ads? My guess is never, or almost never.

Why? Because when you go to Facebook, you’re only there for one thing. To engage with your friends; to see what they’re up to, look at their new pictures and maybe to have a quick poo fight with them. But you’re in a different mode to when you surf the web. And yes I hate that word too, but please bear with me.

I’m not yet sure whether we’re in a different mode when we use Twitter, but we appear to be. When people view your Twitter profile and click on the link to your website, they usually do so to get a feel for who you are. And I’m guessing that a lot of people do a lot of clicking in Twitter, so perhaps there is a mode of Twitter surfing – Twurfing?

So will the new Twads (you get the idea) work? My guess is no. They’re a little too discrete, and I expect to see them change, move and grow over the coming months. Twitter won’t introduce paid ads until they know they work, but when they do, we may actually see today’s big thing generate revenue. How quaint.

I’ve been using the new version of Internet Explorer for the past couple of days and have formulated a few very initial impressions.

First and foremost, IE8 is definitely a nice improvement over its predecessor.  It is faster, more user-friendly and boasts a number of very useful new features.

Among the best new features that I’ve discovered thus far:

• Accelerators are task shortcuts that are enabled when you highlight text on a web page.  The ‘accelerators’ located within IE8 allow you to automatically perform several tasks using the highlighted text including enter it as a search query into a number of different search engines, map it (assuming the highlighted text includes a geographic location), add it to an email or blog, translate it and several other options. You can also search for additional accelerators to suit your specific needs.

• Quick tabs allows you to view thumbnails of all the pages you have open in the browser. This is especially helpful if you have many tabs open at the same time and have forgotten the exact content of one or more of the tabs.

• Tab Groups is very handy when multiple pages from the same site are open at the same time. IE8 automatically color-codes those related tabs so you can easily see which tabs contain similar content.  In addition, when a new tab is opened from an existing tab, the new tab is placed directly to the right of the original tab so that related tabs are kept together.

I still have a lot of exploring to do but overall I think Microsoft has vastly improved Internet Explorer and has provided a number of new features which will enhance users’ web-browsing experience.

My subscription to The Economist magazine is set to expire at the end of the month, so I went to their website for some pricing information. Being in a slightly curious mood, I wanted to see how the UK pricing compared to the US.

To my surprise, the prices were almost identical at around $1.99 per issue, at least if you went for the best possible deal, which happened to not be the ‘best offer’ for the UK subscribers.

Yet what surprised me more was the different approach taken to presenting the information for each country.

Take a look at the UK offer:

The assumption appears to be that a UK subscriber has the mathematical ability to work out for themselves how much each issue will cost, yet not quite enough to see that the ‘best offer’ might not be the best offer at all.

If I were to subscribe for three years using the ‘best offer’, I would pay a total of £309. Yet the standard three year subscription costs only £216.

Compare this to the US offer:

The US offer is a good example of more is less. Each offer includes a bewildering amount of information, yet doesn’t say how long the subscriptions actually last. The magazine also assumes that US subscribers cannot work out how much each issue costs, and has to spell out precisely how many issues they’ll receive (four trial plus 98 additional = 102) unlike their more intelligent UK counterparts.

Interestingly, the UK options contain far less information, yet the costs and savings are highlighted, making it clearer.

Take the last option for each country, and look at what each contains.

US: Number of trial issues, number of additional issues, total number of issues, cost per issue, total cost, percentage saved.

UK: Lenth of subscriptions, total cost, percentage saved.

The question is why?

The most likely reason is local norms. If subscriptions are normally presented this way in the US, then it makes sense for The Economist to conform to what their subscribers expect. And in the case of the US, there may also be legal issues to consider.

A few points to think about.

1) Selling a subscription is simple. The subscriber pays for a number of issues and receives them. The complexity only comes into effect through the vendor.

2) Most subscribers are a captive audience. They like the publication, they’ve already decided to purchase a subscription, and they won’t be put off by a few basic (or not so basic) choices.

3) The Economist can offer their mathematically savvy UK subscribers a ‘best offer’ that isn’t a best offer because they can get away with it. They can argue that it is the best offer if a person only wants a one-year subscription, and more importantly still, the people who do realise that another option is cheaper aren’t going to walk away in disgust. They’ll just choose the cheaper option, and probably feel good for outsmarting The Economist.

It’s also worth considering what they are really offering with their special rates. When comparing the offers, US readers can save $0.50 an issue, but is that actually tempting for them? Is a reader to The Economist really persuaded to subscribe because of a 50 cent saving? Probably not – but the 71% saving will be far more tempting.

I’d be intrigued to know which of the offers are the most popular. I suspect that the longest term offers are the winners, as I would think that most subscribers are looking for convenience. As a UK subscriber I know I can pay today and not have to worry about resubscribing until March 2012. The extra saving is just a little icing on the cake that further tips the scale. Convenience plus savings are an effective incentive.

I’ve just been trying the latest beta of Google Chrome (2.0.169.1) and it’s noticeably faster than the ‘old’ general release, which was the fastest browser that I’d ever used.

For the software user, speed is a relative idea. Upgrade your Windows XP from 512 MB to a Gigabyte and you’ll see a serious improvement in how the OS and your software respond. Wait a week and you won’t notice it any more.

The previous version of Chrome that I used was much faster than Firefox, but once I got used to the speed, there wasn’t much to impress me, which is why I had it on my system, but only for testing purposes.

What makes this version of Chrome different is that the speed is really noticeable. If I use it for five minutes then switch back to Firefox, Firefox actually seems slow.

So am I about switch to Chrome as my browser of choice? No. Chrome are fixing a problem that I don’t have. Ask me to draw up a list of every single issue that I have with Firefox, and slow speed won’t be on there.

I’m using Firefox because it’s pleasant to use, reliable, configurable, and does everything I want a web browser to do. I’m only going to switch to a different browser if it does something that is (1) different, (2) useful and (3) regularly required. It’ll also have to do everything that Firefox does, and do it at least as well, if not better.

Dangling a cool new feature that I don’t need might convince me to use a new plugin, but I’m not going to go through the pain of transferring my settings and data to a new browser and learn how to use it. Offer me a seriously useful feature with benefits that make me sit up, however, and it’s probably goodbye Firefox.

Scratching an itch is immensely satisfying, yet scratching for the sake of it is unrewarding. Do it too much and it’ll start to hurt.