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IN THE FEBRUARY ISSUE...
Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land, 2/05/07
The Super Bowl is known by advertisers as one of the biggest marketing events of the year, but do search ads play a part of that? Reprise Media released this years Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard that explains that although there were improvements from last year, this year was still lacking in terms of integrating their offline and online ad efforts.
The study also claims that marketers used poor call-to-actions in their ads and lacked in driving users to interact with their brands online. So how did each advertiser rate? The PDF score card puts SalesGenie.com, Snickers and GoDaddy in the touchdown box, but Ford, Doritos and T-Mobile in the fumble category.
Speaking of Doritos, they teamed up with Yahoo to hold the Crash the Super Bowl. They just announced Wes Phillips (age 22) and Dale Backus (age 21) are the winners of the promotion. You can see all five finalists and the winners at http://www.crashthesuperbowl.com/.
Finally, if you missed any of the commercials, Gary Price notes that Ask.com has a Smart Answer for super bowl commercials.
WHY THIRD-PARTY CLICK FRAUD ESTIMATES DON'T ADD UP
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, Google, 01/31/07
I want to thank everyone who has written to me with questions since I started blogging about the work we do at Google to protect advertisers against click fraud. I'll be catching up on some of those questions in the next week, but today I want to address some of the more recent items in the media on click fraud rates.
There was a press release yesterday from ClickForensics stating that their quarterly measure of click fraud for Q4 was 14.2%. They also stated that this was the year's "highest level" (up from 14.1% in Q2) and that the click fraud rate for search engine content networks was 19.2%. This morning there was a competing press release from Incremental Advantage and several other click fraud firms, stating that "Click Fraud Cost Internet Advertisers $666 Million in 2006".
On a basic level, these numbers are much higher than what we see at Google, and are not at all representative of the actual statistics of our network. Most savvy advertisers and industry pundits are already aware of this (see "Why We Can't Trust Click Fraud Numbers" in yesterday's WebProNews), and generally haven't paid much attention to these estimates for a while.
However, these stats are still out there and there are some things everyone should keep in mind when reviewing them. Specifically:
- Many
third-parties have not even counted clicks properly
We did an analysis of Click Forensics and other click fraud consultants back in August 2006 to see why their numbers were so inflated (see "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports" on the Google AdWords Blog). We found serious flaws in their counting of clicks - a more fundamental issue than their counting of click fraud. They were making basic counting mistakes and inflating the number of clicks by an average of 40%. The source of this problem is incorrectly counting page views – from users browsing through an advertiser's site – as clicks. - Inflated
click counts result in even more inflated "click fraud" estimates
This over-counting problem results in an even more dramatic inflation of click fraud estimates, in fact consistently classifying an advertiser's best users (the ones spending time browsing their site) as fraudulent. As a result, conclusions based on this data are flawed and the small differences in overall percentages they report are not meaningful. And instead of protecting their businesses against click fraud, advertisers can actually harm their businesses by acting on recommendations from these reports. - Even
if they fixed those problems, they're not actually measuring click fraud
Even if they were counting clicks correctly, they are still trying to measure only activity (attempted click fraud) and not advertiser impact (actual click fraud). That is, even if they corrected the basic engineering and accounting problems contributing to the above problems, they would still be counting clicks we filter (and do not charge to advertisers) in their click fraud estimates. They admit this. - Industry
metrics (in any area of our business) are not necessarily the same as
Google's metrics
The advertisers in their sample are part of many different networks and not all of these networks have invested as heavily as Google in click fraud protection. - ROI
on the content network is the same as it is on search
We know there is a more direct incentive for fraud on the content network and we do much more to protect advertisers, ban bad publishers, and improve ROI through SmartPricing discounts. As a result, average ROI on our content network is nearly the same as on Google.com. Yes, you read that right. ROI is the same on average - and not by accident, but because we automatically provide discounts to advertisers to make it so.
The key point here is not that their numbers are "too high". The point is that their data collection methods are inherently flawed and any resemblance their numbers could have to reality would be coincidental. Even so, given that they are not measuring click fraud (see point #3), they apparently don't intend their numbers to reflect reality.
Click fraud protection is something we take very seriously at Google, and it requires a high level of scientific rigor to do well. It's frustrating to see basic mistakes being made by firms selling "additional protection" to AdWords advertisers - in essence, charging them money for advice which can actually hurt their businesses. I've spoken with many firms and a number of academics interested in this area, and the ones who are investing in serious R&D efforts recognize the limitations of their data and analysis and have not been focusing on publicizing unsupportable and flawed numbers such as the above. We're very supportive of those efforts (and in scientific research in this area in general) and we'll continue to work closely with them.
For more information about Google's actual metrics, you can see my previous posts here and here.
A QUICK WORD ABOUT GOOGLEBOMBS
Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, 01/25/07
We wanted to give a quick update about "Googlebombs." By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you'd like to get more details about this topic, read on.
First off, let's back up and give some background. Unless you read all about search engines all day, you might wonder "What is a Googlebomb?" Technically, a "Googlebomb" (sometimes called a "linkbomb" since they're not specific to Google) refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else's site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries, because the lack of any relevant results for that phrase is part of why a Googlebomb can work. One of the earliest Googlebombs was for the phrase "talentless hack," for example.
People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.
The next natural question to ask is "Why doesn't Google just edit these search results by hand?" To answer that, you need to know a little bit about how Google works. When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand. Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages. We wouldn't claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted. But if you are aware of other potential Googlebombs, we are happy to hear feedback in our Google Web Search Help Group.
Again, the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact, but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers.
MICROSOFT 'NOT HAPPY' WITH SEARCH RESULTS
Ina Fried, CNet News, 01/25/07
Microsoft is continuing to lose market share in the search business to industry rival Google, something the software maker's financial chief said Thursday he is "not happy" about.
And things aren't expected to turn around any time soon. Microsoft said Thursday that its Internet services business will produce less sales growth over the next two quarters than the company had previously forecast.
Where it once forecast that revenue might grow by as much as 11 percent, the company now sees full-year sales growth in its Internet services business of just 3 percent to 8 percent.
"Success continues to elude Microsoft in this market," Technology Business Research analyst Allan Krans said in an e-mail interview. He said Microsoft is hardly alone, with other rivals also struggling to keep pace with Google.
"Given Google's large head start in the market and its ongoing momentum, we think it will be very difficult for Microsoft to have a real impact in the online search market during 2007," Krans said. "However, Microsoft continues to take a long-term approach to this market, and plans to keep the investment dollars flowing into its ad business."
Microsoft has been investing heavily to try and grow its ad-backed businesses, aiming to build a second Windows Live brand to sit alongside its MSN business. In recent years, the company has shifted to its own technology for both the underlying search engine and for paid search.
The shift from Yahoo's Overture engine to Microsoft's own AdCenter paid search system has had a particularly strong impact, with Microsoft taking a hit in the amount of revenue the company derives from each search query. The company is also losing ground in terms of overall share of the search market.
A report on December Internet traffic from ComScore Networks showed Microsoft losing half a percentage point of market share in U.S. Web queries, down to 10.5 percent. Google and Yahoo both posted gains, to 47.3 percent and 28.5 percent, respectively.
"On the search side you are correct we lost market share," Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said in response to an analyst's question on the company's earnings conference call. He said he is "clearly not happy with that."
Liddell said Microsoft continues to "take a long-term view of this business" and that the company is making progress in some areas. The company also hopes this year to turn the tide in its revenue per search query. "We still expect to get revenue per search equal to where we were a year ago by the end of this year," he said.
Other parts of Microsoft's advertising business are doing better, he said, pointing to the display advertising business.
"Clearly there is a better story on the display side," he said. "We are growing broadly in line with the market...We're comfortable with the progress we're making there."
The company is investing billions in its advertising business, but the company's forecast Thursday shows it meeting overall financial goals only because of better than expected strength in its core Office and Windows franchises.
Microsoft appears committed to growing the business organically, Krans said, adding that he doesn't believe the company will buy Yahoo, a prospect that has been the subject of on-again, off-again rumors.
"Although the company does acquire, most of Microsoft's purchases are smaller-scale, tuck-in acquisitions that fill gaps in current product offerings," Krans said. "Yahoo's current market cap is $38.37 billion, which would be a large purchase even for Microsoft."