A lot has been written about how Google Adwords have changed the way advertisers interact with their market online.
A lot has been written about how to use and abuse the system to make money for your business, either as an advertiser or as a publisher of the ads.
Harold Davis puts it into simple terms which should help you see if your ads are paying or not.
He does raise an interesting point about the tracking of the ads. As he rightly points out, most ad publishers track invisibly, whereas Google is more overt:
An interesting, and somewhat controversial, feature of Google AdWords conversion tracking is that as part of the tracking, Google notifies users that they are being tracked. This notification is produced by the Google-supplied code you add to the results page. A tracked user sees a message titled Google Site Stats with a “send feedback” link when the results page is opened.
Although this is possible, it is not always going to be visible. We use the Google tracking code as an integral part of our billing system, but users do not see any graphics or other content to indicate that we are using the code to track them, as our billing system allows us to embed the code invisibly in the pages. If cookies are involved and the user is prompted about them, then the visibility will be lost.
I’m still not convinced by the stats for the CPM campaigns though.
Edit: Harold Davis’ email this morning prompted me to run a couple of tests, as he rightly pointed out that hiding the tracker completely would have been an infringement of the Google TOS.
Yes Harold, you are right. I am wrong!
There is a very small image visible on the checkout page. I must have missed it!
You wait for ages for a post and then four come along at the same time!
Ah Tom, don’t be like that 🙂
Michele,
the fact that I say “waiting ages for a post” is a good thing – I wouldn’t be waiting if I didn’t feel they were worth waiting for!
The really frustrating thing about your posts is that you don’t provide full feeds!
Tom
But if I provided full feeds you wouldn’t go to the site to get the full story. Or would you?
Why do you want me to go to the site?
Let me approach it another way – all my blog reading is done through my RSS reader – I’m subscribed to many blogs and I skim where I can. Sometimes the summary doesn’t provide enough info for me to be interested, so I don’t click through and i miss what might otherwise have been an interesting post.
With a full feed, I can see the whole story, and if I am interested, I will click through to check the comments and possibly leave one myself.
Do you read blogs through an RSS reader, and if so, which do you prefer, full or partial feeds?
Tom
I’m subscribed to a number of RSS feeds on both my work desktop and my home machines. I prefer to get snippets of information and if I am interested I will click through to read the entire entry. I don’t want the full feed in my RSS reader as it would be far too distracting and I wouldn’t gain any benefit.
I’ll have a look at my feed settings since you asked ! 🙂
Cool,
Thanks,
Tom