DISQUS

I suppose well meaning public relations operatives can often be like a dog with a particularly tasty bone - hard to get them off it.

I suggest we buy a bag of Milk Bones and toss a few in AOL's direction. Perhaps they'll chill out. :)

Noindex/nofollow in your front yard -- ha ha, good quip Andy :)

Andrew Goodman's last blog post..Google AdWords Success Stories

Wow, that was scientific.

Regarding user profiles and other ways of enhancing trust and interaction among trusted "online neighbors," rest assured we're working on it at HomeStars! Nice overview Jevon.

Regarding user profiles and other ways of enhancing trust and interaction among trusted "online neighbors," rest assured we're working on it at HomeStars! Nice overview Jevon.

Jim, I can't help but notice you cite your own article. Looks like you've done a lot of interesting research relevant to online marketers, user experience analysis, etc. I sympathize with the plight you must face in presenting reliable "trend analysis" in the context of some of these publication processes -- for example one of your articles from 2006 is covering long-defunct user experiences from search engines like Excite, Alltheweb; references to user interactions with Yahoo as "directory-based," and so on. The references seem to be 5-7 years out of date by the time they are published.

As to what constitutes an "academic research article," we will have to disagree. This looks to me like a short unrefereed overview article in a magazine. Some of your other articles conform more closely to the norm of a refereed journal article that would be worthy of the title of "academic research article."

Here, I don't see the research. I see some decent common-sense definitions and terse recommendations and conclusions. But no independent data or critical insight.

@hlawton: Any decent analytics package, such as Google Analytics, will give you bounce rates by keyword, and time spend on site by keyword, if that's what you want.

If UGC is posed only as "creative" work - your point is definitely worth making.

Of course, there is more to the "wisdom of crowds thing" or the "wikinomics thing" than just a bunch of backyard wrasslers seeking Specialness as described in Hal Niedzviecki's last book.

That sounds like supply without demand. I think that's what a lot of the long tail is, at least in digital content. Unsuccessful artists who now have a cool web 2.0 excuse for wasting their time can talk about that whole tail thing :)

However, where the individual's contribution amounts to valuable *information* that can be shared and tapped into by others, then it becomes powerful.

It's out there. We'll find it. :)

I haven't heard "diminutive" used in such a cutting way since the days of Toronto sports reporters writing about "diminutive puckstopper Allan Bester."

Here I go again.

bg, if I may say so, you seem obsessed with click fraud.

Is there a marketing program lurking anywhere in there?

As for the class action suit. Isn't that a red herring? I've been in these before, with other similar situations. LookSmart ripped us off, misled us, and we applied and received a small credit in the suit. That's class action for you.

Meanwhile it absolutely does not mean that Google has no further obligation to you. Perhaps it means you have fewer options to actually sue them, but you weren't going to do that anyway.

What you can do, is document any click fraud that may have occurred, if indeed it did. And then directly request a refund. That process hasn't gone away just because there was a suit.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled marketing program. There is one, isn't there?

Frauded,

If this is the worst example of "fraud" we can dredge up, then things must be pretty rosy indeed.

I'm not sure that this really provides much proof of actual fraud, and even if some is getting through, it wouldn't be hard to combat by lowering bids a bit. Fraud on the search network would be more serious.

400 clicks on the content network should only be costing you around $160 or less if you're bidding correctly. Just because the traffic isn't converting on those 400 clicks doesn't mean it's fraudulent. It may mean your ad is showing up somewhere it shouldn't be - somewhere that isn't very targeted.

Increases in clicks aren't surprising, either. New publishers are always being added onto the network, or your position may jump up so that you actually appear on pages that would have shown your competitors' ads previously. This may be a sign that they have lowered bids, so you should, too.

You haven't offered much evidence of anything untoward, as disappointing as it may be that $160 worth of clicks didn't convert to anything.

Wow indeed. Great exclusive, Andy.

Proof? Is Google blowing smoke?

I really don't see why they would. Other traffic sources have, and it has seriously impacted their credibility. Advertisers can easily cross-check this type of info against the tendency of clicks to convert.

If you're working on real accounts, you can often see during the holiday time the conversion rates and cost per order numbers trending into very affordable territory. You aren't going to see conversion rates of 5-10% on mediocre, relatively unoptimized ecommerce user experiences, if there is tons of fraud floating around out there. To me, having watched a large number of campaigns closely, Google's account rings true. I won't believe it all when it comes to the AdSense network, but then again, we all bid low on that inventory, don't we?