Recently in adwords Category

Hittail have launched their premium service.

While it may be a bit expensive for a hobby site the pricing is very reasonable if you intend using it for an ecommerce site.

Why?

For one very simple feature - the option to transfer keywords that hittail has "found" into your Adwords account.

The only thing that is a little annoying is that there are limits on the number of keywords and pricing is per domain.

I received an email yesterday from Google's legal team, as I had previously lodged a trademark complaint regarding Adwords.

In order to maintain clarity here is the email in its entirety:

Hello,

We're writing to inform you that we're changing our trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the trademark complaint you currently have on file with Google.

If you've submitted a complaint letter requesting that we prevent
advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, we will continue our efforts to support your request.  However, from May 5, 2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed
under our revised procedure.

You do not need to file your trademark complaint with us again unless you would like to amend it based on the new guidelines. For more detailed information regarding our trademark complaint procedure, we invite you to review our revised complaint procedure, posted online at
http://www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html.

To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

Advertising Legal Support Team

The email is quite confusing. On the one hand they say they are going to uphold the previously lodged complaint, while on the other they say they're changing their policy to come into line with the one they use in the US / Canada. 

In order to make sense of it all I spent a bit of time digging around their "help" documentation to see if I could get a better idea of the implications.

From what I have been able to understand Google are basically giving trademark infringers carte blanche. The only thing you will now be able to complain about is trademark usage in the advert text. The actual triggers ie. keywords, will no longer be protected.

So what?

Well the problem is that people are just as likely to hit a competitor's ad based on a trigger as they are on text in the ad. In fact I'd reckon that the triggers are a lot more powerful than the ad text itself.

So what are a trademark holder's options?

At present I'm not 100% sure. I've contact our trademark attorney in the US to see if he can shed any light on the matter and offer any sane advice, but I imagine his response is going to be unhelpful. He's a great guy, but Google's policy change doesn't leave us with many realistic options.

Of course you wouldn't mind so much if what they were doing wasn't so problematic. Is it a coincidence that Google is constantly being sued by trademark holders exactly because of this kind of thing?
I think not.

Congratulations to Bernie who finally tied the knot! I re-read his post from yesterday and the penny dropped !

Segala's WP optimisation article is useless apart from the one tip on disabling unwanted / unncessary plugins. A lot of the other supposed "tips" have very little to do with Wordpress or are simply technically incorrect. My optimisation tip is simple - move to something saner.

Pavarotti has passed away. The knockon effect being that his official site has fallen over. Loads of media coverage.

Google reader now has a search function. I hadn't noticed that it was missing one! I suppose it depends on how you interact with things. If an article interests me I'll bookmark it.

The iPhone pricecut has upset a lot of early adopters (nah nah nah nah nah - told you so!) but Nokia's marketing department have taken advantage (according to Techcrunch)

It's a Saturday evening, so I'm pondering what to do. Should I rent a DVD, watch one I already own or try to find something worth watching on the TV?

My first port of call is the Xtra Vision website. Of course I can't remember what the web address is and neither can Google!

A search for "xtravision" or "xtra vision" takes me to a number of sites, including this one, but I have to find the actual site by going via whoisireland.

While Xtra Vision may not rely on online sales, I'm probably not the only punter in the country who can't remember offhand what DVDs are released when, so checking their site seems like an obvious starting point.

Of course the other funny thing is that they obviously haven't bothered protecting their IP online.

A quick search for them gives me adds for their competition (click to enlarge):

It seems that Google is being sued yet again over trademark issues related to adwords, its pay per click search engine marketing service. This time round it's American Airlines that is taking them to court. The full story is over on Eric Goldman's site. One of the questions he raises amused me:

I also wonder if American Airlines itself has ever bought third party trademarks as keywords--plenty of keyword plaintiffs have engaged in such duplicity, and I'd be surprised if American Airlines has run a completely clean shop.

Of course the question that I'd be asking is why didn't American Airlines simply request that the keywords be blocked by Google. They may not act that quickly when smaller fish submit a request, but I would presume that when a big corporate sends one in that they act a bit faster.

I've been working on the migration to Movable Type over the last couple of days. Unfortunately doing it "cleanly" won't be easy due to WP's broken XML export :( In any case I've posted some preliminary notes on what I'm taking into consideration and how I intend to deal with the issues if and when they arise. So the question that a number of people have asked me, both in public and private, is a fairly obvious one: Why are you moving away from Wordpress? If you are a regular reader on here you may have come across a number of my previous posts where I was dealing with the performance issues. Even though I have tweaked things and appreciate Donncha (and others) taking the time to help me squeeze more out of it, I'm really sick of Wordpress' inherent lack of decent performance. Rob went into some detail on his own testing and the results were truly shocking. The number of queries to render an entry on this server, even with all the tweaking, is just plain silly (and most of the plugins that I'm currently using don't even add DB queries - they're more aesthetic). And what about security? Of course software will have bugs and need to be patched and upgraded, but over the last few months the number of times I've had to run around late at night upgrading installs to avoid serious issues was just getting on my nerves. And what's WP's response? They seem to avoid the issue. The last security upgrade isn't flagged as serious, yet the bug sounds serious. I may be missing something, but the number of upgrades I've had to conduct would show otherwise. The other issue is management. If you only write to one blog or possibly two then logging in twice might not be an issue for you. I, on the other hand, have over a dozen blogs. I looked into WPMU, but to get it working with multiple domains would have involved hacking the files and the database - and I'd still have to upgrade every X weeks when yet another security hole was discovered. MovableType on the other hand is really slick. I can login to one interface and then manage as many sites as I want. Not only that, but I only have ONE install to worry about upgrading! Whereas a lot of the minor tweaks that you'd use on a WP install involve 3rd party plugins, MT makes it easy to customise and add functionality with its existing system. Performance wise MT is a lot more attractive as the entries are real files on the filesystem and not just mod_rewrites or temporarily cached files (via yet another 3rd party plugin - notice a trend anyone?) Another thing that bugs the life out of me is WP's attitude to their users and advocates. Over the past 3 years I have probably recommended WP to several hundred people directly and possibly thousands more indirectly (pushing blog hosting for example). However Wordpress is more than happy to ignore Europeans and run adwords campaigns to promote their US partners ONLY. SixApart, on the other hand, seem to have a much more open attitude to the rest of the world, possibly because they have staff and offices spread across the globe. So in a nutshell I will be happily moving away to something that I am happier with on both a technical and philosophical / moral level. You may find some of my reasoning a bit odd, but it's my reasoning and I'm quite happy with it :)

Does anyone know if there is a mechanism for reporting false claims in Google Adword campaigns ie. paid ads that Google Adword publishers run on the search and content networks? I've come across a few that are highly misleading, but I can't see any way to report them.

It didn't take too much to find the flipside to the latest adsense addition. Pay per action (beta) is where it's at. Until people gain access to the beta program we can only guess what will be inside, but the concept of only paying for specific user actions is definitely attractive. More on the official blog

Since it's slightly different to the "normal" sizes:

• Banner: 468x49
• Leaderboard: 728x79
• Square: 250x239
• Small Square: 200x189
• Large Rectangle: 336x269
• Medium Rectangle: 300x239
• Skyscraper: 120x578
• Wide Skyscraper: 160x578

The slight difference in size is to cover the space used by Google themselves

I am always impressed by good quality direct marketing, so last week's missive from Interactive Return was really welcome.

Search Marketing World 2007, Dublin March 21, 2007, brings together the search marketing professionals, the search engines, the business owners who have successfully implemented search, the ad agencies and you.

While you might be tempted to think that it is just a gimmick all you need do is look at theevent lineup. Danny Sullivan is a heavyweight, so getting him to Dublin for a conference is no little achievement. Hopefully it will be a complete sellout, as it looks like a really worthwhile event.