Part I Updates: Becoming a Google Advertiser
Chapter 1:
As of November 2007, the text ads on the content (AdSense) network behave differently when clicked. In the past, someone could click anywhere in the ad to be taken to the landing page. Now, only the blue underlined headline and the grey underlined display URL will act as live hyperlinks. The two description lines and any geographic delimiters below the URL will not longer be "clickable."
It seems that Google believes that some percentage of the clicks on text ads in the content network have been accidental, resulting in high costs and poor conversion rates for advertisers. So if your cost of customer acquisition was just too high to justify in the content network, you may want to let the dust settle and try again in a couple of weeks.
On Dave Taylor’s excellent parenting blog (www.apparenting.com), the ads were behaving exactly as Google says – the headline and URL were clickable, while the descriptions were not. On gmail, though, the entire text of the ad was clickable. Luckily, the ad I clicked was Google’s own AdWords ad, so I didn’t cost any real advertisers any money.
Chapter 2
Google offers a free tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool) that allows you to see what Google searchers see anywhere in the world. Now you can tell whether your ad is showing in Germany without having to call your friends in Berlin and asking them to send you screen shots.
If you want to click those ads and see their landing pages, you’ll need to use Redfly’s FireFox Google Global Extension (http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/google-global-view-results-different-locations) to view Google results in different regions and languages. Install the plugin and then right-click anywhere on the page to activate the tool:
And if you don’t want to cost the advertisers a click (very bad karma to charge competitors for your market research), you can either copy and paste the link into a browser and then remove all the AdWords code before the actual http:// of the landing page, or download the (currently) free Firefox plugin from PPCwebspy.com and view and click the actual landing pages:
