Let’s face it. Google Adwords is not a perfect service. As much as Google tries to tell us that it does its best to filter out bad advertisers and crappy offers, people always find a way around Google’s measures. It did not take me long to find an offer that seems suspicious at best. Take WooThemes. It’s one of the most popular WordPress theme clubs around. Anybody who has searched for premium WordPress themes in the past has probably heard of the company. The company has all kinds of plans and tiers of membership. What it does not offer is all its premium themes for $10.

So how does the webmasters behind this crazy offer explain their deal? They do talk about the license of these themes and the fact that they can redistribute it.

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In case you have missed it, Google has been changing its Adwords interface and adding new tools in the past few months. The latest change seems to be concerning Adwords reports. With all the information that you can now dig up under campaign tab, it was inevitable that Google did something about its Report Center.

The Adwords interface has gone through plenty of changes recently as Google aims to combine insights and control for more effective campaign management for its customers. By moving the remaining reports from Report Center to your campaign tab, there is no reason for Google to keep the report center around: (more…)

Google Adwords is a cut throat business to be involved in. There are a ton of advertisers that use this tool to drive traffic to their websites. Adwords advertisers use all kinds of tools to optimize their ROI and get the most out of their ad money. But it’s always nice to know how one is performing against other advertisers in a category. That’s what Analyze Competition Tool is about. Google intends to roll this feature in the near future to help advertisers compare their performance against others in their niche.

This new tool will let you compare your performance against others based on impressions, clicks, CTR,  and average position. Of course, Google is only showing you averages and is not exactly disclosing sensitive information to other advertisers. Being able to compare your performance against other advertisers can be useful. But just like any other Google Adwords tool, you do not want to rely only on this data to make decisions for your business.

This new tool is not available to everyone just yet. So do not be surprised if you can’t find it in your account. Google does plan to roll it out to everyone in the near future.

I know. This site is not about world news. While it is a shame what has happened in the gulf of Mexico, we do not intend to be covering that disaster here. It was just interesting to see how Fox News managed to spin a regular story and make a big deal out of it. Let’s face it. BP has made a huge mistake, and I am sure it will do everything possible to reduce costs to its shareholders. That’s what companies do. So how is it a surprise to see the company purchase ads targeting oil spill and other relevant terms?

That is not how Fox News reported the story. It talked about “news manipulation” and this practice being unethical. But it is not against the rules. All companies mess up. BP is now responsible for one of the biggest disasters in that region. Of course, it is going to buy ads to push its own agenda and moves. This is by no means a “manipulation” of search results. Ads have always been at the top of the search engines. Besides, last time I checked, BP was not a government-run business, so it can do what it wants with its funds.

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Google is constantly innovating and adding new features to its services, though if you are not using Adwords or other Google services that regularly, you may miss easily. Google has opened a whole new can of worms by enabling Adwords users to install their data on local computers to speed things up. Google Adwords’ local storage feature takes advantage of Google Gears to store users’ data and makes it much faster to change views and do all kinds of things with data. Since you are using your local data here, speed won’t be an issue.

You can enable this feature by clicking on the appropriate mini-icon at the top right side of your Adwords account. If you don’t have Google gears, you’ll have to take a few extra steps. But installing this feature won’t be too much of an issue. The security of your data will be. Since this feature stores a copy of your data on your computer, you will have to make sure the computer you are using it on is secure (not a shared one). This is not a universal feature, meaning that you’ll have to do it for each computer. (more…)