Google Adwords is coming up with interesting features lately. The recent one being Demographic Bidding.

The new demographic bidding feature can help you display ads to only specific age and gender segments within the Google Content Network. This can not just help increase click through rates but also understand and analyze how the ads perform under each segments.

With this feature, you can utilize two options:

1. Increase your bid rate for certain segments like teenagers or the middle age segment based on your ad product category.
2. Exclude certain groups from viewing your advertisements. For example: If you are displaying ads for kids like toys or children books, you can avoid them from being seen by the older generation. This can help you reduce cost and stop ad viewership by non-targeted audience.

The reports can be run using the Report Center. The report center provides various campaign performance metrics like conversion data, CTR, clicks and impressions based on the age and gender of the viewer who viewed your advertisement.

Many Google Adwords users received a mail stating that the exchange rate displayed in their Adsense account is incorrect. The exchange rate was listed as 1:1.

Google adwords account holders from countries where the dollar rate was lower than their rates, were surprised, rather shocked to see the exchange rates issued incorrectly. However, users with rates lower than the US dollar were happy as the income would be higher. Well, Google is not that faulty or dumb. 
Here is what Google had to say about this issue:

Sub: Important message about your AdSense account

Hello,
We’re writing to let you know that your AdSense account is displaying anincorrect exchange rate for your most recent AdSense payment issued onSeptember 23, 2008. While the exchange rate is incorrectly listed as 1:1,please rest assured that your payment has been issued with the correctexchange rate. You can expect your check to arrive according to the normaldelivery time, within two to four weeks.

If you normally receive communication from us in a language other thanEnglish, we will provide additional information in your preferred languagenext week.We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
Google Inc.1600
Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, 
CA 94043
USA

Similar issue occurred with Google Adsense few years back.

A private detective from the Bay State Detective Agency has filed a law suit in California Court against Google for advertising in third party websites. If the lawsuit wins, Google would have to end up paying millions of dollars.

Bay State Dectective ageny private investigator David Almedia informed that the company had signed up for Google Adwords. However, he wanted to advertise only on Google search engine and not on websites like MySpace or personal blogs.

He also mentioned that while setting up the budget for advertisement, he had left the text box blank thinking that a blank box means he would not be charged and that his advertisements would not be displayed.

Google has earned $1.7 billion from advertising in the first quarter of 2008. It should also be noted that Kabateck Brown Kellner had filed a suit against Google for Click Fraud and Google ended up paying $90 million in settlement in the year 2006.

However, this sue by the private detective does not seem to have a strong base to fight against Google. It is a well known fact that Google also displays the advertisement in its other websites apart from the search engine like Blogger and also on third party websites.

Google has expanded the Conversion Optimizer Bid Management feature. This expansion would mean the bids would be automatically adjusted making AdWords simpler.

The advertisers using this new AdWords feature would be able to automatically manage their cost-per-click (CPC) bids according to a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal. Based on this, the AdWords application does adjustments keeping the cost of each conversion below the specified maximum CPA bid.

Google first released its beta version in September 2007 and has been constantly upgrading and enhancing Conversion Optimizer. From January, advertisers who had previously enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and had at least 200 conversions in the past 30 days would be eligible to use Conversion Optimizer.

Google claims that advertisers who use this campaign would gain more precision, increase ROI, save bidding process time, receive higher conversion rate and greater control over their advertising budget.

More than 700 teams in U.S. have registered for the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Students would be provided $200 to spend on Google AdWords. Students have to work with various local businesses according to their preference and advertise online and track visitor trends and profit analysis.

Vice President of Product Marketing in Google, David Lawee informed that this challenge would give students great experience and help local businesses use the power of web to attract more customers. He also mentioned that, the organizers expected a participation of around 200 classes. However, they are amazed at having more than 700 university teams already signed up. Read More »