Search Engine Positioning and Web Marketing News

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

As part of our goal to improve the monetization of your sites, Google has introduced a number of new features for advertisers, which will directly impact you as an AdSense publisher.

We anticipate that these features will introduce new advertising dollars into the content network by giving advertisers additional ways to reach their objectives.

We're currently testing these new features with a select group of advertisers, and expect to make the features more widely available in the near future.

Site targeting: focusing on the audience

The keyword-targeted ads that you're used to seeing on your pages will now be joined by a new type of site-targeted advertisement. Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites.

We believe that advertisers will leverage both our traditional keyword-targeted advertising which runs across the entire AdSense network, and our new site-targeted advertising, bringing more ad dollars to publishers.

CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.

For every eligible impression, both pay-per-impression ads and pay-per-click ads compete in the same auction. Our technology will automatically display the highest performing ads on your pages.

Expanded text ads: testing new formats

We are also running a test with text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit. At this time, this test will only apply to text ads in a site-targeted campaign and to ad formats banner-sized or larger. The expanded pay-per-impression text ad will have to beat out all of the competing ads before it can appear, so publishers can be assured that any expanded text ad is a highly competitive ad. These ads will be served to any text-enabled ad unit and will abide by your text ad color settings.

More image ads

Because of these new features available for advertisers, the number of image ads in the Google advertising network will grow. To take advantage of these ads, and the increased earnings potential that they offer, we encourage you to review your image ads preference in your AdSense Account Settings page.

You can also choose your image ads preference on a format-by-format basis when generating your ad code. For publishers who want to fully leverage image ads, we now provide an image ads only selection.

Your image ad inventory will also include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers. These new ads will adhere to the 50KB size limit for image ads, and will be reviewed according to our content guidelines.

That's according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which says that plaintiffs in the US filed a lawsuit in February alleging that not only do the likes of Google and Yahoo overcharge advertisers, they collude with each other to continue doing so.

In the pay-per-click model that Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves use, advertisers pay each time a user "clicks through" on an ad listed alongside search engine results. Each click costs on average between EUR0.30 and EUR0.50 with more popular keywords costing as much as EUR10 per click.

Led by an Arkansas company called Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, the plaintiffs are looking to have the lawsuit certified as a class action. They allege that the defendants, which include Google, Yahoo, FindWhat, Ask Jeeves, America Online and Look Smart, improperly charged advertisers for what they refer to as incidents of "click fraud."

Click fraud is a growing problem in the search industry. The practice has seen people -- such as competitors or unhappy employees -- repeatedly clicking on a pay-per-click advertisement in order to run up a bill for an advertiser. This issue has the potential to cost advertisers a good deal of money and is difficult to track down.

For their part, the search engines such as Google and Yahoo, have said they have anti-fraud systems in place and that they regularly give advertisers refunds for fraudulent clicks. However, they have failed to give any more detail on the subject, causing some advertisers to worry that the problem is bigger than they are being told.

Click fraud statistics from Sempo, a non-profit association that works to increase awareness and promote the value of search engine marketing, indicate that advertisers are concerned about click fraud but haven't been able to seriously track it. Between 36 percent and 58 percent of advertisers say they're worried about click fraud but haven't been able to track the full extent of it, according to a report by Sempo published in December 2004.