DaveTech » Google

Google AdWords Email Phishing Scam

sallymander — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:34:30 +0000

Thanks to @aimclear for being quick to post the info on this scam. Here’s an email that I wrote to all of my AdWords clients based on the tweets that @aimclear posted with the text from the email he received. Feel free to copy and reuse for your clients.

————————————————————–

Dear Client,

I’ve heard from colleagues today that there is a phishing scam targeting Google AdWords account users. This scam is an email with the following (or similar) text:

" Dear Client, Your Google Adwords account has expired. You must renew it immediately or your account will be closed. If you intend to use this service in the future, you must take action at once!. To continue click here, login to your Google Adwords account . Thank you for using Google Adwords! Google Adwords Services DEP. COPYRIGHT Google Adwords Services 2009 (C) "

The email includes a link that will take you to a log in page that looks no different from the Google AdWords log in page you are familiar with. Please do not log into your account via this link. The URL is *not* on Google’s secure servers.

If you think that you’ve been a victim of the scam, please try to log into your account immediately via https://adwords.google.com and change your password. If you are unable to log in, please contact me as soon as possible and I will contact a Google representative on your behalf.

Thanks,
Sally Burke
————————————————————–

Revealing geographic AdWords performance statistics using Google Analytics

sallymander — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:48:32 +0000

If you’re running an AdWords campaign that serves multiple countries, you may want to see how each country is performing individually. I came across this again recently when discussing AdWords performance with one of my e-commerce clients. In his campaign, he is running ads in both the US and Canada. “How is Canada performing compared to the US?”, we wondered.

As far as I can tell, AdWords Report Center does not have a method for seeing data per country. Their demographics reporting is limited to age and gender. Here’s my method for revealing the data using Google Analytics. Your AdWords account must be properly linked to your Google Analytics account for this to work.

1. Log into your Analytics account and in the Dashboard, select Visitors > Map Overlay.

2. On the Map Overlay screen, select the country of interest, in my case that was Canada. You can drill as deep as you like here.

3. In the Dimension selection drop-down, choose Campaign.

4. Now, you can see the productivity of your Campaign(s) in the geographic region that you selected.

Now you want to know what to do with this new data? Well, I hope it convinces you to segment all of your countries into separate campaigns. For this client, Canada’s conversion rate is 68% lower than the site average. I’ll be splitting out Canada into a separate campaign as soon as I finish this post and redistributing my spend. I’ll also be talking with my client about updating his site to include Canadian shipping rates and landing pages for Canadian customers.

For a hot tip on how to make doubly sure that Google is only serving your US targeted campaign to US customers, see Uber Affilliate’s article, “QuickTip Time : Adwords International Traffic”

UPDATE 09/03/2008: Looks like Google AdWords finally decided that

More on Yahoo store “404 error” pages and Google. (Analytics this time…)

David Burke — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:42:52 +0000

Ok, now that everyone has had a chance to develop a “content rich” super-converting 404-error page, it’s time to put it to good use.

And what better use for an error page, than to have it give us some indication of what link may have *caused* the error to occur in the first place. Thankfully, Alix Obitz posted just how to do that on the Google Analytics blog the other day. So now we can:

Serve up a custom, “content rich” 404-error page in our Yahoo! store.
Track which links are causing the error page to show up.
Surely, you didn’t think we were done yet, did you?

Once you have the new code in place, you’ll have access to the URLs the visitor was originally looking for. Depending on what the URLs look like, you may be able to determine the visitor’s original intent. A page URL of “http://mystore.com/gensym23.html” is not going to reveal much about what type of content was at that URL previously. A URL of “http://mystore.com/soft-blue-widgets.html” is much more helpful. (I know Rob Snell has a page on “Why You Should Always Create New Pages from the ‘Contents’ page” but I can’t find it right now… The tip is also on pg. 179 of his book, Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies)

Anyway, when you *do* come across information laden broken links like the “soft-blue-widgets” example, one possibility is to go create a new page at that location that will redirect the visitor to an existing relevant page. This can be valuable for 2 reasons:

Your visitor will now end up on a page even more relevant than your “content rich” 404-error page.
You now have another *working* link to your site. (Your PageRank should skyrocket any minute now…)