Those who publish their ads in MSN, use Microsoft AdCenter might be unpleased not only with some disadvantages like a limit on the amount of keywords per account, a weird editorial process or poor support channel but also by a reporting delay happened recently.

The delay is reported to last since 7/14 and the fact is Microsoft knows about it. The AdCenter support engineers claim that the delay for hourly and daily reports is 1 hour and 1 day correspondingly. Normal turnaround times for report data is 8 a.m. Pacific Time.

Users of forums at SearchEngineWatch.com and WebMasterWorld.com also complain they haven’t received any conversion data since 7/14 yet.

This week Google released a new feature for AdWords – category selection tool. To allow you more easily select a site you want your ads to display at Google divided all publishers’ sites on categories and subcategories.

So now to find and include sites relevant to your services or products you can just find the needed category, choose among the subcategories and you get a list of the most matching sites to make your campaign the best targeted.

The choice which site from the list to run ads on is completely up to you.

More detailed instruction on how to use the new tool you can find here.

Bad and Sad news for Indian bloggers as Indian Government has instructed ISP’s to ban 17-18 websites on the internet. None of the website was informed that they ware going to be blocked.  The main reason was to stop the illegal activates but it’s not justice to block the entire sites like blogspot where millions of people share thoughts, information and useful contents. All the blogs hosted on following domains are blocked.

blogspot.com

ttypepad.com

geocities.com

Not good to block entire Indian Bloging community to avoid illegal activates. Smart people will simply use the alternate proxy to access their blogs. A restriction has to be thoughtful and measurable!

This Monday Yahoo users could see some changes in its front page. The text calling people to create 12-second video commercials for Yahoo might have not left some most enthusiastic customers indifferent, thought no money or prize for the best ad was announce. The ads will be shown on video.yahoo.com.

To bring first success to the idea of user-generated ads Yahoo enlisted students from 4 popular art schools to create ads.

Yahoo vice president Allen Olivo thinks that

Any advertiser or business that isn’t maximizing the power of what users have to say is crazy. The brand belongs to the customer. Who better to express what we’re all about than them?

So user-generated ads can be considered to be a way of getting customers feedback for the site.

As long as users ad doesn’t violate Yahoo usage rules for language and sexual content and doesn’t conflict with copyright every ad will be will be shown at Yahoo.

Most Google advertisers must have noticed a message in their AdWords account claiming that for every $1 an advertiser spends on AdWords, he can process $10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. For example, if he spent $1,000 on AdWords the month before, the next month he can process $10,000 in sales at no cost.

Google is trying to promote it’s newly implemented checkout service by all means including it’s advertising program. What benefits can AdWords customers take from using Google Checkout?

First your URL when displayed in the ad will get a shopping cart icon in front of it meaning that is supposed to let you attract customers more easily. For me that icon worked as this ad really drove my attention.

Second is the possibility to process $10 in sales for every advertising dollar you spend with AdWords. If you accees this amount the transaction will be charged 2% and $.20.

Besides Google promises to protect its checkout users from fraud by filtering out transaction identified as fraudulent and help to escape chargebacks.

As for the last benefit featured by Google – better leads conversion – to my mind that could be achieved only when Google Checkout will be at least that widely used as other money processing systems.

We’ll keep tracking the systems progress!

Yesterday Google announced via its Sitemaps Blog that Google implemented a new feature to let site owners not display snippets from Open Directory Project (ODP or DMOZ).

The problem is some DMOZ descriptions Google used to use as a snippet to a site are inaccurate and out of date. But Google resolved this problem with the single simple move – a metatag generated to inform Google bot that DMOZ description shouldn’t serve a snippet to a particular site.

Here are the instructions that Google Sitemap blog gives tyo webmasters:

To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page’s description, use the following:

Note that not all search engines may support this meta tag, so check with each for more information.

To direct Google specifically from using this information to describe a page, use the following:

These tags are easy to implement and will ensure the description from DMOZ will not show as a snippet to your site on Google and other search engines that support this feature.

The recent traffic analysis issued on Tuesday by Internet traffic measurement corporation Hitwise MySpace has for the first time in history acceded Yahoo or any other U.S. site in the amount of visits per week. The report claims that for the week ending July 8 MySpace.com has got 4.46 percents of all U.S. visits which is more then Yahoo Mail (recently the leader of U.S. traffic) or any of the pages like Yahoo, Google, MSN Hotmail.

From the other hand, Yahoo persist that “The Yahoo network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo’s (e-mail site).” If to count traffic for top three Yahoo sites – Yahoo Mail, Yahoo.com and Yahoo Search – the numbers will be of the other value. 10 percent of the total U.S. audience a week and 129 million unique visitors per month can give odds to any other American site or portal.

Besides, Yahoo is indisputable leader from the point of view of the time spent on a site. It has 13 percent of users’ time online while MySpace’s share is only 3.2 percent.

I’m not to judge how we should count popularity, who’s point of view we should support. The facts are published so you are t o decide.