Do you tend to click on sponsored links in search results? If you don’t then you will not even see sponsored links in Google SERPs because the company starts to test a user-behavior- based ads rotation. So if according to your search behavior Google tracked you are not the person that is likely to click a sponsored results link the system will remove the top ads from the page placing it on the right side.

Google spokesman Michael Mayzel claimed that the changes are implemented to refine ads delivery and that this method will ensure both that users will find the ads only when they are of the greatest use and advertisers will receive the better ROI and more qualified leads.

A new tool for Google advertisers was announced by Inside AdWords Blog this Friday. AdWords users have been using a geo targeting function for a rather long period but now Google provides a possibility to preview your ads in the way they are shown in a particular destination other then your physical location. Search results and ads in them are not active so that you could avoid unwanted impressions and occasional clicks happen. There is a number of optional attributes like target country, region, city or longitude/latitude coordinates for advertisers’ convenience.

In other words now it became possible to see how users in different geographies see your ads.

Kim Malone, The President of Google AdSense reveals that Google is now using AdWords conversion data to combat adsense spam sites.

On an Arbitrage Issues panel in San Jose, Kim Malone was asked specifically what steps Google is taking to stop the MFA (Made For Adsense) websites. This question was posed right after Kim was shown an example of how a person clicked on a Google Adwords ad and the person was taken to 5 different MFA Adsense pages before ever actually reaching the content. Basically the person had to click on 6 total Google Adsense ads before they could actually get to the real content because each ad just led to another page with no content but more Google Adsense ads.

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Google today returns their view on third parties click fraud detection. Google engineers consider that the click fraud problem is much exaggerated by the third parties.

What served a reason of considerable flow of the reports examined? Google representatives name two main reasons of lack of coincidence in reports provided by third parties and Google itself.

First is wrong click fraud reporting because of mischaracterizing events. A user may not actually click the ad but third parties may count it as an additional click because of the imperfection of their tracking system.

Second reason is the conflation across advertisers and ad networks. That could be caused by the wrong use of cookies that track users’ activity so that for example Google clicks could be tracked as Yahoo and vice versa.

One by one cases are analyzed and the evidence of exaggerated click fraud data is claimed by Google engineers in Inside AdWords Blog

Google is making click fraud count accessible to AdWords users. As Inside Adwords Blog reports yesterday Google launched a new feature to its advertising platform that will enable customers to view the details of invalis clicks activity in their AdWords account.

Check your reports section to have an idea of how invalid clicks will be displayed in the report. You may include both invalid click column and invalid click rate column in your report.

The clicks are claimed to be filtered before advertisers are charged for them.

Google has been paying much attention to the click fraud question and the release of this handy tool confirms once again their not being ignorant.

This week Fathom Online has published its research of keyword bids. The list of over 20,000 generic keywords divided into 12 categories shows that keyword prices have decreased 8.6 percent for the second quarter. The average bid dropped form $1.39 on March 31 to $1.27 on June 30.

We should mind that the bid decrease mentioned above is an average value and it may not happen in all categories. On the contrary, depending on competition and specifics of business keywords of some categories have become much more expensive. These categories include career training, pregnancy-related words, student loan consolidation, consumer electronics and some other groups.

Nevertheless, statistics says that in general keywords become cheaper from the first Quarter. What is that influenced by? Some relate it to the season price fluctuations but others, including Matt McMahon, VP Marketing Services at Fathom prefer to suppose that advertisers become to make bids more smartly:

The search advertising market continues to expand in robust fashion, but individual keyword’s bids fluctuate each day. Advertisers are now using marketing analytics tools to make smarter advertising spending decisions.

I yield to agree with Mr. McMahon as IMO advertisers really gradually become more sophisticated and professional.

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.