Timberline Interactive

This should be a thrill to investors and soap-opera lovers alike! Google's Q1 2008 earnings call webcast will be streaming across the internet today at 1:30 pm Pacific time (4:30 pm Eastern time; you midwestern and mountain folks can do the math).

Why, if we don't own GOOG, should we care? Because it raises the curtain on a big question: Where is the online ad market going?

After quarter after quarter of torrid growth -- and a fourth quarter 2007 surge of 25% -- Google reportedly slowed to a crawl early this year. ComScore has been tracking anemic 2% to 3% growth in paid ad clicks, and although the firm took heat for the accuracy of their numbers, given the abruptness of the turnaround, many analysts have come around to the view that the numbers are real, and that they point to 1) the slowdown in the overall economy, and 2) normal post-holiday seasonality to which, up till now, Google has been immune.

While more experts accept the notion that fewer people are clicking ads, the other unanswered question is about ad quality. Google and Yahoo have been retooling their ad-serving algorithms to focus on higher-quality ads and higher-quality clicks (the latter by weeding out fraudulent and accidental clicks, better policing the quality of the content networks, etc.). If Google is, as a result of higher click quality, attracting a higher cost-per-click, the earnings machine may still be operating at full tilt. We'll know the answer this afternoon!

* (CNN Money sums up the story nicely.)

This morning our spam filters and those of some of our clients were clogged with a number of bogus emails purporting to be from Google AdWords. Bearing the subject line "Please Re-activate your account," they resemble some actual billing-info alerts from Google, but they are pure phishing scams -- sent to random email addresses and meant to get receivers to cough up their credit card info.

The sender email address and the links are spoofed to make them appear to be Google addresses. When you "view source" you'll see the links actually point to a "Adwords.Google.com" subdomain on the Chinese domain hki045.cn, or other non-Google domain. If you receive similar messages, IGNORE AND DELETE THEM! DO NOT CLICK THROUGH.

The copy of one of the emails we received is as follows:

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Dear Google Adwords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information.
To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.

In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.
Pease sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update
your billing information.

Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed,
any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

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Google Adwords Team

Yahoo -- in the crosshairs of a takeover bid by Microsoft that Steve Ballmer says may soon go hostile -- is reaching out to arch rival Google.

Yahoo will provide some of its advertising space to Google AdWords ads, in a two-week experiment that is seen as testing the waters for a broader partnership. Of course it may just be posturing by Yahoo, which has countered that Microsoft's offer is too low, and has been scrambling for weeks to find white knights to save it from either 1) being gobbled up by Microsoft in a hostile bid, or 2) being made increasingly marginal in the search and search-advertising game.

Meanwhile, Google has no interest in a Yahoo-Microsoft marriage. On its blog, Google (which knows a little something about competition) whined that such a deal would be anticompetitive.

The partnership will display Google ads in response to about 3 percent of Yahoo searches made in the U.S.

Cuddling up to Google may help Yahoo fend off a takeover bid, but to search marketers like Timberline Interactive, the attractive thing would be more exposure with less work. Why manage ad campaigns in both Google and Yahoo if Yahoo would simply roll over and syndicate our Google ads across its whole platform?

In the short run, that would certainly make things more convenient for online marketers. But talk about anticompetitive! In the long run, it's best for marketers when a few robust ad platforms are competing for their business. Search-engine ads and other online advertising products will be more fairly priced, and offer better management tools and targeting options, when there are more strong players in the game, not fewer.

The Google Analytics problem we reported on Jan 15 has been resolved by Google engineers, and accounts are now collectly tracking Google AdWords traffic.

UPDATE: The problem has been resolved

Since January 9, Google Analytics has been experiencing technical problems capturing traffic data coming from Google AdWords cpc platform.

While there is no official word yet on the cause of the problem, we are in touch with Google Tech Support, and Google engineers are working on it. Our initial suspicion is that the situation is connected with Auto-Tagging, a setting that enables advertisers to pass campaign information into Analytics without manually tagging their links with tracking information.

The problem does not affect the customer’s experience. Customers coming from paid Google ads are still able to place orders, and if you’re using Google Adwords conversion tracking, orders are still being tracked as conversions within the AdWords platform.If your Google ads are manually tagged using Conversion Ruler, Atlas, Omniture or other third-party tracking tags, you’ll be unaffected.

The problem is apparently affecting a number of other sites. Here is a thread devoted to the topic at Google Groups:

We will keep you updated as soon as we have more information!