All Your Budget Is Ours

Adwords will be rolling out a "feature" in which all an advertisers unused budget will be spent on keywords of Google's choosing. This might be ok for some, but there are others who bid $10 but pay 5c, and those people often necessarily have budgets way higher than they are comfortable with.

Google say it is opt out, but I really hope they see commonsense and make it opt in before they launch it! More...

Adwords: Age & Gender Targeting

Some AdWords users can now utilise a beta function that allows you to only show your ads to people of certain age and gender.

Obviously the regular Google search doesn't have this - because you and I have not told Google this information. It will only apply to those sites in the Google search network that can make this info available to Google.

Adwords: Demographic Bidding

Obviously this new beta feature will only apply to the parts of the search network that know the sex/age etc of their members - sites like MySpace, Friendster, HotOrNot and Flirtbox are part of the test.

This might be a useful way for find out how well ads on these sites convert...

Blatant Rule Breaking in Adwords

Check out this US search result for a very popular keyword "ringtones" (click on it to see the full size)



Loads of ads from the same advertiser - something that Google does not allow.

There is an ongoing discussion at WebMasterWorld concerning Google's role in this, highlighting the possibilities of Google deliberately letting this happen to increase revenue, or perhaps just failing to police this any more because they don't care:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3520638.htm