In terms of actually determining if a geotargeted ad should be shown, unfortunately advertisers are not provided with enough information to make comparisons. In the case where a request came in from an IP address with no mapping, but the query contained the targeted location, the ad could be shown, according to the AdWords documentation. However, advertisers don’t get a report of what comes in on the HTTP requests, so they have no way to determine what factors were applied in deciding whether an ad was shown.

Sorry to chime in here again but this hand wringing about the 100% “promise” of accuracy of geotargeting is irritating to say the least.

When selecting regions the UI provides little in the way of warning or disclaimer about accuracy, but that is a classic problem of AdWords disclosure – like that of telling, or not telling, clients when their ads will run on parked pages. But I digress.

As I think it’s fair to infer from Mikkel’s comment, I agree the issue is where in the world does Google get off charging for something they are uncertain meets the client’s criteria?

Why does the slop spill on the customer, not Google? If Google is not 100% sure of the visitor IP, by all means don’t show the ad or don’t charge for the click.

Why is the burden on the customer to police Google? And to do so without detailed reporting of click IPs?

In my case reported above in this thread the IP was 124.176.218.XX (last two munged for privacy of visitor)

How long does it take to confirm it was not in the USA? Yah.

Google could not handle that one?

And again, most importantly, and in direct contradiction of public statements, irrespective of the issue of how accurate their look-ups are, how does Google really handle properly reported credit requests for bad geotargeting?

Folks, this is a direct quote from an e-mail sent to me by AdWords Support:

“Since our tests indicate that this targeting is accurate in the vast majority of cases, we do not credit for geographic targeting.” (quote here real)

They keep the money. That is the only way that can be understood. If I order a salad and the waiter delivers a steak, charges my credit card and refuses to reverse the charge, I’d view that as fraud. Especially if they tell me “Our data suggests that folks who order salads really wanted steaks in the vast majority of cases, therefore we do not credit for steaks served you did not order.” (quote here fictional)

As stated earlier, Google did finally reverse charge in this case, but it took a month, over 30 e-mails and hours of calls. That behavior, along with the real quote above, speaks volumes about Google’s intent.

They did not, in my case, quickly, easily, willingly or cooperatively reverse the charge and it was impeccably documented and politely requested at the outset. Read the response quote – they had no intention to reverse the click. None. And an official representative stated in writing (the quote) that this was official company policy. And if past is precedent that response was far from a personal message to me, it was pure boilerplate (template) text that reflected official approved policy.

Frankly, the class actions don’t seem as an appropriate a remedy as seeing a bunch of State Attorney Generals investigate this a la Microsoft.

Part of why this irks me so much is the hypocrisy of it all.

Yet another reason is this is doing significant harm to small AdSense publishers, like me, in the content network. When advertisers pull out of the content network for fear of being ripped off by who knows who, the little publishers also get hurt. And that’s before the nightmare of so-called smart pricing.

Thanks for the electrons Matt. I’d be honored to meet you at an event.

Where on Googles TOS does it say “We will show you ads to users in the region you select + any other user we do not know where is coming from”?

Google have so far claimed, oh but thats just a small number. In most cases we do fine! How do you know? How do we, the advertisers, know? For all I know Google is indeed not doing very well on this given the fact that IPs Google should, and can find out about they apparently say they have not mapped. So, Matt, is Google’s mapping bad or is Google not telling the truth when they claim that IPs from the biggest local ISPs (such as in my own case) are not in your IP database? Sorry, but as I said before, I simply do not believe that Google have data that is not as good as what I can pull of the web for a few bucks.

The second claim from Google is, oh yes, we may have shown your ad outside the region you targeted but we never charged you for the clicks that came through. Does anyone really believe that Google will waste its inventory on commercial ads they do not get paid for? I don’t! From a business as well as a technical point of view it dosn’t make any sense. Why not give that inventory to ads that are either targeted to that region or no region at all – ads that Google could in fact legitimately charge for.

nothing to do with the fact that it was wmr that found the story ..
or the fact that wmr called on people they are close to, to look at the data.

the terrorist side of the story is not what i wanted to get into .. The NSA are all over that with the FBI ,, and before we broke the story I believe.

I’m interested in the Clickdata from AIT .. and combining that with some other clients, in fact I’m just getting the data for over 100 million dollars of ppc spend.. which I said to Adam i would share. But man the TW thing imo was a low blow,., the story was nothing to do with me being posted over there and deep down you know that.

DaveN

I remember the Nazi/Yahoo France case. In fact, it is mentioned in the geolocation paper I provided a link to. My understanding of Yahoo’s statements is that they believed it was impossible to guarantee any level of accuracy of geotargeting results. This doesn’t mean that it would never work; certainly, there are instances where the mapping corresponds to the physical location of an (alleged) user. But it would lead (and has led) to problems when the mappings fail, and advertisers are charged for usage they were (perhaps accidently) led to believe they would not be charged for.

BTW, Jonathan, there are parallels to click fraud in the telecom industry, such as 1-900 phone scams. However, this doesn’t stop phone companies from providing detailed billing statements when that is warranted. I think there is some merit to providing detailed click charges against IPs, and allowing advertisers to block on an IP range, provided that they understand that this might lead to the blocking of “legit” traffic if that range is transferred to another organization. I would also understand if Google needed to charge more to provide this service.

I think your larger point is also more interesting: how does a company try to stay true to itself and our users as it grows? How do we make sure that we advocate for our users, and that the outside world knows that? When we have discussions internally, I’ve been a fan of the idea of trying to bake the culture into our corporate DNA in different ways, so the culture doesn’t rely on the personality of a few people.

DaveN, the Baker/Boser/Shoemoney/TW stories all appeared the night of the 6th. That agrees with what I said in the post, then it got quiet for a while as the web mulled over the claims. The short mention in SEW was on the 7th, and the ClickZ article was on the 8th. I didn’t say that it didn’t get written up, just that a) the first write-ups were mostly WMR folks (not BH folks; I don’t mean to imply that this was a BH thing), and b) not many other people wrote it up, given the considerable claims made for the story.

CPCcurmudgeon, I agree that geotargeting is a best-effort service; if you see documentation that claims geotargeting to be 100% perfect, please point it out to me so that we can make sure the language is as accurate as possible. In November of 2000 I evaluated geolocation vendors for Google’s initial implementation of geolocation, so I’m well aware that no solution is perfect. On the other hand, do you remember the Nazi/Yahoo France case several years ago, where Yahoo claimed it was impossible to determine country-of-origin from an IP address? Measured by that incident, it’s wonderful that geotargeting has gotten so much more accurate since then.

Perhaps the AdWords documentation can be reworded to describe geotargeting as a best effort service, making it clear to all concerned parties that while efforts are made to target, results cannot be guaranteed.

Too bad you’re not on the ads team, Matt. BTW, I find the operator in the spam protection field difficult to read. I realize this is intentional, but it might pose problems for people with poor eyesight.

The first phase of the story was fascinating because other than Loren Baker, pretty much the only write-ups the first night were from WebmasterRadio (WMR) hosts:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061207-180311
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624150

hmmm the date on that seems tell a different tale but then again it depends what your job is, Yours is fighting spam not reading the news I guess..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=YQZ&q=mattcutts.com&btnG=Search

you might want to clean up the proxy stuff and tiny url stuff and the edu stuff .. but then again bad serps is good for adwords …

DaveN

I’m glad these post where pointed out to me

- Threadwatch started a discussion called “Is Google Funding Al Qaeda & Hezbollah Terrorist Groups”. Threadwatch is co-owned by David Naylor, who co-hosts the Strikepoint show on WebmasterRadio.

Debunk all you want but don’t try make out this is some BH hat thing against google …. thats all I will say In Public .. on this at this time .. in fact if google needs infomation then they can go Via the correct channels.

DaveN