Google disapproved 134 million ads in 2011!!

Google revealed in a blog post  that they axed 134 million ads in 2011. 136% rise from the year before. Back in 2008, the company only disapproved 25 million ads.

The rise appears to be due to a combination of factors — first, there are just more bad ads out there.

“My interpretation is that the better we get, the faster we get at shutting them down, the more persistent they get,” David Baker, Google’s director of engineering for advertising said.

Secondly, Google appears to be getting better at detecting them over time.

“Despite the rising numbers that you see, the bottom line is that things are working,” Baker added “Things are improving over time.”

 

Google announced a new PO Box policy for Google Places!!

Google announced a new PO Box policy for Google Places. As per the new guidelines, you can no longer put your PO Box information in both the address 1 or 2 fields. Earlier businesses could do that, but not anymore. Here is what Google says about the changes made:

“As it stands today, we allow users to list their P.O. Box in Address Line 2. This sends your listing for manual review to our teams (that’s why you might see your listing’s status as “Pending”), who then verify the accuracy of Address Line 1.

Google announced a new report promising to provide advertisers with more transparency!

Google announced a new report for AdWords on the Inside AdWords blog, promising to provide advertisers with more transparency into the ad auction.

One of the more interesting things about this new report is that it provides Impression Share at the keyword level, something that has not been seen before. The new Auction Insights Report also provides some interesting competitor data. Another statistic provided that is worth returning to in-depth is the Top of page rate.

For years advertisers have struggled to understand how the auction process works and have asked for more insights into the auction to help optimize for better performance. Currently Google provides competitive reports at category level (in the Opportunities tab) and impression share data, but now they will offer information to show how advertisers are performing in comparison to other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions.