This is my first YOUmoz post and unlike many first timers, you don't need to be nice to me.  As Tom and his favorite song would say, Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation.

I thought that Jane did a great job on bringing up some interesting points about Google in her post Google's Advice - Godsend or Gimmick?

It's certainly true that Google divulges quite a bit of information and advice to the public, but taking a quote from Jane

...always remember that (Google) is going to misspeak and they're going to publish posts and comments that are in their own interest. They are also aware of their power, and so we should pay close attention to the meaning behind the messages we hear and find the middle ground between faithful servant and irate conspiracy theorist.

So why would a person ever go into operating a business?  To MAKE money, of course, and Google isn't exactly a non-profit organization.

This brings me to the Google Content Network and Advertising.  This is old news but something worth exploring. We know in 2007 Google released what is known as "Placement Reports" for the Content Network. This is a detailed report of all the websites on the content network that your ad has appeared with the usual click rate, click throughs and conversion data of the search network. Before this introduction of the "placement report" you were told by Google that your ads will appear on certain websites with relevant content based on algorithms and what you are trying to advertise for.  Basically, before the introduction of this report you would have no clue what websites your ad was running on.

If you advertise in the Google Content Network and have never run a placement report, please do so immediately as this is what I have found.

Having just taken over our entire Google Adwords Campaign 3 weeks ago, I will tell y'all that we bid on words that are related to the Vietnam War and Vietnam veterans as we are a military website.  Obviously military veterans in this country speak English and use English speaking sites so we targeted only English speaking sites and websites located in the United States.

After running a placement report I found that we had advertisements running on Vietnamese websites (some with English words, some totally in Vietnamese).  4 of these websites were producing impressions in the hundreds of thousands with high click rates.  4 sites that were in Vietnamese cost our company in one year alone over $3,000 with 1 sale! I think we can agree that that is an awful CPA and ROI, as we don't sell anything over $60 on our website.  I further analyzed the report and found an additional 200 sites that either were foreign or produced poor CPA's.  So I placed these 200 websites on our "site exclusion" list to be excluded from running our advertisements. "Site exclusion" is located under tools in Adwords.  By doing this I saved our company a pretty pretty penny for the next year, resulting in massive amounts of praise by my boss (I should've said I'll split the savings with you!).

So getting back to the point of Godsend or Gimmick, what the hell gives??!! We clearly stated to only appear on English speaking sites located in the United States, and based on my placement report we appeared on websites that catered to Vietnamese people, Ethiopians, Chinese and Korean news plus a various number of other foreign countries.  I sent Adwords an email asking for an explanation.  Here's what I got from the Adwords team:

"I ran some placement performance reports and can confirm that your ads are appearing on domains outside of the standard .com and .net. When we place ads on the content network as well as the search network, we do so based upon the user's IP address. In your case, a user may have an IP associated with the United States, however, is visiting sites outside of the US."

Yeah, that's great, you run an IP address scan to make sure the IP is hosted in the US, but come on, Google, everyone knows that you can get an IP address in the US no problem!  I know you're capable of scanning a website to see if the content is in English rather than VIETNAMESE!  

This tells me that Google is looking out for their best interests which is, of course, generating money through Adwords. HOWEVER...

Where did I learn how to run the placement performance report and how to exclude websites? In a free Google package that included an apron, cooking recipes and a small booklet titled "Recipes For Success, Advanced Tips From AdWords Experts."

Google: Godsend or Gimmick??