Imagine for a moment that you are buying ads in a magazine.

Full page, full colour ads. Nice. 

The salesman at the magazine tells you that you're getting a great deal. For only $10,000 dollars your ad is going to be in 150,000 magazines. You think that's a great price. You book the ad, give them your money and run back to your office to wait for the phone to start ringing off the hook.

But the results are less than spectacular, and you start to question why. So you get back in touch with the salesman. "How many magazines does my ad appear in?", you ask. "150,000," is the happy reply "but we actually only sell 50,000 of them, the rest we just recycle and pulp."

Would you be upset? You betcha.

Welcome to the Google AdWords display platform.

I love the new bulk upload facility for image ads in Google AdWords - I really do.

But with the recent change from Destination to Final URL - there is a funky little quirk that caught me out and got my ads disapproved... here's what happened...

Do you believe in karma?

It's not such an existential question as it might sound... essentially, do you believe in giving back, paying it forward - putting in before you take out?

I do. And this is why being awarded the Top Contributor badge on the Google AdWords Community Forum is something I'm very proud of.

Recently I've read a few articles about just how poor the Google Display Network works for advertisers.

Many of the writers question whether it should be used at all.

And, as if this is not bad enough, Google are testing a paid version of the web experience where the ads are pixelated, so your senses needn't be assaulted and offended by their gaudy messages.

But, just perhaps, the GDN is an Ugly Duckling - just waiting to be recognised as the swan it really is.

Let's wander back in time... before the internet. You wanted to find a plumber, you went to the yellow pages, or the classified ads section of your local newspaper. Today we call that Google search.

But there were lot's of other things you bought that you didn't want. Or need. You saw them in magazines, or on TV or heard about them on the radio. Maybe someone left a flyer in your mailbox, or sent you a letter (remember those?). Today we call that Google Display Network.

I've been quite happy over the past few months. I discovered that I could get most of the traffic I wanted with a minimal amount of fuss using Google's new Broad Match Modified (BMM) match type. I felt like Baby Bear from Goldilocks - BMM isn't too loose, nor is it too restrictive. It's just right!

And like a happy bear, I was gradually replacing most of my phrase match keywords with their BMM counterparts.

I had never really used broad match - that was like putting all my money on the desk and telling Google to just take what it wanted. So I ended up with basically two types of campaign. Those using BMM and those using exact match. I like exact match... not quite as much as I like BMM - but for different reasons - It's badass.

A couple of months ago Google AdWords introduced a drag and drop function for adding image ads to campaigns. I love it. It saves a lot of time on one of those functions that cannot be automated and must be done on a "one by one" basis.

They recently made a further improvement to this feature but I'm not quite as pleased with this one....

I'm lucky. Luckier than most. It takes me 5 minutes to drive from my house to my office.

I can stay in bed until the very last minute and still get to work on time.

And yet my office is 625 kilometres from my house.

OK - not completely true.... it's true that my house is a 5 minute drive from my office. And it is true that I stay in bed until the last possible moment most mornings.

Clutter.

It's what stops us from achieving our goals. Clutter on our desk. Clutter in our heads. And clutter in our PPC accounts.

When we take a step back from the day to day micro-management of ppc campaigns we can sometimes catch a glimpse of the bigger picture. The one where the fundamental principles shine through.

PPC management is simple and the secret is.....

Below the fold... it's a term borrowed from newspaper advertising. When a broad sheet newspaper was folded in half and then stacked on a newsstand, you could only see the top half of the front page. Everything else was, well... below the fold.

The internet has borrowed this term to describe ads which are on the web page being browsed, but not visible unless the user scrolls down, and there has been a lot of talk over the past few months about whether Google should count an ad which is never seen as an impression. It's along the lines of trees falling in forests and no one hearing them....

Sometimes the most innocuous of changes can have ripples that become surfing waves before you even realise.

Google have just released news of a change that is to be rolled out during February that will subtly change the way in which conversions are reported in Adwords.

Here are the bones of the changes:

So you're running your business. You've put everything into getting it to this point. And now you're ready to embark on the next step - getting more customers. Everywhere you look people are talking about Google AdWords - Heck, you even got a voucher through the mail.... if you spend $25 Google are going to give you $75!

How can that be a bad deal?

And it's simple. Google are going to walk you through it... So you open the box.

In the olden days... long before the internet... advertisers had a term for ads on the front page of a newspaper that would not be seen when the paper was on the newsstand or left on a table - below the fold.

Generally, if you were paying for a front page ad, you would pay less if your ad was to be positioned below the fold. Makes sense.

Online advertisers have borrowed this term to describe ads that are on a web page, but that are not visible to the user unless they scroll down to it.

If you are an advertiser you want your ad to be seen - obviously. And you are happy to pay for your ad to be seen. The model for this is CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions). It differs from CPC (Cost per Click) in that you pay every time your ad appears 1,000 times on web pages. At least that's what we thought was the case.