I have been getting some Google Adwords phishing emails lately, and aside from some poor formatting, they look fairly legitimate. Google posted some security tips the other day, and they’re not half bad, but I wanted to share an example.

Here is an email I received recently: (warning - don’t click the link in there!)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
Please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your billing information.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Google AdWords Team

Overall the phisher did a pretty good job of making the email look legitimate. However, the formatting was a little off, and the request was a little too vague.

Plus, no matter how well camouflaged the link is, it’s not that hard to spot that the link goes to a subdomain of 4e1w1.cn, which is definitely not Adwords!

But the dead giveaway is that this email came to my “@internetmarketingsucks.com” address I have listed on this blog, which is NOT an actual Adwords account email. So obviously it’s not from Adwords because Adwords does not know about this email address…

There’s a very important lesson - don’t mingle your actual Adwords email with a public one. Then you won’t have to really worry about phishing, since your Adwords account updates will only come to your semi-private email address.

For example, you might use josh@myawesomelookingfunblog.com as a public email on your blog, but then you would use josh.doe.adwords@myawesomelookingfunblog.com for your Adwords account.

Anyway…

Be careful out there.

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I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of one person that’s happy with their cell phone service provider or their long distance carrier. You just go on with life (with your fingers crossed) hoping you never have to deal with them.

But sometimes people just complain about them because it’s so common. So why not ease up on AT&T and cast your glance at someone that deserves it - Pay-Per-Click Ad Agencies!

That’s right, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and all the others. Here’s why:

3. Keyword Restrictions

Whenever I call up an old buddy of mine, I regularly swear and use profanity. No one cares. I also talk about Nike, Adidas, eBay, Amazon, and many other trademarked brand names. No big deal. And my extensive slang… no problemo.

But have you ever used certain four letter words in an Adwords ad? Or bid on a trademarked name? Or used poor grammar and vocabulary?

If so, they probably disapproved your campaigns, banned your account, or sent your personal details over to the trademark attorneys.

2. Coupons and vouchers are only good for first-time customers.

Don’t you just hate seeing those offers for “$100 in Free Clicks!” that are only available for new publishers?

It’s kind of like the “all the long distance calls you want for $1.99 per month (for the first 2 days)” that you get from the phone company. But let’s say you get a new house with a new phone number - your new address means you are eligible for the deal once again.

(And sometimes if you call them and beg nicely, they’ll give out special treatment to long-time customers.)

But let’s say you start a new website and start new PPC campaigns for it. Do you get anything for it? Any good deals? NO! The PPC companies will keep screwing you until you start a new company with a new Tax ID number (and therefore can start a second advertiser account.)

To make things worse, there are sites that list all these vouchers. Even with third tier search engines. I get pissed at Adwords even more whenever I see that list!

1. You Can’t Bitch Someone Out

What’s the first thing you do when you see some extra charges tacked onto your bill? If you’re like me, you call up customer service and promptly bitch out every representative that picks up the phone. (Being rational is not something I like to do.)

There’s just something satisfying about yelling at helpless underpaid customer service reps. Yelling at their manager is great, too. Especially when the charges were all your fault to begin with.

But have you ever done that to Google? Called them up and said “Yo G, I can’t f&@$ believe this quality score $2*$&*$@!! What’s up with dat?”

Chances are your answer is “No.” That’s because you can’t talk to a real person at Google. So you have to go flame them on the message boards. And that is nowhere near as much fun.

* Note that you should still hate your phone company, but hate Adwords too.

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Boring Adsense ads can be seen on almost every site out there. It’s nowhere near as bad as those talking smiley face banners, but a lot of Adsense ads are mundane. Not all of them though…

Every so often you come across a really cool site-targeted Adwords campaign, sparking your interest and making you laugh. One of the ones I saw was from Advolcano, which is an advertising network similar to AdBrite and AdEngage, and the ad was on JohnChow.com.

See, John Chow had recently started displaying AdVolcano ads as a publisher, and AdVolcano took full advantage of that. If you’ve had any marketing classes, they tell you that a prospect must get your advertising message seven times before taking action. So Advolcano went to work! John Chow had blogged about the new ads, and you could clearly see the “Ads by AdVolcano” message on his site. But still, AdVolcano bought some ads to be displayed on JohnChow.com! (See the pic below.)

(Click the picture for a larger version.)

The ad just enhanced the powers of “celebrity endorsement” and “social proof,” the concept that if someone popular is doing something, you should do it too.

It may have worked well, but these days I don’t see any AdVolcano ads there. Perhaps AdVolcano got a good enough boost from that, but it could have backfired. One might wonder if John used the ads and ended up hating them, hence they are no longer on his site?

(Note: No worries, there are still plenty of good publishers listed at AdVolcano.com, including JohnChow.com, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re ready to pay for big traffic.)

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Another good blog post I was checking out…

It’s from Shoemoney, and it’s all about Google cracking down on people doing some sort of arbitrage through Adwords.

See the full story at:

http://www.shoemoney.com/…nuke-arbitragers/

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Still paying less than $10 per click in your Google Adwords account?

Either you have landing pages that Google happens to like, or they haven’t gotten to you yet! Apparently Google is on another one of thier rampages to improve the quality of their website by destroying the businesses of its paying customers. It’s no surprise to see this “Google Slap” as many have called it.

I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard about it yet. But basically, if your Adwords landing page is not up to G’s standards, your minimum bid will probably go from $0.03 to $5.00 or more!

What are people going to do?

Build MFA sites!

No, not the numerous “made for adsense” websites, these are the next breed - “made for adwords” websites! Complete with extraneous content and longer, uninteresting sales letters. And of course, no more squeeze pages with nothing more than an opt-in form, which were becoming very popular.

Although this may be a good thing for searchers if it works, we have to wonder how long it will take to work. It wasn’t long before I saw articles about how to slap Google back. These articles and reports show you the special tricks that will allow you to get your same ads back into Adwords on the cheap. These are the kind of tricks that will just force Google to do more work to achieve quality results.

Or maybe Google has something else up their sleeves…

They are rumored to be launching a new CPA network soon. Perhaps they want you in that instead, which could give Google a bigger percentage of your revenue…

By the way, here is some more info I found on slapping Google:

I Gotta Tell You

Googleicious

And a piece about the new CPA network:

ValueClick Killer

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