If you haven’t seen this in your AdWords account yet, it is pretty cool. There is a new report called Placement Performance. Here are the benefits that I see from it.

1. Advertising is all about conversions and it is also about where the traffic comes from.
2. Placement Performance allows you to see what domains are sending you traffic through the AdSense content network.
3. Simply run the report and see which domains are performing the best, and which ones are performing the worse.
4. The ones that are performing the best you may wish to contact them to discuss advertising on their site directly. You could get a much better deal going to them direct. Or you can use Google’s site targeting advertising which is impression based.
5. The ones that are NOT performing well, or not at all, you can block their domains from running your ads. This is a great way to get rid of click fraud.

Here is another great report from Google to put more power into the advertiser’s hand. MFA (Made for AdSense) sites just received another blow.

Okay, this is just awesome. I had some ads banned by Google and they sent me to their “ban list” only the product I was promoting wasn’t on the list. I was told, “It falls in this area” which was ridiculous. It would be as if I sold flowers online for men to give to women on a date and Google said “that is in the same class as prostitution.”

Is it just me or is it getting more difficult to advertise effectively with Google? Hopefully it is just a phase and we can return to normalcy soon.

Here are some of my personal favorite banned products/services:

Academic Aids: They just recently added this one which won’t allow companies to advertise essays for sale to college and high school students. Can’t write that essay that is due tomorrow? No problem! Buy it online! I still remember the episode of “Welcome Back Kotter” where that happened … where one of the students bought an essay “on the street” that was originally written by his teacher, Mr. Kotter some 20 years earlier. It seems that colleges and high schools look at this practice as cheating. When did it change? I think they always have.

Aids to Pass Drug Tests: I was an affiliate years ago for a company that SOLD drug tests that you could administer as a high school coach, or even as a parent. As I always do, I bought one to test it and did so on my teenage son. He, of course, passed. But in my research in the market, I came across all the products that “mask” drugs. Wasn’t the best one when the Minnesota Viking’s running back was busted with the “Whizonator” in his carry on bag at the airport? Some people ….

Automated Ad Clicking: Okay, so are you going to be stupid enough to ADVERTISE on Google on how to defraud Google’s system? I mean, comeon, they have all of your contact information including your credit card. Connect the dots … it’s pretty easy.

Bulk Marketing: Same thing here. The government wants to catch the Spammers. Google wants to nail the Spammers. So the Spammers setup an AdWords account with their personal and credit card information. Spammers are getting less intelligent everyday.

Copywrited Works: There have been companies who were advertising in Google on how to purchase copywrited works with no legal right to sell them. Again, they are leaving a nice paper trail for the authorities. It is similar to robbing a 7-11 and leaving your wallet with your ID on the counter as you leave. Not a smart move.

Fake Documents: “Get yourself a fake ID or fake passport at this website.” Hmmm. Do you think the US Homeland Security office would be interested in those ads?

Prostitution: Even though Google says it disallows ads for prostitutes, they still have ads for CraigList.

Go through the ban list yourself and know it well so if you have an add that is regected, you know what is on the list.

Not much “news” here, but Google has renamed their “personalized search” iGoogle. It is now in 26 languages in 40 countries. That is pretty cool. Google is trying harder and harder to deliver content based on individual want and desire. For example, if the user typed in Apple did she mean a piece of fruit or a computer? Based on past search behavior, Google can make the right distinction. Of course, Mac users will tell you that the person performing that search is a PC user, as a Mac user would never perform a search on just one word.

Geo-targeted ads will be available as the user’s location will be known through the iGoogle Profile or through the Google Maps default information.

The new Search Recommendations that they have been testing will be watched closely as Google begins to attempt to PREDICT what the user wants. This service is very buggy, but the potential of it is incredible. If anyone can do this, it is Google.

Google Trends keeps getting better and better. The “Hot List” will show Today’s Hot List on the home page, and if you click on More Hot Trends, you will get the Top 100 list for that days searches. Using Google Trends has been a great injection to many SEOs when doing competitive analysis … but with the Hot Trends, you can target hot searches right now via PPC and capitalize on short term bursts of traffic.

Make sure you know that this is not the “most popular” searches for the day, these are the searches that had the highest “surge” which is mainly due to a news release or an event. Clicking on the term will open a new window which will outline the latest postings on the subject which will help you gather why the phrase is hot.

If dig … just a little, you can find great buys on traffic in your industry with a hot new trend, and usually just a little creativity is needed to spin it in the right direction for you to capitalize on it!

The negative on this right now is that Bloggers are using this information to create Blog posts about the subject in hopes of being listed in the references section in order to get more traffic. I would love to see an analysis on this to measure the ROI on this tactic. I would estimate it would be quite low.

One of my favorite features is that it will tell you the countries that target the keyword phrase the most, so you can ensure if you go after a short-term phrase, you are writing in the language that dominates the queries. It wouldn’t make sense to target a phrase that people in Italy hit most often when the site is written in Japanese. The geo-targeting can be quite useful when looking to do a PPC campaign, but I still feel the demographic information over at MSN adCenter is a lot better.

Addition: A member informed me that Yahoo! had a similar function called Yahoo! Buzz and that it should be mentioned here. Fine, I will mention it, however, it is not in the same class as what Google has put together, despite Google’s limitations in this space. You can just tell the information is “washed” by editors. I would much rather have my data raw thank you.