The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Digital Photography and Photoshop Roundup

Here's a roundup of articles about digital photography and Photoshop I've published recently in my Photoblog 2.0:

• Processing a Digital Photo
• Fun with Phlowrs and Photoshop
• Opening Camera RAW in Photoshop CS2
• The Evolution of Photography
• Without My Polarizer I Am Blue
• Would Ansel Like Digital?
• Shine On, Ersatz Moon
• Yosemite without People
• It's the Lens, Baby

Editor? What Editor?

Consider the following sentence in John Twelve Hawks's The Traveler (on page 59): "The tension in his shoulders and the quick way he moved his hands showed he was worried, but Gabriel knew that his brother would never show it."

I think I know what this author meant to write (that the brother would never show worry to an outsider), but the way it appears in print is blatantly and unintentionally self-contradictory. (You can't both "showed" and "never show.")

This is a hardcover title published by the prestigous Doubleday division of Random House. The novel essentially has the appeal of a cable sci-fi action movie: not much depth or characterization, but quick moving and diverting. It has received a fair amount of attention (including a starred review in Publishers Weekly) and sales (it is currently #71 in sales on Amazon).

So my rhetorical question is really this: if a frontlist title like this gets the kind of skimpy editorial review that the sentence I cite indicates, what kind of editorial support is given to most books these days. Better we shouldn't ask.

Harry Potter Comes of Age

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the most recent book in the Harry Potter series.

The book is a very pleasant change from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

In this penultimate volume in the series, Harry has lost his whiny, teenaged angst -- and calmly and efficiently begins to assert his manifest destiny. Way to go, Harry!

It's also good to see the complex details of the plot in this series under control and beginning to come together.

The ending is a bit of a let-down, but it's probably necessary as a platform for the last book in the series.

Now if only I had some of that felix felicis!

Google Moon

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, Google Moon is now open and showing NASA imagery. Google Moon uses the Google Maps interface to help you take a close up and personal tour of the moon.

Here's the Google Moon FAQ containing an unusual announcement of Google's future plans: "We usually don’t announce future products in advance, but in this case, yes, we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information."

Zoom in too close, and what do you think you see? (Closer, that is, than the resolution provided by the NASA maps which are the underlying data for NASA Moon). Proof that the moon *is* really made of cheese!

Google AdWords API web services

If you want to build and application with the Google AdWords API, you should know that the AdWords API services have the same relationship to each other as the objects you can manipulate from a regular AdWords account. So get to know AdWords before you try to program with the APIs.

Most importantly, an AdWords campaign contains ad groups which contain keywords and creatives. To modify keywords associated with an ad, you’ll need to start with the Campaign Service (using the client information for the account the campaign is part of), and down to an ad group via the AdGroup Service, and from there to the Keyword Service.

Here’s some more information about the purpose and role of each of the AdWords APIs services, and links to each service’s WSDL file:

Account Service

The Account Service lets you create and modify information associated with AdWords accounts, such as billing information. WSDL file

AdGroup Service

The AdGroup Service lets you create ad groups, list ad groups, associate ad groups with a campaign, and perform actions. For example, you can set the cost-per-click for all keywords in the ad group. WSDL file

Campaign Service

The Campaign Service lets you create, list, and modify campaigns. For example, you can change the name, set the daily budget, and define the end date of a campaign. This service also lets you perform actions on a campaign, such as pausing the campaign. WSDL file

Creative Service

The Creative Service lets you create and modify creatives, and associate them with an ad group. WSDL file

Info Service

The Info Service lets you get basic information about how much you have used the AdWords API and how many operations you have left. WSDL file

Keyword Service

The Keyword Service lets you get information about keywords. For example, you can get the keywords in an ad group, and create and modify keywords. WSDL file

Report Service

The Report Service lets you generate reports on the performance of your AdWords campaigns. For example, you can get reports on the daily number of impressions, clicks, and clickthrough rate. WSDL file

Traffic Estimator Service

The Traffic Estimator Service lets you estimate the performance of keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. You can estimate data, such as the cost-per-click, clickthrough rate, and average position of your ads. WSDL file

Grokking AdWords Conversion Tracking

"Conversion Tracking" sounds arcane, but really it is a simple mechanism you can use to determine if your Google AdWords campaigns are producing the results you want.

How does the value of a conversion relate to the return on investment of a Google ad campaign? This is pretty straightforward Business School 101. If you understand what a conversion is worth to you, and the percentage of CPC (cost per click) AdWords visitors who do convert (the conversion ratio), then it is easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI) for an AdWords campaign. If the amount each conversion is worth multiplied times the conversion ratio is greater than your average CPC, then your AdWords campaign is producing a positive ROI—and probably makes sense.

You could put this as an equation. For an AdWords campaign to make sense, then the following should be true:

Conversion amount * Conversion Ratio > Average CPC

Google's underlying conversion-tracking mechanism bears a striking resemblence to the way Google AdSense works (AdSense is the program used to put Google contextual ads on your and my web sites):

• You add some special Google conversion tracking code to a results page on your site.
• You make sure that the results page will be opened when a visitor is converted, for example, by buying something (in the case of a purchase, the results page usually doubles as an order confirmation).
• When a user clicks your AdWords ad, Google adds a cookie to the user’s computer to track the user.
• When a user with the Google AdWords cookie on their computer opens the results page, a conversion is logged, and a special tracking message displayed to the user.

An interesting, and somewhat controversial, feature of Google AdWords conversion tracking is that as part of the tracking, Google notifies users that they are being tracked. This notification is produced by the Google-supplied code you add to the results page. A tracked user sees a message titled Google Site Stats with a “send feedback” link when the results page is opened.

Google explains that they prefer to be above board about their actions, and that the send feedback link is chance for users to understand Google’s privacy policies, and indeed to reject the Google tracking cookie if they wish.

However, most major advertising programs do provide conversion tracking options, and other advertising programs that track users and conversions do not “brand” the process. Users who click through ads in these other programs never know they are being tracked.

To summarize, Google tracks users coming through AdWords to your site by giving them a cookie. You decide when a conversion has occured by opening a page for your visitor (for example, to confirm an order - but the choice is yours!). When the two match (the cookie and the confirmation page) a conversion is recorded and reported in AdWords.

Cross-channel conversion tracking is a nifty feature within AdWords that also allows you to do conversion traffic coming in to your web properties from other advertising networks such as Overture. Taking advantage of this feature, if you are deploying ads across multiple advertising venures, means that you can use the powerful AdWords reporting facilities to aggregate your information about conversions in one place.

My Life Is on Hold!

The Googleplex Blog is on temporary hold for the month of July while I finish up Building Advertising Tools with Google (O'Reilly). Please check back, and in the meantime have a look at my Photoblog 2.0. Sorry for the silence and thanks!

Harold

Independence Day Google