Earlier this morning a colleague of mine was conducting a search and called me over to show me something interesting. Immediately below each of the sponsored search results (AdWords) were three separate variable names and values. The numbers that have been shared publicly, and documented here on this post include those for major corporations including Honda Motor Company and Hewlett-Packard.
- The advertiser values shown include:
- Pscore
- mCPC
- thresh
Here are screenshots of each ad and their corresponding stats…
I’ve also included a Full Screen Shot of Ads and their Values for review (opens in new window).
The next step for me of course was to try to search for these variables. When I conducted a search for “mCPC” I saw the following example again for an advertiser’s stats being shared:
My initial thoughts here are that mCPC is the maximum cost per click for an ad. For example, the first ad shown appeared to be from Honda Motor Company. The second AdWords ad was for a small, lead generation web site in the automotive industry. My suggestion here is that with deeper pockets, Honda is in a position to maintain a higher maximum cost per click — which appears to be $4.71 compared to the competing CPC ceiling of $1.09.
Additionally, when researching Pscore, I found a document published by the European Bioinformatics Institute that may be related. That document states:
P-score represents minus logarithm of the P-value. P-value measures the probability of achieving the same or better quality of match at a chance, i.e. at random picking the structures from the database. “Quality of match” is a complex characteristics, which accounts for RMSD, number of aligned residues Nalgn, number of gaps Ngaps, number of matched Secondary Structure Elements and the SSE match score. The higher P-score (the lower P-value), the more surprising, or statistically significant, is the match.
Either way, this is a very interesting leak of data. I want to give thanks to Paul from Search Marketing Corporation for sharing this initial find with me as well. Please share your thoughts on this via the comments area below.
