About a week ago did Google introduce the referral program for Google Apps via Google AdSense.
I grabbed the code of one of the “new” Text link ads that are over a year old , but only became available recently to advertisers that are part of the beta test program of Google’s Pay per action and put it on my site .
To my surprise was the anchor text a bit different to the one I selected and I first thought I made a mistake. I went back and selected the desired text link ad again, pasted it into the page on my site, made sure that I got everything right and… still wrong.
I selected a different link with different anchor text and tried that one. It changed alright, but again not to the anchor text I selected via the AdSense interface. I ended up checking all text links and except for one are all anchors for the 9 available text links wrong.
Mixed up would be more correct. Here is a list of the text links for Google Apps and what the selected anchor was and what the ad code actually rendered.
“Google Apps”
shows “Google Apps Premier Edition”
“Sign up for Google Apps.”
shows “Google Apps”
“Google Apps Premier Edition”
shows “Sign up for Google Apps.”
“Google Apps Standard Edition”
shows “Google Apps Premier Edition”
“Google Apps Education Edition”
shows “Sign up for Google Apps.”
“Power your domain with Google Apps.”
shows “Power your domain with Google Apps.”
“Lower your organization’s IT costs with Google Apps. ”
shows “Google Apps Standard Edition”
“Get your whole organization talking with Google Apps”
shows “Google Apps”
“Google Apps: Get powerful communication tools for your organization.”
shows “Google Apps”
From how it looks, must “Power your domain with Google Apps.” be the QA team’s Google Apps test Ad 🙂
The question is now what Google should correct, the selected anchor or the displayed? I used the link that says: “Get your whole organization talking with Google Apps” on my site where it today simply says: “Google Apps”.
If Google corrects what’s get displayed, then I don’t have anything to change, because it will still show “Google Apps” after the fix, but if Google changes the text that is being rendered to match what was selected, then my link on my site will change from “Google Apps” to “Get your whole organization talking with Google Apps”.
I am surprised that this was not reported yet. The program is live for over 10 days and I can’t imagine that no publisher created a text link ad for Google Apps yet or did create one and did not wonder why the Ad shows something different then he selected in the AdSense interface.
First Yahoo! Search Marketing, now Google. This must be the week of glitches or is it because everybody, but me, is in N.Y.? 🙂
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketing Resources at Cumbrowski.com such as the Google Referral Programs Primer.
