How To Combat Google Adword Cookies Monitoring Your Search Analysis

2007 July 18

by Barry

Recently I’ve been testing some new keywords, so my analysis of campaigns have been bordering on the obsessive through ad copy testing and competitor analysis – looking out for minute changes and determining patterns. I use a similar optimisation process as Randfish on SEOmoz.

During my daily analysis I noticed that I would frequently get my ad placing much lower than the Adwords stats were showing, I then tested the same keywords in another browser, with simultaneous searches across two different browsers, returned very different results, sometimes ranking as differently as 15 places on the sponsored link rankings.

Digging a little deeper I found that clearing my browser cookies resulted in normal order returning, and the ads placing correctly, this was verified using the Google Ad Preview Tool.

So what exactly is stored through Google cookies ?, possibly search behaviour on sponsored link clicks – i.e if I havent clicked on the top 3 ads, does it replace them with others ? certainly seems that way.

To ensure correct testing, I’ve put together a Google Adwords Preview Plugin for Firefox, this adds a custom search engine to the Firefox search engine list, which links into the Adwords Preview version of Google, and returns sponsored links in the expected manner.

You can download the it from here – Google Adwords Preview Plugin.

Once installed it will show up as a new search engine, with a slightly greyed Google logo.