I had wanted to do an in-depth post on noting what you could do with Google Adword’s new ability to show actual search numbers, but All Things SEM did a fabulous job of the ideas that ran through my head when I heard about this news.

Instead I’ll just remark that there are two important types of people humans listen to: The Pessimist (seen here as Smackdown) vs. The Optimist (seen here as All Things SEM).

The Pessimist takes the news of Adwords showing search numbers by beginning in this way:

The problem is, however, that those numbers are meant for people doing research into PPC traffic. The numbers shown have very little to do with what people actually search on using Google.com.

Often times they will claim the mantle of “Realist” insisting that the Optimist is naive in the approach. Yet, the instinctual drive towards thumbing down new information limits the boundaries of what is possible.

The Optimist takes the news in this way:

More Accurate Data

Better Upfront Planning

Click Through Rates for SERPs

Title and Description Testing

Improved PPC and SEO Synergies

The Optimist takes down ideas and creatively comes up with new possibilities to test and use in order to create new opportunities and improve upon existing campaigns. Yes, sometimes that leads to wrong paths and errors, but without trying and testing, then you are left with a stagnant campaign.

I prefer to take the path of creativity and new ideas rather than shooting down new possibilities and thus why All Things SEM goes into my RSS feed. You want someone who sits down and thinks of all the possible ways to work with and use new data rather than throw it to the wind.

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Talk about knowing your audience–this is definitely the best keyword buy ever:

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I have sat in a few conferences about the globalization of one thing or another and what never ceases to tick me off is the waste of time those sessions are by providing such generic explanations of what to do and what not to do. Thus, it is a nice breather to at least see a good start of an article over at Search Engine Land on localization outside of the US in the SEO/SEM markets:

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Couldn’t help but laugh seeing the History Channel now buying PPC ads after the fact of their great special that I blogged about on Life After People and also my thoughts on Life After People (not to mention creating the pages all after they ran the ads on TV).

Too little, too late, perhaps?

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Here’s a great real-life story by Paul Middler at The China Game to show how people try to get away with not doing their job in China:

In the case of Google AdWords in China, I have a story. One supplier I worked with was advertising its products to “the world”, but the ad reseller wanted to show that the advertisement was getting exposure, so what the reseller did was “turn on” the advertising so that it showed up on searches conducted inside China. In other words, when the factory went online to check its name in Google, because the advertising was targeted to China, it showed up. But the ad was not set to show up in the US or Europe, where they had prospective customers.

Now, I’m not on the PPC side of things, but I’m fairly certain with the average American (how many times have I had to explain what SEO is?) this could be done as well to show up in the US, but not in Europe or China, but claim it was being shown there as well.

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