I know that this has been in testing since 2007 but I’ve been seeing it more & more often recently.

What happens is that you search for a product & when the results are displayed you see the normal adwords ads, but one of them (this can be above the results or on the right hand side) will have a hidden div & the text “Show products from RETAILER for SEARCHTERM” it might look like this (at the top):-

or like this (on the right):-

& when expended, they look like this :-

& this :-

Now I’m sure you’ll agree that this is quite cool – & if you can ever get any control over it, it could improve conversions. The data is being pulled from a google products account so this will be more something for merchants than affiliates though.

Oh, one final thing, All of the above screenshots are from a search for 32″ tv amazon. Do Tesco (& eBuyer, Dixons, Money Supermarket, Revoo, Nextag etc. really think I want to see their ad when I’ve specified Amazon?

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First post for a while – been stupidly busy & any free time tends to get wasted used on twitter.

I was looking at the source code of the Google UK homepage earlier on & spotted some strange code.

So, they have a hidden textarea, with an ID of “csi” & they have a js function which loads with their logo which makes the window lol & lol.

Any conspiracy theorists care to hazzard a guess as to what they’re up to?

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Unfortunately, I’ve been completely snowed under at work recently & have been neglecting this blog.
I have a list of things I want to write about but haven’t yet managed to….

Here’s the list :-

• ChannelAdvisor – what it does & how I use it
• Recommended WordPress Plugins
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s crap
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s great
• CJ Datafeeds – why I don’t like them
• Excel trickery – cleaning datafeeds & timesavers
• Expensive Chocolate – how I built it in less than 2 hours
• 3M Select – relaunching the affiliate program

I think I’ll probably get around to writing all of the above at some stage, but if you would like one or more of them sooner rather than later, please let me know in the comments below.

EDIT : posted this as a poll on A4U if you’d rather use that…..

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BFG

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Here’s an example (from here):-

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BFG

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• The Prescription for Self-Doubt: Watch This Video
• Amazon bucks trend : Q4 sales up 18%
• WordPress SEO Video : Yoast
• More On Google Website Optimizer
• Whiteboard Friday – When to Track Rankings

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BFG

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Anyway -- onto the video….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8nJTlusQY

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BFG

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Any twitterers out there may have seen some twitter based competitions, @johnchow & @shoemoney are a couple that spring to mind.

It’s an interesting idea – basically to enter you need to follow them on twitter & send a tweet to all your followers that you’ve entered by following them & they can do the same.

I guess the aim is to gain 10′s of thousands of followers – but the question is why?

Is it vanity – a chance to say look how great I am because I have 20k followers on twitter?, or is it just stupid?

I’d like to hope that they have some grand plan to monetise all these followers. Maybe they plan to drive traffic to their own blogs ( http://www.johnchow.com & http://www.shoemoney.com respectively ).

So – whaddaya think? Vanity, Insanity or Genius?

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BFG

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Stephen Fry looks a little messed up

Here’s what it should look like :-

Stephen Fry looking a little better

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BFG

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqt3Zb7BItA

Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads-up.

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BFG

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How do I get a screenshot from my iPhone? (or iPod Touch)

It’s really very simple – sort of like the iPhone equivalent of Windows Prt Scrn key.

Just hold down the power button on the top of the iPhone & push the Home button at the bottom of the front – Bingo – it will make a camera shutter noise & save the image as a .png in your Saved Photos folder – which can then be copied to your PC next time you sync or you can email them to yourself.

Here’s mine :-

My iPod Touch

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BFG

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