Now that's a lot of data to be collecting, I assume they are testing to see what could be better. Surely it would be easier to listen to users instead of relying on analysis that's open to mis-interpretation.
Your thoughts, good or bad?
[edited - spelling]
Now that's a lot of data to be collecting
We're talking of a company that builds a search ranking model from some 8 billion pages and gets 100s of millions of searches a day. I really don't think that the stats from the Adwords pages would amount to much.
Surely it would be easier to listen to users instead of relying on analysis that's open to mis-interpretation.
When you have a company built by PhDs, what else do you expect? Not that it is a bad thing. Your argument would mean scrapping of all web analytic software and relying solely on Customer Feedback or Focus Groups.
Remember that the users of AdWords are amongst the most web-savvy around so I'd expect some very good suggestions to be put forward by them (admittedly amongst many poor suggestions).
I love AdWords in comparison to other PPC systems, I just don't want Google to go down the 'look what we can do, aren't we clever' route as they did with their maps/local interface.
Yes, the amount of data is small compared to Google search but it's still a lot of data to analyse when you consider the aggregated time spent by users.
Don't forget one simple thing -- AdWords makes Google lots of money: this is the area optimisations in which will make Google richer than making more relevant search engine. Considering small amounts of data and the fact that Google actually paid money for Urchin it would have been rather strange if they did not use it.
