Today was indeed a busy day for me, and I'd have to admit that I'm pretty tired as I'm writing this. With that said, please excuse any typos or bad grammar usage that you come across as I just don't care enough at the moment to triple check things. I just got back to my room from the Google Party... thank god tomorrow is a late start. I'll touch more on the actually Google party a bit later, but for now... on to the good stuff.

My day kicked off with the "Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues" session, which happens to be one that I typically try and attend each time. The session covers how to spot abnormalities and follow-up with search engines if you should suspect a competitor or someone else is creating invalid clicks on your accounts. Personally speaking, this session is a great way to keep up with the latest on click-fraud class-action lawsuits, as well as what the engines are doing to combat malicious click activity.

Lori Weiman, Director of KeywordMax, shared a very interesting statistic today. According to her and the research that she and her team have done:

Now to be fair to Lori and the statistic she provided (and because I spoke with her personally about it after the session) the 28% mentioned is 1 or 2 extreme cases that she's come acrossed and it certainly does not represent the large majority of her clients. Another thing to keep in mind is that an "invalid" click doesn't necessarily mean click-fraud.

Also, during this same session, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager of Google, announced that a report had just been published (we're literally talking hours before the session) which claims to find fault in how 3 major 3rd party click-auditing companies, and potentially all auditing programs using JavaScript solutions, count their clicks. The report is titled "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports" and actually featured Tom Cuthbert's company Click Forensics. The interesting thing here is that Tom just happened to be a panelist on this very session.

Now I have not yet read this report, and doubt that I will anytime soon, but I do encourage you all to take a look as Google's findings. You can check it out here.

A quick shot of the Click-Fraud Panel.

I happened to catch a special lunch session with the Yahoo! Search Marketing team where they showed off a live demo of their new, soon to launch, PPC Ad Platform. The new platform seems to be tons better than their current platform, and from what I've seen today it appears that Yahoo! is definitely moving in all the right directions. Here are a couple of major updates highlighted in today's presentation:

• A New User Dash-Board.
• A Time-Zone Setting.
• An Extremely Better Geo-Targeting Feature.
• A/B Testing Options.
• Budgeting on Both an Account Level and Campaign Level.
• Alerts and Customizable Alerts.
• A New Ranking Algorithm Based on an Ad's Performance.
• Plus tons more TBA.

This new platform is available now to a select few, but will hopefully be up and running completely by 4th Quarter of this year or by 1st Quarter of next year. The YSM mentioned that the delay is due to the fact that they'd like some time to beef up their customer service staff and ensure that they're indeed ready to assist advertisers when the time comes. Not a bad idea if you ask me.

A quick shot of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Panel. Sorry about the camera guy!

The exhibit hall opened up today as I found myself spending a great deal of time in the hall. There are tons of booths to cover and tons of people to look-up, and only 2 days to do it in... which validates my time on the exhibit hall floor. Here are a couple of pics that I was able to take:

The Google Booth

Me and CK Chung (AKA Kid Disco)

Me and Todd Malicoat (AKA Stuntdubl)

Stuntdubl and Disco

A Live "SEO Rockstars" Show

The Google Dance kicked-off in similar fashion to other years... boarding a bus at the convention center which takes attendees to and from Google. Upon arriving at Googleplex, we were greeted by members of the Google staff and were shortly after introduced to a bunch of great freebies, including food, beverages, and entertainment. As always this was a super great time!

The Google Dance

And that's it for now. Be sure to stay tuned for all the fun and excitement still to come.