Chapter 1:

As of November 2007, the text ads on the content (AdSense) network behave differently when clicked. In the past, someone could click anywhere in the ad to be taken to the landing page. Now, only the blue underlined headline and the grey underlined display URL will act as live hyperlinks. The two description lines and any geographic  delimiters below the URL will not longer be "clickable."

It seems that Google believes that some percentage of the clicks on text ads in the content network have been accidental, resulting in high costs and poor conversion rates for advertisers. So if your cost of customer acquisition was just too high to justify in the content network, you may want to let the dust settle and try again in a couple of weeks.

On Dave Taylor’s excellent parenting blog (www.apparenting.com), the ads were behaving exactly as Google says - the headline and URL were clickable, while the descriptions were not. On gmail, though, the entire text of the ad was clickable. Luckily, the ad I clicked was Google’s own AdWords ad, so I didn’t cost any real advertisers any money.

Chapter 2:

www.AdWordsAnywhere.com offers a tool that allows you to see what Google searchers see anywhere in the world (about 40 countries, actually). Now you can tell whether your ad is showing in Germany without having to call your friends in Berlin and asking them to send you screen shots. Currently, the tool is free, no registration required.