Top 2 Premium Placements

are they still taking new bookings?

[canuck]

Anyone know if Google is still selling the Top 2 Premium Placements separately from Adwords? Several of my keywords were in these top 2 placements up to a few days ago when I saw 2 competitors suddenly take me over on several keywords.

I was under the impression that these premium placements were no longer being sold outside of the Adwords framework now. Any ideas?

I spend $10K - 20K per month on Adwords on this particular site, so it's a middle of the road campaign...

- canuck

[Shak]

2 potential reasons:

1, They are out bidding you, and hitting that "spacial" CTR where they get promoted to the top 2 listings.

2, Although NO new booking for Premium listings are being accepted, there is nothing to say that campaigns previously booked, and due to start from eg: 1st July 2003 > 31st December 2003 would not be going live.

I wouldnt really worry about it too much.

Shak

[DaveN]

I believe that they have totally finished with the Premium Placements here a couple of threads for ya!

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

dave

[canuck]

I upped my Max Bid over 20 times my previous week's bid on a few of these keywords... so it must just be Premium campaigns coming online.

I emailed Google Adwords about it... so we'll see what they will & will not tell me.

Thanks for the info...

[canuck]

The Adwords team informed me via Email that Google is indeed consolidating the 2 advertising campaigns by the end of 2003, however, they decided to be fair to their current Premium Sponsorship clients they would renew the contracts through the end of 2003 [whenever you use the word "fair" someone is getting screwed ;)]. Apparantly this also means adding new keywords in my instance.

I also noticed that several large sites that have Premium Sponsorships have been buying up a lot of keywords before the 2003 expiration. So, I guess it's a short-term problem.

Anyone else seeing a final Premium Sponsorship buy-up?

[edited by: Shak at 6:44 am (utc) on July 1, 2003]

[Shak]

NO buy-ups allowed in the UK, deadline was a few weeks ago.

Cant say a significant increase was noticed, probably because no-body knew about it.

Shak

[heidibear]

Although Google is continuing to run the Premium Sponsorships until the end of the year I think everyone but Google might end up getting the bad end of the deal until adwords/premium are combined and all the kinks are worked out.

My understanding is that Google will stay loyal to their premium sponsorship IOs and deliever the inventory that is stated on the IO, however, no longer can premium sponsors buy up any extra (over) inventory that becomes available for the premium spots. Google would sell premium inventory based on a forecast for searches on a keyword. If actual searches were above the forecast amount, premium sponsor could set a % of over delivery inventory they wanted to buy, now that extra inventory is now given to the adwords ads ranked at the top of the list. Google will also make the decisions on which ad is being served based on the ECPM they are receiving.