So, does anyone think google will be tempted to lower the quality of their search results to promote spending in their ppc system one day?
I don't know about intentionally lowering the quality of results, but it certainly opens the door for the introduction of more aggressive spam filter testing, or algos that intentionally rotate different sites to the top.
As GG pointend out, the general public doesn't usually notice problems like the zeroPR issue, because for every site that drops out, there are plenty of equally relevant sites to take their place.
Webmasters who enjoy constant top placement for quality terms in the free SERPS have absolutely zero incentive to become paid advertisers. That will change dramatically if the type of volatility of the past couple months becomes the norm.
Here we have a model that (so far) seems to satisfy all parties. Its got to turn up the heat on the others to get relevant and get 'open'.
Hope so.
Will work cheaper than Googles CPC prices - we don't produce - you don't pay!
What are you trying to do to us!?!?!?!?
lol ;)
After reading this board today I signed up for the Google program-- and I'm sorely disappointed! First of all, they show your add for ALL kinds of related keywords-- not just the one you entered. If you enter "dolls" any impressions for a whole host of keywords like maybe "doll house" "doll dresses" etc will show your ad. Not such a big deal on the face of it, but Ad words has some weird system that takes your ad out of commission if you don't appear to be meeting the CTR ratio. If this happens, you have to go back in, change your description or keywords, blah blah blah-- at the risk that if they keep nullifying your campaign they are gonna try and charge you $5 to "reactivate" it.
HUH?
Gimme a break. With high CPC's and all these weird rules, I don't see any reason to keep up w/ this campaign. Not only that, but I rank well on a lot of terms in Google anyway, and see this baloney and possibly taking away some of my nice free traffic anyway. Whoever set up this program should have realized who difficult they make it compared to the other big 3.
Jeez! I lived, loved and have forgotten (in a haze) most of those days. Much as I hate it though - they won't return :(
And Google is in all this for the money - not Peace, Love and an egalitarian society. Amazingly, despite my cynical attitude ( and my PR0) I still admire their style above all other SEs. One day though, they will talk to me about cash (just as all the others have) :)
Seems USA Today does too [searchengineworld.com]. That is a rather ummm, poor piece of journalism and distorts the truth to make it sound like Google is setting up to be identicle to Overture.
hehe, because it is! Raise your eyes up a little from the day to day task of making money on the www, have a good look around it will be a rewarding experience, trust me.
>poor piece of journalism
That may be true but this hit home:
The system lets Web sites raise their bids to increase their chances for higher placement on the section of Google's site that's devoted to sponsored links.
So the difference between G! and the "pure" PPC engines is that on G! you can buy your way to the top but only on the right hand side, I don't see that as reinforcing their USP.
I haven't seen any PPC results yet, do they have the class to show the "cost to advertiser"?
I think we are all holding our breath on that one NFFC. I think thats way there is some strong trepidation among quite a few people.
If they do - what happens? What's your opinion of them then?
If they don't - what happens? What's your opinion of them then?
That's an easy one to answer. I set up an Adwords Select for the one keyword that is cheaper than CPM Adwords, and forgot to delete the old one. When I looked, they were both there, with the Adwords Select one on the top. Both ads looked identical (wording was slightly different), absolutely no way to identify CPC ad from the CPM one....and no cost to advertiser showing.
Yes, and that has been a problem in the old CPM adwords as well. I know of one financial firm that is bidding on "banks" and probably wouldn't be happy to know that they are appearing (and paying the CPM) for banks of the Nile, Grand Banks, etc.
Use "[dolls]", and it will be shown with searches for exactly and only "dolls". They offer solid documentation of all the features, especially in the FAQ. It pays to read all of it very carefully.
"If you wanted to increase brand awareness but not clicks, couldn't you target very general keywords that really have nothing to with your product, but will receive many impressions. Therefore you could increase brand awareness at little cost, so when they do want your product, they might think of you. For ex. sell candles, but target keyword love or something. Many impressions but few clicks= high brand awareness at little cost."
The general point is a good one, but you cannot do this ad nauseam because Google disables any ad whose CTR rate falls below 0.5%.
Still, if you have the time to put in, it seems to me it would be worth bidding on a wider variety of key phrases, as opposed to fewer, in the hopes that you just make it over 0.5% and get that free branding benefit on a wider variety of phrases.
Oh, I just love make-work projects. :)
Incidentally, what have people experienced as CTR's for their AdWords campaigns in the past? I have one that has been between 0.3% and 0.4% (I guess that means I'd be paying close to $1 per click - horrible).
I have another that consistently gets a 3.3% CTR.
There is a lot of math to ponder here. But the bottom line is a huge amount of flexibility in advertising options, and of course the opportunity to place ads beside the world's most important search engine.
If I were a betting man I'd say that Yahoo will announce their intention to drop Overture for Google AdWords sometime in June.
Not only does this mean a lot of revenues for Google, but a really healthy take for Yahoo. Maybe, in fact, Yahoo will be able to annoy users less as a result of raking it in through less obtrusive sponsored ad results. Some of Yahoo's current banner ads are huge, outrageous embarrassments, and if they keep up, they will kill the company.
i sent an email to google AWS with the following comment (slightly edited):
"you are preventing advertisers from buying keywords on adwords campaigns that failed in the past because the mincpc required is using irrelevant numbers from the inactive campaigns. let's say "xxxx" had a 1% ctr in a previous campaign from any advertiser and the advertiser stopped the campaign. since that is the last data point you have, the min cpc required for that keyword is $1.5 (based on a 15cpm). google is shooting itself in the foot by not making the minimum 5 cents across the board (and perhaps letting AWS start below the current AW as opposed to above it) and letting the clickthrough rate work its own magic;
the perversity is that highly popular keywords have been optimized more and the ctr are higher and hence the mincpc lower. you are also opening the door to people manipulating ctr rates to get lower cpcs."
here is the response i got:
"As you are well aware, in order to ensure fairness for AdWords CPM
advertisers, minimum CPC's have been set for AdWords Select keywords based
on how well those keywords sold in the original AdWords program. Thus,
AdWords Select advertisers will no be able to purchase keywords unless
their CPC rate is comparable to or higher than the amount being paid for
those same keywords through the original AdWords program."
the response does not address the issue of setting mincpc based on current ACTIVE AW campaigns.
am i missing something?
thanks
I like the interface, and I think I can live with the idea that they will soon be exporting the results, ala Oversure. I mean, why wouldn't they?
I'm just a little concerned about prices creeping up, when they are starting too high already. I have no qualm about spending some money at Google, as long as they don't go OverBoard. The max bid and word group features are nice, I am not sure I like the billing procedure.
The general point is a good one, but you cannot do this ad nauseam because Google disables any ad whose CTR rate falls below 0.5%.
Wow, it would have been days before I had discovered that if I hadn't just read it here. My trial ad didn't seem to be getting many clickthroughs, and I kept looking at the "Campaign Summary" page and nothing seemed to be changing. (I'm new at this kind of advertising, so had no idea what to expect.) I just figured maybe no one was doing this (Spanish-language) keyword search, and not many who did were clicking through. The above message made me poke around and I see the ad has been automatically deactivated.
I'd strongly encourage Google to either place a red flag on the "Campaign Summary" page indicating that an ad has been deactivated, or default to sending email to the sponsor when that happens (with option to turn such notification off). I do now see that if you select "View/Edit Campaigns" there is a red flag, but I had no reason to visit that page; I didn't need to view or edit, I was just monitoring the summary.
The "friendly robot" suggested ways to further target keywords (using "-", [] etc.) This is precisely the problem i referred to earlier in the thread. Adding keywords for one keyword grouping reduces the estimated average clicks to almost nothing, but does nothing to reduce pay per click cost.
Will fiddle around and see what we can do, but as a very modest advertiser Overture is starting to look better again! That may be unfair but will see what we can do with some fiddling around. At the moment it seems that advertising web sites targeted to a very specific group may well be impossible, or at best cost-ineffective on AdWords Select. For s site with a broader appeal, I dont think there is this problem.
That generated average CTR's that weren't real. Now that it it costs you money to click on your own ads, Webmasters will stop doing it, which means no one will come close to the Average CTR's that the minimmum bids are based on.
That means that for many advertisers, CPC will be much more expensive.
I do think it is starting off too costly for CPC. Many terms seem to be double what adwords was costing me. And then it looks as if it may be .05 a click and it turns out to be .11 a click later on. It would be nice to be able to figure out what rate is what position so we have a clue.
I also have a couple terms that are getting impressions and no clicks, but I can't get any ad to even show at all for me. I have no idea where these impressions are taking place.
To keep the Adwords robot quiet I added some keywords to each string, hopefully to increase CTR to ).05. We have a product that is sold from a country, but is bought by all other countries.
Where we had just
gizmo
with an ad emphasisizing to click here for "gizmos in Singapore"
now we changed that to
gizmo slovania
gizmo australia
gizmo japan
Imagine my surprise when the click cost moved from 0.5c for just "gizmo", to .35c or more for "gizmo plus extra term"
The click cost actually seems to increase the more specific the term. Anybody else notice this?
I dont think this will work for us. So its back to good ol'd Overture. Never thought iid say this!
But my concern here is the Google Ad words may hit the same trouble of Overture if my experience above is general and not just a specific furphy. Adwords would become less specific and more general. Big companies with big budgets will be able to dominate. So while Google's main listings are generally good at finding specific trageted information, Ad Words Select will not be, leading to people ignoring these listings after a few disappointments.
Just musing on the future, and our expereince may not be general, but worth tossing into the discussion anyway.
You only get 2 chances to shange your listings to meet Googles 0.5% minimum click per view ration. Then you have to start all over again, and pay your registration again. How many advertisers would be more likely to just give up?
i guess the only way maerican people will finally learn about us will be if we win your baseball or footbal league or championship. ;)
Yes, I had the same impression, but I think that prices increase when you add a geographical term to your keyword.
More important the geographical location, higher the price, no matter how popular is the phrase itself.
Chyo, try [gizmo plus extra term], the problem may come from the fact that to have the effect of you must use []. So when you are using gizmo japan, maybe itīs calculating your cpc for everything that includes japan, so if there were ( or are ) campaigns using the keyword japan ( Iīm sure there are ), youīll be affected.
But I donīt know if this works. I havenīt read the FAQ
Sm26, Iīve said the same thing to them during the Beta Test, and received the same answer.
Rjhoara, Iīve been using Portuguese ads targeting only Portugal and Brazil, on Adwords Select for some weeks, and I have a CTR of 1%. Maybe you didnīt select that you only want your ads to show up only on country x and x, and not everywhere.
WebGuerrilla, you have an excellent point there maybe Google should read it.
Sincerely,
Nuno Oliveira
(1) Generate high bids on popular terms (an effective CPM of > $15)
- Google seems to be placing all of their emphasis on this aspect.
(2) Generate any bids on semi-popular terms (effective CPM < $15)
- Google seems to be ignoring this aspect for the most part.
The argument against lower minimum bids would be cannibalization of the higher bids, but what is there to cannibalize when the vast majority of terms have no bids and the most popular terms have eight aggressive advertisers battling for position? I am no Nobel-prize winning economist, but I stayed awake long enough in macro to see the graph where supply meets demand at a glorious point of equilibrium to maximize total revenue. I suspect the minimum bids will be tweaked when Google realizes they are leaving too much money on the table.
Trouble is, this is my first experience with any ad method, so I don't really know what I'm doing.
No outright dumb mistakes, as the Google tutorial and FAQ are good.
The site is ecommerce, in a niche market, so I got the robot warning yesterday. I got rid of a few keys and filtered others with " " or [ ], as appropriate.
This morning, things are better, with the filtered keys getting fewer impressions and a couple of click-throughs - but not good enough yet to get over Googles hurdle. I expect another email from the robot any time.
So here is my question:
I'm no doubt using too many key phrases (22) and want to eliminate the worst performers. But which are they?
Have done extensive reseach on my keys on WordTracker, so I know that many of the zero click keys are probably good in the "long run" (I mean with so few clicks, how can I tell). If I use impressions to cull the keys, where do I draw the line? Don't want too many impressions (with no clicks), that's why I filtered. Yet the very lowest impressions should probably go.
Can anyone unconfuse me? Too bad Google won't let things run for a few days as is, so I can gather more data points.
Thanks all...
whilst adding adds to the select program, I want to stop some old ones on the old impression program. The Classic Adwords site is down however..
So I advertise and pay double..
Back to Add select and deselect..
i've disabled the ads for now. will watch and wait while other companies play around and force the rates up. when things start to settle down a bit, i'll sneak in on the lower priced keywords / phrases.
That's after reading the FAQ's in detail and optimizing my listing.
Keyword group 1: Adwords $0.66 Adwords Select $0.51
Keyword group 2: Adwords $0.40 Adwords Select $0.08
Keyword group 3: Adwords $1.00 Adwords Select $0.12
The CTR is somewhat similar between both programs so far also. I have been tweaking ads quite a bit to get that higher but so far the program is working great for me.
I guess for some it is better but others like the old program. Hopefully Google will find a good way to integrate the two without them harming each other.
