People confused by AdSense / Content Targeting

you can bid seperately

[blaze]

Recent post that got deleted (it was a funny call to action) about someone who felt AdSense / Content Targeting in AdWords was full of fraud, waste of money, yada yada yada.

Please note two things:

a) you can bid seperately for AdSense verus Serps. Beren and Nyet have explained how to do this. Content targeting not converting as well in the SERP? Just lower your bids..

b) smart pricing by Google is Google's attempt to address this problem. Basically, different adsense sites which don't convert as well will cost differently.

I think Google's real problem here isn't their poor implementation but rather their real lack of customer education

It appears that AWA has left it up to Beren and Nyet. I personally found this very frustrating, btw. However, I do recognize that this is probably just bad policy on the part of Google.

Regardless, in the end, you can bid seperately and if you don't want to for whatever reason, know that they are trying to do something about the different value of different clicks.

For more information, try "smart pricing site:webmasterworld.com"

[nyet]

Can't speak for Google, but at our company it would certainly not be a feather in your cap to go around telling customers how to spend less for our services. I suspect that explains AWA's lack of discourse on the subject.

I also suspect the smart pricing is Google's answer to lowering bids for Adsense.

The marketplace is a wonderful thing!

Smart pricing will likely work for the vast majority of users. Control freaks such as myself will however manually lower bids.

If it wasn't for getting 'branding' ads essentially for free, I would just leave it to smartpricing anyway.

[blaze]

Yes, you are right .. it's smart business to purposely mislead your customers into thinking that they can not use your services in a more cost affective manner. Especially for a global and well known brand, like Google.

Anyways, I spend *more* with Google now. Before, I just turned off content targetting.

For me, leaving it to Smart Pricing would double the cost of CPA and force me to turn it off.