I am a searchengine marketeer for almost 5 years now. Worked for big Search firmsa and doing some private websites on the side.
The Google helpdesk lately blaims everything on Quality score and tells the same story about all the "factors". The problem is that it's not a formula as it use to be; Clickthrough and Price what seems a fare deal to me and a long term strategy.
They now raise prices on words that are perfectly compliant for customers. I even had to pay 4 euro for a clients own brandname.
I may do a prediction. Google can already make groups of words and track the roi on a lot of keywords. So they will raise the price for obscure (few competitors) financial word more then they will do for an obscure keyword about the topic knitting because they know they roi on knitting related keywords is lower then the roi on the financial related keywords.
Who will be left to advertise: big company's with big budegets. Who will be out first. The litle affiliate guy who targets obscure but relevant keywords. And whats wrong with an affiliate link anyway?
I rather have a good site with good information with relevant affiliate links then 1 big company with 1 type of product (his own)
I think 99% of the surfers don't see the diffirence between affiliate and non affiliate links. But do they care about affiliate links or non affiliate links? NO! They only want to find the what they are looking for.
The QS really does very little to encourage new users or struggling users to stay with Adwords, it reaches too far and isn't accurate enough to distinguish the good from the bad. Plus in terms of user experience the visible effect is largely exchanging a big batch of affiliate marketeers for a smaller but very heavy spending batch of big name brands such as Ebay and chums. Purely based on the end user experience these big names are efficiently arbing their traffic also, just that the whole thing is maybe less cluttered and obvious than it was before.
Plus ppc is about conversions, calls to action etc. Even for an affiliate, their feed or their contract whatever it maybe as far as they are concerned it is their product to market. Start adding images, nice little articles etc to satisfy some errant QS and it all starts to slide. Just gives the competition more opportunity to catch up I think which is no bad thing.
[edited by: TrafficGal at 7:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2006]
sure its fair to say that all the aff fluff filling the listings can lead to duplication and a lesser user experience. However they could take half of that away in one stroke by prohibiting pages from just containing adsense and nothing else just to keep it in check.
Why not do both? Choke off the "aff fluff" and get rid of adsense only pages?
Everyone gives them free conversion data, so they know EXACTLY which keywords are keepers. The sad thing is even if one person decides to never use the conversion tracking/big jacking code, they'll still have the data because some meatheads will always use it.
The company you're buying ads from should never know which ads are working and which subjects are most profitable.
Bah, if they didn't make me so much money, I'd never use them...
