Are we all Adwords mugs?

[Calc Richmond]

Call it just my suspicious mind but..

1) Every now and then google turns the Adwords tap on and my account starts acruing clicks.

2) OK they may say that they are 'evaluating' my landing page etc but imagine if they do this to every advertiser one a month..

3) Let's just imagine that Google has for arguements sake 1 million advertisers and each advertiser that they turn the Adwords tap on spends $100 dollars...

4) Google has just made themselves some SERIOUS fat stacks..

Are we not all just being shafted deep and hard without blinking an eyelid and accepting this?

[briggidere]

are you making money using adwords? If not, go somewhere else and make it there. we all have choices.
no one HAS to use adwords

[davewray]

Actually, for a business to grow and thrive to its full potential a person MUST use Adwords. Adwords is the biggest dog in the kennel and to not use them would be limiting your business growth potential. So, it is important to be critical of them...in a constructive way though. The arguement, "Just leave if you don't like them" would be all well and fine if there were at least two other competitors out there that had equal market share to Google, but there is No such thing as of yet.

[briggidere]

not true at all dave,

Not all businesses trade online or have the need to.

I know someone who has an extremely successful kitchen business and he wouldn't even know what adwords is. His business is worth millions.

Adwords does not suit all businesses so it is not a MUST do adwords situation.

[davewray]

I was referring to ONLINE business models, and ones that use PPC to drive qualified cutomers to their websites....

[fluffyMuffin]

Just my two cents, but I think a serious number of people have an aversion to clicking on ads. I'm new to this all, but so far, my most constructive leads have come from organic long-tail results. I'm getting about 2% CTR on AdWords, but these people aren't going as deep as the people coming through the organic results. Don't think I could have a viable business if I had to rely solely on AdWords. But the jury is still out.

[rocknbil]

Most of the "average users" I talk to - the ones that buy online - aren't even aware that "sponsored links" means PPC advertising, they see it as another link.

Google has just made themselves some SERIOUS fat stacks . . .

I don't think they need to resort to clicking their customers' ads to do this, but then I'm an optimist. :-) What do your site stats say about incoming clicks from adWords, do you see any IP's that correspond to Google?

[arieng]

Can you imagine what kind of a PR nightmare it would be if a scenario like the one you have laid out surfaced? Google is far too intelligent a corporation to allow something like this to be happening.

I'm not one to necessarily trash Google conspiracy theories, but anything they're doing would have to be far more subtle than this. Otherwise, one disgruntled employee and a leak to the media could cost Google billions, far more than they stand to make by such flagrant overserving of ads.

[Rehan]

Just my two cents, but I think a serious number of people have an aversion to clicking on ads. I'm new to this all, but so far, my most constructive leads have come from organic long-tail results. I'm getting about 2% CTR on AdWords, but these people aren't going as deep as the people coming through the organic results. Don't think I could have a viable business if I had to rely solely on AdWords.

Don't assume that everyone is in the same boat, though. :-)

Several of my ad groups regularly get 10-20% CTR (including the Search Network), and I do make a decent profit from that traffic. These are not even using long tail keywords, per se. Offer value and you'll get rewarded with conversions.

Sure, I may be funding some Google employee's BMW but using AdWords allows me afford to one as well. ;-)

[edited by: Rehan at 11:21 pm (utc) on May 10, 2007]