To my surprise, I got NO ads on the Google SERPs! I wondered if I'd really turned off Adblock, so tried it in MSIE. No dice. Still no ads.
Turns out it was my <manufacturer> <part#> search. Not an obscure part#, BTW, but one of the essential products from one of the manufacturer's major product lines. But guess that's way too specific for Google. Only thing that returns ads is to back off to <manufacturer> <broad type of product>. I can use <manufacturer><broad type of product><part #> but that doesn't give me anything different than <manufacturer><part#>.
I know from my experience as an Adwords customer that Google actively discourages large numbers of keywords. I think it's a resource issue that continues to bite Google. They have a love/hate relationship with their big clients who stuff the system with millions of keywords, but (IMO) they don't really have the capacity to accommodate this.
The vendors in this sector have apparently altered their strategy to go along with Google's distaste for large numbers of keywords. And it left me with - a blank right margin with no ads, in one of the rare situations when I've WANTED to see ads.
Further, the number of ads displayed is minimal. I'm seeing six, in a sector that a year ago would have returned a couple of pages of vendors to choose from. Of those six, three have "Google Checkout". Surprise, surprise...
Good going Google! Adblock goes back on - permanently! I have NO use for Google ads any more, at least as a consumer! Instead of finding a variety of stores vying for my business, I get a limited number of stores that are vying to please Google.
I get a limited number of stores that are vying to please Google.
ebay, shopping.com, target, shopzilla <yawn>
and what's sad is that had you clicked you would have found the results to be irrelevant because they mapped your keyword to an all-purpose similar keyword..
What you are describing makes sense because the in-house marketing teams at most mega-corporations seem to be fond of taking a scrabble word list and adding it in it's entirety to Adwords.. If Goo would allow little peasants such as ourselves to bid on relevant exact matches it might take a higher CPC broad match click away from Monstermart or One-size fits all, inc.
And then Googlers might have a poor quality experience on one of our lame little web sites.. BAD WEBMASTER! BAD WEBMASTER!
At least the corporations are producing such huge profits that our government has record revenues..
I'm running a medium-to-large-sized campaign (about 50K keywords), a third of which are model numbers and another third of which receive less than 5 clicks per month. The minimum bid on these keywords has not gone up dramatically. In fact, the only real cost increases have been on broad-matched, high-traffic terms.
Could it instead be the case that a lot of large advertisers have decided that aggressively pursuing the long-tail isn't worth the time investment?
actually most of the comparison shopping sites should have model numbers and part numbers covered..
I haven't found the comparison sites useful. I typically find one or two stores listed there, and at high prices.
BTW, the part I was looking for was a basic building-block of a track lighting system - an 8 foot section of track.
"<manufacturer> track" gets me 4-5 sites that sell the product line, plus the worthless general-purpose merchants. Even those that sell the product line don't take me to the specific product, and then I have to go wading through their listings.
"<manufacturer> <part #>" or <manufacturer><part#> track" gets me zip.
Surprised that nobody broad-matched on <manufacturer>. But maybe it just isn't cost-effective.
I did the same search a year ago, and came up with lots of relevant ads.
I don't see any reason to consider turning AdBlock back off. Pursuing the ads just wastes my time. I was thinking that it might be nice if they had a feature to allow text ads. But.... naw.
