The email, coincidentally, arrives the night before ComScore announces that Google clickthroughs are not rising as fast as in the past and are, in fact, almost flat. Where will the future revenue growth come from? How will Google get back to their winning ways? Perhaps they intend to get more out of their current clicks? Doing so wouldn't be an unusual business tactic as there are really only 3 ways to grow revenue:
1. Get more customers
2. Have your current customers come back more often
3. Charge your current customers more
Google seems to be running out of 1 & 2 so the logical course would be to do 3. Are they? I am not here to say definitely, as I have no way of knowing, but this evidence, now and in the past, certainly points to that.
The gist of the email I received was that Google is making an adjustment to their quality score measure. They don't expect that we will notice much difference except, perhaps, for a "slight increase in CPC."
I was reassured that they will keep an eye on my account and encouraged me to call if I saw anything "drastic." Um... like what? My CPC has gone up 50% in the last year. Is that drastic?
Google People, I would be naive to think that you are unaware of the wide gap between "max bid" and "actual CPC." This must look like a giant cash reserve to you. One which you can simply go to when the numbers are off or you need a quick fix. Certainly your "black box" AKA "quality score" must have the appropriate dials built in to tap into this potential. Further, what options do we advertisers have? Are we going to stop advertising on Google?
The questions I have for you are these:
1. You have always justified any action that may increase CPC by promoting the corresponding improvement in the system or quality of results. Skepticism aside, are the results better now than they were a year or two ago? I would argue, as objectively as possible, that they are not. My CPCs are up 50% in the last year, not all due to you for certain, but are the search results 50% "better?" Note that this current change came without any pretence even of "improvement."
2. Do you realize that we advertisers are increasingly focused on ROI (many of us have been for years) and that our max bids are not necessarily reflective of what we can afford to pay? Since the system you created is so cloudy, we often enter bids well above what we could afford knowing that our resulting CPC will be in the ballpark of where we need to be. Obviously at some point we will run out of ability to simply suck it up and this drop-dead point is well below our max bids in most cases.
Anyway, anyone who has made it though this absurdly long post obviously has some skin in this game and probably has some of the same feelings and questions I have. Would love to hear the conversation furthered by your responses.
Just use Yahoo and Live.
Less work and less headache.
Unfortunately, Yahoo has been copycating Google's features including this QS nonsense.
Over the years we have been provided all this 'free' tools that continually open up our business models to the search engines. For example Conversion tracking, and even worse, analytics. We essentially walked into the car dealership and told the sales guy how much we want to spend. If you didn't (like me), your competitors most certainly did.
This was said years before, but only few listened or understood. As always, and especially in the online world, all the "Free" tools do the most damage.
Exactly. ANYONE complaining about CPC prices that has used Google conversion tracking or analytics has themselves (partially) to blame for Google's price increases'. You may argue they should not use that information that they gather to price the program, but you are so ignorant to think you get anything for free in life (especially business).
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree on the comments about the free tools... however in my observation the cheapest keywords I get are those campaigns that I don't use any conversion tools provided by the SE's.
Clcks Imprs CTR -- CPC - Cost -- Rank
2,057 3,574 57.55% $0.05 $111.47 1.1
1,390 2,301 60.40% $0.05 $72.830 1.1
These keywords are 2 months old...
Honestly, for cases that are not QS related, I have not seen the CPCs go up by much unless a bunch of new competitors have entered the market.
[webmasterworld.com...]
This is sure to drive up revenue. If you can't beat them....join them!
1. What is the relationship between quality and price? What has quality to do with money?
The relationship is simple. Have a higher quality page that relates to your advert and you will pay less for your clicks. This is a mechanism designed to encourage people to create better pages hence better user experience.
2. Why has your $1 ad a bad quality, but if you pay for the same ad $10 the ad changes into good? The user who sees the ad don't see any difference, just the same ad, good or bad.
see above. The ads are the same but people are not likely to pay $10 for a click when they can optimise the page and pay $1.
3. Will this logic be transferred to the search results, so that even the quality of your page is not good enough you can buy your listing if your are willing to pay the asked price?
No the systems are separate. If this happened google would no longer be a search engine merely a paid directory.
4. Isn't this system not encouraging even more bad quality? Cause instead of fixing your page/ad/keywords, it makes you just raise your bid and you're done, fast and easy (only expensive, but many big companies seem not to care about it anyway).
No. People will optimise to pay less. Big companies tend not to get big by wasting money. Getting a good quality score is part of good google adwords maintenance.
As I've stated before, I have a site that ranks on the first page of Google for my targeted keywords yet Adwords says it will cost $10 to advertise under that same keyword. (prior to that I paid .05-.08). I was replaced by a couple of comparison shopping sites and a personal blog that advertises affiliate products using stolen RSS feeds.
"Better" is whatever puts maximum dollars in Google's pockets. I have repeatedly reported arbitrage garbage sites and they are still there, obviously Google likes their Adsense earnings or simply does not care.
No. People will optimise to pay less. Big companies tend not to get big by wasting money. Getting a good quality score is part of good google adwords maintenance.
Indeed I have, but my QS was never low, our bids are always a minimum of at least 5 cents with allot of 3 cent'ers...
So with optimization and obviously better written content out of the way. And with page version testing ongoing to increase decent conversion - why does it take me up to 5 dollars per click to get into the top three? Especially that is where we convert nicely. 3 months ago it was never more than $1.26...
I don't think the system is encouraging any one particular behavior (besides wasting money) as there is no real published standards that can be used to hold someone too when they are creating content for you nor is there any real way to report flagrant misuses of googles systems. There are guidelines yes, But there is also allot of tribal knowledge - and it would appear, that at least in my keyword pools, out competitors would rather just push the bids up for the top place rather than fix their "unoptimized" sites.
Funny, my google rep said our search traffic was so low for our terms that they didn't have any good feel for our industry. So they recommend even more obscure terms that have little to no history. So if I use those terms my minimum bid was low - but if after over a month with no traffic to those word they just turn the words off without any warning nor in my view any notification.
This is all frustrating enough to just start calling papers, mags and other sources of targeted traffic to negotiate those good ole fashioned direct deals again.
All in all, I feel the trust I had in Googles system is being abused. And it is going to be hard for them to get that trust again.
Just use Yahoo and Live. Less work and less headache.Exactly! deploy your own quality score, look into your own algo and vote with your feet.
Adwords used to be a great platform to work with....too bad it turned to what it is now. An expensive exercise in wasting time
All very well and good, but not exactly pracical. My CPA on Yahoo is worse then on Google, and if I factored in my additional time working with their horrific system the CPA would be higher then profit! There simply isn't the traffic going through Yahoo and Live to sustain a larger business.
Point being, any large Internet advertiser is bound to working with them in the same way that P&G is bound to working with Walmart. You can say you hate them or say they are bad, but to turn your back on them simply isn't a reasonable option.
Unfortunately no Google employee has responded to this string yet. It would be very interesting to hear what they might have to add here.
Thanks to everyone who has responded thus far. If there are others who would like to add to the discussion about the change in "tone" with Google, it would be great to hear your thoughts.
Unfortunately no Google employee has responded to this string yet. It would be very interesting to hear what they might have to add here.
That's not going to happen. AWA can explain Google policy in a general sense, but I'm pretty sure he can't comment on it, or defend it or engage in our er.. heated discussions about it (nor should he be expected to - once started, that would NEVER end, and I don't know of any employer who would condone their employee doing that) I believe that mostly he's here to get our input and pass it along to people within Google, and he does an outstanding job of that. I'm sure he has taken the salient points from this item and passed them along.
One thing getting lost in all this is that, no matter what we advertisers want to say or how we feel about google, they are 60%ish of our traffic. Advocating to avoid working with them or simply complaining that they "are evil" does not change the fact that the company I work for would be 60% smaller without them.
This reminds me of having a brick and mortar equivalent - a Main street store front sits idle while the roads department rips out the pavement to the store for "just a bit" and then that ends up taking 6 months to put it back. What do you do in this case?
In terms of a Google employee responding, agreed, I am probably being naive. I guess I was hoping they might fill in the blanks by elaborating on the recent QS algo change. To think I should expect a corporate rep to just jump in here is wrong.
To further the point about diversification of traffic sources and the inherent threat Google imposes on all advertiser's business', I agree, but think part of the issue is still being lost.
Yes, diversification is absolutely imperative. I am very involved with my relationships with Yahoo, MSN and even Business.com. Those companies actually offset my horrible ROI on google and are clearly very important to us.
The point I think is being glossed over is that we advertisers forget that it isn't us who make any impact on the actions of Google. It is the searchers.
To further my Wal-Mart analogy, customers love shopping there. They, primarily, don't care that Wal-Mart pushes jobs overseas or that the quality of the products is compromised by the constant pressure on suppliers to cut costs. Wal-Mart literally dictates to the suppliers what they are willing to pay for how much and in what package etc. You want to sell your product there, that is the deal.
The beauty of search marketing, and the thing that makes it so fun for real serious practitioners, is that there is/was the game. You had an auction based system where the "best" advertisers could usually win out top spots because they could extract more ROI from every click. There was an open market with little to no influence from the company that hosted it. They provide the traffic, you pay them based on the value you can get from it. Small(er) companies usually even had an advantage because they were faster to try new things and make changes. That is good stuff!
As I write I guess I am realizing that this is the biggest thing I fear. Google is becoming Wal-Mart. They are saying 'we have the customers. We make the rules.'
Now I am just rambling, but you see the inevitable here. The searchers, as we all know from trying to explain our jobs to family and friends, simply don't know or care about how Google makes money. They don't even have a good way to judge search results. They just know that Google is "cool" and works good enough.
Obviously we have seen this writing on the wall for a long time now, but it has become more clear to me that the game has officially changed. Google seems poised to "Google-effect" us. The 'we are in this for the best search results' mantra isn't even a pretense anymore.
My advice, get really good at SEO :)
ork ork
