Now I have to disclose to the company that will benefit from the knowledge what my maximum bid is and what my budget is. All of my competitors are forced to do the same. Now the Google Adwords system can rotate ads in order to maximise its income.
Its like going into a casino telling the croupier how much you have to spend and then playing Blackjack where you have to show all your cards and the croupier can select whatever cards he/she wants from the deck to make sure you lose as fast as possible.
Can this possibly be legal?
Cheers
Sid
The change was not for the benefit of users, or "advertisers" it was so that Google can maximise its yield from searches.
The problem is that Google controls both the sell and the buy and can therefore manipulate its own market. This simply would not be allowed in a stock market for example. There has to be a clear divide between the interests of those buying and those selling.
Cheers
Sid
Can this possibly be legal?
Of course it's legal.
There has to be a clear divide between the interests of those buying and those selling.
This isn't the stock market. It's Google's ad delivery system, on (at least in part) Google's property. They "buy" ad space from web properties and "sell" ad space to advertisers.
BTW, there are plenty of ways to make money from both ends in the market as well.
In the old Adwords system I felt somewhat in control, I bid for position and didn't have to tell Google how much I intended to spend each day or what my maximum bid was.Now I have to disclose to the company that will benefit from the knowledge what my maximum bid is and what my budget is.
I'm not sure how the model you're describing would work. If not a budget and a bid, how would you propose defining your specific parameters?
At a blackjack table, you place defined bets (bids) per hand. And, you do so with chips that require cash pre-payments (allotted budgets).
Did no one prefer the old system where you had a greater degree of control?
Sid
My recollection is that I bid say $3, if the next highest bid $2.50 I paid $2.51 and was above the one bidding $2.50. Or have I been on another planet for too long. No quality scores just my decision to bid for the top slot.
Now I bid $6 and I get to #1 10% of the time even though I have a bounce rate of just 13%.
The point is that "Quality Score" is another term for "manipulation of ads to maximise Google income". And they keep changing it, testing a new mix of algo factors to see if they can increase Google income. Before "Quality Score" I could work out how much to bid to be #1 all of the time.
I'll give it a rest now.
Cheers
Sid
Mind you I hate the Yahoo/Overture system as well.
Cheers
Sid
PS I spend over $100,000 a year with Google and about $30,000 Bill and Mr Yahoo.
Someone said why play at a casino if you dont like the house rules, that makes sense, but when the rules are not fair to advertisers and the majority of the planet does not know or care about this, you are forced to play by their rules regardless if you want to or not, thats the way it is. This is about selling and money, not making people happy. I feel your pain, I spend close to 150k a month in PPC and Google is squeezing the profits right out of everyone. There are so many shady, unethical things that Google allows because of one reason, money.
I come to find out a month ago that one reason ads do not always appear is because if you run a tight budget and come within a certain percentage of your daily budget your ads wont be served 100% of the time even though you are hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars away from meeting that budget. Why? Its pretty obvious to me, they do it because if they can't get people to raise their daily budgets and make money that way they will force them to raise their max bids and get them anyway.
They already have the search market locked in for at least anohter 5 years and they know it, so expect advertisers to pay the price for that monopoly.
Apart from the unfair play you see, that monopoly-thing is true for most of europe, but not for the united states, is it? I mean, in germany, google is above 90%, that clearly is a defacto monopoly and every hour spent on optimizing for yahoo or bing/live in this market is wasted. but as far as I know, they're far from that in the states, more like 60%. while that is still a big lead, it's not even close to a monopoly. Is my knowledge on that outdated?
Yahoo is on its way out the door. It has been for years. Your right about Germany, I run localized ad to localized pages to a localized product across all major PPC platforms and Google crushes them.
I think your knowledge is right about market share from a very broad sense of statisical research, but i am willing to bet that market share is higher in certain niche's.
