A Punter's Perspective

[topr8]

... sometimes i think, what's the point, some people must just love throwing their money away!

so i've just searched for: 'my destination' holiday on google

and the second adwords result has a title of:
'my destination' Holidays
it even has a url of:
example.com/my_destination

but i click the link and go to a generic Holiday Destination page which at a glance must include over 100 destinations, none of which is 'my destination'

FYI. this is an exotic but not obscure destination, plenty of the ads down the side go straight to a page for the correct destination.

it's annoying when i'm looking for something! however i love it when my competitors do something similar with their widgets - i'm happy to see them throw their money away!

[Eschatonic]

A few thoughts...

It's sort of a shame that Google don't appear to take session-based indicators into account more directly when calculating quality score. By which, I mean users who click on an ad, immediately bounce, and click on another ad or an organic result.

Arguably, any ad which has a terrible one outranking it will naturally have a better CTR than it otherwise would do in that position, for precisely this reason. Since its CTR would be higher it'll have a better quality score meaning that (hopefully) it'll be much more cost-effective for that advertiser, and still provide the searcher with what they're looking for. The only loser is the person with the irrelevant ad.

Having said that, you have to wonder about the losses inherent in this approach. How many people click an irrelevant ad, and get disillusioned with the search process before bothering to check the next result? It seems that indirect benefits for competing advertisers aren't really good enough to correct for a poorer search experience.

I'm sure Google have the ability to measure bounce rates from ads, and they could probably apply that as a modifier to quality score if they wanted. They could even provide that sort of data to advertisers to help them make their ads more relevant. The only problem is that solving this issue would naturally result in fewer clicks per session, which would hurt revenue.

[wheel]

I've seen my competitors run ads with an ad title that says 'Ad Title'. That's a nice, generic title, works across many verticals.