The Biggest Loser in the Blank Right

No tears?

[minnapple]

With most everyone focused on CTR and Avg. CPC, I find it odd that biggest loss, Impr. is not being mourned as it should.

It came to me to later than I feel comfortable admitting, but eventually I realized that Adwords provided much more than traffic alone.

I often started campaigns so they have little chance of getting clicks, but were likely to gain impressions. These campaigns were always highly segmented geographically, by the day of the week, time of the day, etc . . .

With only impression data, I could quickly start to gain a detailed knowledge of demand with little investment other than my time.

Now that the amount of ads per page that don’t get clicks has decreased, it has lengthened the time to acquire the adequate amount of data.

It seems that Google has removed yet another source “free” of data from the webmaster's toolbox. However, you can still obtain a lot while spending very little. For the time being.

[jebernier]

totally agree!

[eWhisper]

I totally agree as well :)

For SMBs; we often used the impression as a 'proof of publication' to let them see their ad on occasion.

With the right side gone; this is a lot harder to do and the 'branding' aspect of paid search is also losing some steam.

[engine]

The smaller spenders are the ones to suffer. I know one of them that has lost their opportunity because they just don't have the budget to play with the big boys. I guess the smaller budgets are of far less interest to Google.

Some of the most effective campaigns I ran way back were for branding. We didn't want clicks as that cost money. I'm sure Google won't miss those.

[ehorvath]

After a few month of this change made live I can tell you that this change doesn't mean the SMBs are suffer. At first I was very sceptic too, but meanwhile I got campaigns where the change just improved the results (and the budget for that campaign is around £100-£150/day so I won't consider this large company as this cost is equal to an average business dev's cost for a company.) I don't see the change as an end for SMBs advertising.

Certain things have changed:
- You do need to care more about the campaigns.
- You need to target your customers better, need to use more settings
- Probably you have to set your campaigns to run in a certain time period or in just certain areas rather than 'everywhere'

but if you do care with the campaigns this change doesn't mean -30-40% decrease on ROI (in PPC point of view obviously)

[engine]

Thanks for the feedback, ehorvath.

The things that have changed, as you mentioned, are often beyond many SMBs. I'm speaking from experience of friends with SMBs, and they just don't have the time, or resources to dedicate to spending time fine tuning the ads. They are in the region of the spend £50-£100 per day. Which is not a lot at all, but it's affordable from their part, on top of the other promo and marketing they do. They don't necessarily want/need business from beyond their region, and have always displayed the ads locally. I also advised them to use day parting.

One of them told me that he's now spending his AdWords budget on improving his local poster advertising. He sees it as a fit and forget, until the next month, or so, when he may update the poster.

He told me that in the last few weeks he's had more footfall in the store because they saw his poster (he always asks new customers how they found out about the store), and he'd noticed some enquiries coming in from the Net, too, with the tracking reference he put on the poster.

He's certainly given up on AdWords for the time being.

[ehorvath]

Hi engine, I think it also depends on the type of business not just the size of the business. If you are an SMB and targeting business maybe local poster ads are less effective than if you are an SMB and selling to customers. So it does make difference whether you are small team of DBA experts or small team of a kebab shop.

Anyway one should do the type of advertising that seems working (and legal hahaha) not the type that is working for someone else :)