Re: Google dance

From: Robert Ross <rross_at_AdventuresMarketing.com>
Date: Fri 05 Dec 2003 09:22:50 -0600

I would have agreed with all the complaints about Google forcing out
small businesses free listings, but I pretty much changed my mind after
checking out yesterday's link: http://www.scroogle.org/fiasco.html

This is an explanation that makes more sense. It never made good
business sense to force out small businesses in favor of paid listings.
However, there is a huge problem with millions of affiliates, that
cummulatively do nothing but get in the way of tryig to find an actual
company's web site. Statistically, most of these do little business for
any of their sponsors and they are just another form of spam. For
Google, relevancy is the name of the game and they must be able to make
the index more relevant, which means less spammers. They may try things
that backfire, as the latest algorythm did when it knocked off honest
players in the top two pages instead of spammers. That is unfortunately
a price we all had to pay for a better Google down the road.

I can tell you, as a major AdWords buyer, that they do not intend to
force everyone to use AdWords. While that may sound like a neat idea to
some folks, in reality it could destroy AdWords and kill the credibility
of the general index, which they sell to other search engines and is an
important profit center.Most importantly, doing that could creater even
bigger bidding wars over keywords, forcing small advertisers out fo the
game and killing ROI for all advertisers. It is a tough balancing act to
find the right mix of bids and conversions to get a positive ROI. I had
one guy with deep pockets bid up a term and we tried to stay up with
him. However, ROI went way down. I decided to cut my bid in half and
accept much lower placement. Though this reduced traffic in by half, ROI
doubled. If businesses can't make a profit bidding on keywords, gross
bidding may decrease for Google, leaving them only with bids from big
corporate clients than are willing to buy consumer awareness without
regard to ROI for online resources.

Just a thought,
Bob Ross
www.AdventuresMarketing.com





Received on Fri Dec 05 2003 - 09:22:50 CST