Webferret

Anyone else noticed a sudden increase in google adwords costs this month? The jump in my costs was so extrems (about 30%) that I had a closer look.

First of all, I track sales from pint of click. Google gets me lots of clicks *and fuck all sales*.

I'm guessing most clicks are my competitors having a look.

secondly, there is no independent auditing of google's claims

by this I mean that google say 'your competitor bids 17 cents for that keyword so you have to pay 18. Oh good, you have set your limit high enough. 18 cents please'.

HOW THE HELL DO WE KNOW THEY ARE TELLING THE TRUTH?

For all we know, the algo works like this - "find the highest paying / ctr sucker, exhaust his daily spend, move on to the next one'.

In other words, if the algo says 'find highest bid, and give slot to that one at 1 cent over previous highest bid', HOW THE HELL DO WE KNOW THEY DON'T JUST SAY 'find highest bid, and give slot to that one at 2 cents over previous highest bid'.

an extra 1 cent per click makes the lying fuckwits an extra 500 mill a year. AND WHO WOULD KNOW???

I'm closing down my adwords campaigns in a controlled fashion, and studying the result.

rant over

micfire

Yes? It's called business

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fuck it.

redmonkey

LET's start a protest. Calling out all advertisers to stop using adwords. That'd solve it(you never know untill u try)

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Drake

Start? This has been normal for years.

PowPow

Good for them.

I try to limit Adwords use anyway.

Webferret

I know what yer mean guys, but it's a hangover from about 2003 when it really did generate some profits.

Up till this point, although it's been falling off, the conversion rate has just about justified the expense, and I've always managed to convince myself that the 'exposure' on the main google site was worth it (obviously got the scam network er content network turned off).

But now, it's toppled over the point where there's any possible justification for it.

will be interesting to see if anyone else decides likewise and pulls the plug on Big G.

500 lb gorillas need a LOT of bananas everyday.

for the money I save, I can get another dedicated server and ip collection, and about 3000 autoblogs

HarveyJ

The irony is that even whilst Google has 70% of the traffic, any number of comparisons I've seen show that MSN ads actually have a better conversion rate.
I'd put it down to the sort of people stupid enough to use MSN would buy anything, but hey... Spend your money where and how you want to.

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ArtDeco

I pulled out of ad cents on most of my blogs long ago - it never worked for me as a publisher - the ads were on target, but they were mostly branding type ads w/o even a call to action. that no one is likely to click . So evidently many advertisers feel the "exposure" is worth while. I doubt it.

I think that Yahoo and MSN searchers are actually looking to buy something and don't want to wade through a bunch of ezine and wikipedia articles just to find a seller. So they convert better by percentage, even though the traffic is much lower.

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