Chances are you’ve seen ads like the one below and you’ve wondered where are publishers like eBay coming up with these keywords?
Well if you were listening to WebmasterRadio.fm tonight you would have learned something.
Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) had an interview with Kris Jones of PepperJamSearch.com on his radio show Net Income. At about 20 minutes into the show they had a call in question, and Kris revealed that Adwords provides him with a list of keywords for his company and his clients companies to bid on. (link to podcast)
Over the past few days I’ve had a large number of my keywords disabled for “low quality” ( see Threadwatch.org). Other than the merchant the only sites who’s ads I see running where my keywords were disabled happen to be the big publishers such as eBay, shopping.com, bizrate.com and so on. I find the double standard of big guys getting keyword research on a silver platter while I can’t even get a straight answer as to why my ads are disabled very disturbing to say the least.
Have we reached the stage where Google is only interested in advertisers who want to run “dead squirrel” type of accounts?
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{ 17 comments }
What can I say .. I am amazed to see the hundreds of reactions to this new landing page quality adjustment, and the disabling of so many ads of so many small advertisers.
If this issue (because I see it as an issue not as a fix, or arbitrage fight) continues, you can bet your ass that a LOT of advertisers will just use other contextual networks.
I have dugg this:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Adwords_Selling_Out_For_Big_Clients
At a previous job I offered to buy Starbucks for the person who found the best eBay ad in Google – this came out of sheer frustration that I was having trouble keeping keywords active on clients accounts with relevant landing pages and being out bid by the likes of eBay and others.
Once again I am running into the same issue and for that matter – with a lot of my content being video, and the changes in landing pages (and lack of ability for Google to “read” video to determine relevance) – I am once again frustrated. There are a lot of things that are great about Google but the disabling of keywords that are much more relevant than that of eBay…
The problem with relying on an algorithm to determine good landing pages is you are assuming that computers have feelings and can emotionally connect with content that the spiders cannot read.
I’d say that the news that Google is providing keywords to high-spend clients shouldn’t really be news to anyone. They already have a keyword suggestioin tool for small publishers, so why wouldn’t they give big publishers managing multi-million dollar clients a keyword list to make it easier for them to spend money? This is just a textbook business move for Google.
Of course they are giving their best clients the best tools. They do that for the “premium publishers” in AdSense too. Shoemoney has mentioned this a few times. Since AdSense is the red headed stepchild of AdWords – Google’s cash cow, the same special treatment obviously applies to the big AdWords clients.
Also, for those who were listening to the Shoemoney show yesterday, you also realize that the big marketers already have their own keyword lists that they use, so this isn’t a huge benefit to them. Maybe some of you little guys are wanting Google to do the work for you, but being a small-time PPC player myself, I’d say that we are all better off finding our own keyword lists. That makes the game more interesting.
I focus 100% on organic traffic, I stopped using Adwords a long time ago, the only small people who might have benefited from Awords are spammers correct?
I think this is being blown out of proportion. Google is definitely not feeding top clients lists of worthless keywords, such as “dead squirrels”. Those types of keywords are being found using a dictionary script. Perhaps I should release one to the public, so that Mom and Pop shops can compete
As Blackbeard said before the lists that *are* given are pratically worthless. If you’re spending six to seven figures a year, you most likely know the system better than your rep. If you don’t, a list of keywords isn’t going to help you much.
As for the whole landing page quality debate, everyone needs to understand this is not GoTo. Google has and will always put algorithms before human judgement, which means your sem strategy has to adapt to an ever-changing algo. Remind you of anything? Could it be SEO?
This is the Florida of Adwords. Another storm will follow.
They do have access to these keyword lists but he said they do not use them. We also have access to these keyword lists we just have to dig for them in the keyword suggestion place.
(IMO) This is no secret. There have even been sessions at SES about search engine reps stealing clients from SEM companies. Google will even help some merchants with their keyword matching options and creating the copy that will go into the ad it’s self.
“If you expect to spend more than $4K per month on AdWords, please contact our industry sales specialists to learn about additional setup and support services available to you.â€
You should contact Google as an advertiser wanting to participate in the Jumpstart program with a 4K budget and see if you can get them to help you set up an arbitrage campaign for your all-ads MFA website. ;^)
One of my new favorite sites for demonstrating your favorite ridiculous “big site” ads:
http://www.dumb-ppc-ads.com/all_images.shtml
We see a lot of that in Norway and the Google staff seems to have no limits to giving out lists to advertisers that I consider very low in quality. A lot of those that are advertising in this way in Norway are competing search engines and directories.
I understand the frustration with eBay’s Adwords campaigns. But, to their credit, they know exactly how to play the PPC game.
They’ll have high landing page quality scores because they use:
- Bespoke landing pages (ie, eBay search results for your search term.)
- Search terms and semantically-related keywords appear in URLs, title bars and throughout the on page copy
Presumably their dictionary-generated keyword lists get a good clickthrough rate (CTR) for the obscure three word plus searches, where there’s little or no competition and they can rely on clickthroughs merely from the brand name.
Ad performance, remember, is influenced by your overall account’s performance. So if you achieve a low-but-reliable CTR on 1000s of niche terms, you should stand a better chance of ranking well for the broader, more competitive ones.
For every ad with a top 10 adrank for a competitive one word keyword, I imagine there are many, many more obscure niche terms with a comparable CTR.
Still, I don’t envy anyone managing their multi-million keyword lists.
Some assume that the only reason you see just eBay, shopping.com, and bizrate.com ads left is because they didn’t get their minimum bids raised.
Quite possible they got their bids jacked up too, but they’re the only advertisers willing to continue spending.
Might be more egalitarian than it first seems.
Hi,
We noticed this kind of rubbish in the Spanish market sometime ago (january), when we saw in dispair that you could get a librarian in Ebay, for just 1 euro:
http://www.catorze.com/blog/1-euro/
Well, we all knew that we were badly paid, but Ebay seemed to be sinking the prices
Well if they are paying they are fools, there’s no way they could be making a profit at those rates. The conversions would have to be over 40%.
I agree with your_store on this.
There are many accounts that can get a helping hand from google in setting up better/bigger keyword lists. They also “campaign” optimization for advertisers with lower spending levels.
I doubt that google is giving away keyword lists with dead squirrels…I am wondering how often the Ebay ads are from affiliates.
Michael, they are willign to pay up to $30 (i think that is where it is at now) for a new member. I would like to think that at 5 cents a click, for dead squirrel they are converting at 1:600 or greater.
I always assume that when stupid words appear in AdWords ads that the advertiser is simpy using dynamic keywords.
eBay are unlikely to bid on the term “dead squirrels” and dynamic keyword replacement seems the likely, if not only, explanation…
Here’s a site with “eBads” – or funny eBay Ads. I laughed forever on some of these.
http://www.dealcafe.com/funnies/searchgame.html
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