Cheating Google... Or Why Pay Per Click Isn't Always The Best Model
from the just-saying dept
Chris "Long Tail" Anderson has an amusing post on his blog about how he's "cheating Google" with an advertisement he's running via Google's AdWords program. The "scheme" works as follows: he's written a pretty bad ad on obscure keywords -- which never gets clicked on. Of course, part of Google's AdWords juju is that if your ad never gets clicked on, they yank it. However, you can re-enable the ad by raising how much you're willing to pay per click. Of course, as Chris points out, that doesn't matter at all if no one is ever going to click on your ad. So, instead, you're getting "free impressions" -- though, the effectiveness of those impressions is rightly questioned. Either way (and Anderson is mostly joking), this does highlight some of the limitations of "pay-per-click/call/action" advertising. We get companies pitching us almost daily on some sort of pay-per-action advertising -- knowing full well that very few people are ever going to buy. What they'd be getting, instead, is a ton of free brand-building. Later on that can be useful to them -- but we certainly don't get a cut of that. That isn't to say these types of ad programs don't have their place, but there are limitations to them, and its why many publishers still feel a lot more comfortable with traditional CPM advertising. Advertising isn't just about the immediate action.
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Google Ad Cheating
-Kas
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Re: Google Ad Cheating
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The google adwords needs some updates
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No Subject Given
Facts check please. ^_^
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PPC - Action Advertising
Lastly, I will pose a question to you all. Does dot-com branding really work anymore, anyway? When there are ten pages of the essentially the same site, or affiliate site hawing the same products at just about the same prices, do the consumers actually 'buy' the brand or the price?
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Re: PPC - Action Advertising
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Re: PPC - Action Advertising
I never said that PPC doesn't work. I said that it's not *always* the right thing for *publishers*. You're talking about advertisers. In fact, the point was that advertisers often get a better deal out of it because they don't have to pay for branding.
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