Search Engine Ads
This thought came to me today while we were fiddling with a Google ad campaign: If everyone has their bid amounts set to "auto", what's to stop the price of ad-space from going up indefinitely? At a certain budget, you will get impressions and clicks for however many keywords you can afford. This number goes down as you run out of money for the month. But, the number of key words you can afford also goes down as other advertisers raise their bid to stay on top. If you leave your budget the same, in time all the keywords would be unavailable because the price is too high for you to afford. This could technically go on forever - especially for popular search keywords.
My advice is to keep strict track of how much you spend on web advertising, and how much you get back. If you are spending more than you are earning, try cutting out your search engine ads altogether. On our server, the site that gets the most traffic, and earns the biggest profits (as of now) does not use any search engine advertising. It is not impossible!
As so often happens, as I was thinking about this in the back of my head, I ran across a page on the same topic: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web
The Alertbox is a great site on usability, by the way. If you are in the web design field, you should read through some of his other articles.
by Susie @ 1:26 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I'm not sure if I agree. I think the concept of your post is good, we should watch our advertising and monitor it, but I think the advertising campaigns "tax the stupid" and I think that is a Good Thing. The numbers don't go up forever - On Google, for example, you set a monthly budget with the budget optimizer and it is trying to achieve the most clicks. That's the most number of clicks for you, not the most dollars for Google. It keeps the bid amounts low. What this does mean, is that many of your keywords will drop off as inactive. If you are clever, you will add more keywords into your campaign that are niche areas where there isn't as much competition, and you will get more clicks cheaper. If Google exhausts your keywords at a low bid, I bet it tries a higher bid to at least get you *some* clicks (it does want to maintain your budget, after all). Whether you have it set to auto or not, any bidding system inherently spirals upward when there is a hot keyword being battled over. This is part of the nature of a bid. It is important to decide if it is worth the extra bucks to be first place, or if you can be satisfied with second or third or eighth place.
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