Saturday, July 9th, 2005, 7:03 pm
AdWords Algorithm Changed
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An insightful little article has been released to discuss changes in Google’s advertising strategy, which ‘chokes’ companies relying on Google AdWords.
…A simple description of the way the new algorithm works is that you bid for a position of 5. As it turns out, depending on the region your ad is shown in, you could end up in position number 1 or position number 20…
…The net result of this algorithmic change is that Google is getting richer and advertisers are getting taken to the cleaners with increasingly poor advertising results for their money…
Google’s advertising programme has recently reached the headlines. They are being sued for making no effort to prevent click frauds. Such frauds result in monetary gains for Google and affiliated sites at the expense of advertising businesses. What makes the story more severe is the attempts to turn such lawsuits into class action with potential for many millions in compensation.
July 11th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
I am not too sure you’ve quoted the right part of that article:
For one thing you could never bid for a certain position, being that number 1 or number 5 or anything in between. So, this first paragraph is simply technically plain wrong.
The other idea you could have copied from the article (but you did not) is that the changes (BTW, I personally did not notice anything out of ordinary in the time frame you are referring to) are done to improve region-specific ad targeting. I do not find that idea controversial, on the contrary it only helps if you DO KNOW your target audience. If you have no idea about your audience, then you might see decrease (or increase) in your ROI, and, as far as I can remember, AdWords lets you geo-target your ads since three years ago, so what’s the buzz?
The other paragraph you quoted is simply lame: any comany that posts approx $500M profit in a quarter is BOUND to have lawsuits because everyone would want to have a piece, that’s just the fact of life. So there was no need to emphasize that as a problem that only Google faces.
My 2c worth.
Cheers,
D.A.
July 12th, 2005 at 1:22 am
Dmitri: from a technical point-of-view, I quoted unimportant parts, so you are right. I was trying to support my reference to Google’s manipulation of adverts, which often neglects the publisher.