Hey folks,
There are a couple of trends in Google Adwords that I feel are damaging to the small business owner.
(1) The ever-broadening of broad match
I've written about this before. Many people have the notion that broad match means you get shown when people search on something that contains your keywords.
So, for example, if your broad match keyword is
red shoes, you can get shown for any search that contains both "red" and "shoes" (or their plurals).
Google themselves encourage people to believe this:
Quote:
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# Broad match is the default setting for all keywords. All searches made using your keyword (in any order or combination) might display your ad.
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(from "
Getting Started with AdWords"
This isn't true... and it's becoming less and less true every month that goes by.
The way things are now, Google could quite easily show your ad to someone searching for "purple trousers".
A real life example from this week is a client who is advertising on 10" TVs. Now, you can't use
" in your keyword, so we have things like
10 TV.
This week, his ad for that was shown to someone searching for "BMW7 series".
I'm guessing google "related" the "10" and the "7" and the "TV" and "series".
However, we had no keywords with "7", "BMW", "BMW7" or "series".
Any human would know we weren't interested in that searcher, but Google will show whatever ad they can get away with.
(2) The increasing importance of on-page SEO
This week I had a new client (new adwords advertiser) whose quality scores quickly got knocked back to "4". But, when we did some on-page SEO to theme the page for his main keywords, the quality scores went back up to 7.
To give an idea of how much of an impact this had, it's about the same as a 42% reduction in cost per click.
Again, any human could see what his page was about, but google punished him for not having his SEO right.
(and I'm talking about technical stuff like H1 tags and the outgoing links on his landing page)
These two trends - both of these things are becoming worse as time goes on - mean the D-I-Y adwords person...
(a) needs to closely manage broad match campaigns... or give up on a huge amount of potential visitors
and
(b) needs to know on-page SEO - and some inside tricks about what google are looking for on landing pages... or pay through the nose for clicks.
IMO, this is just bull****. Both these things bleed advertisers dry - the first by having them pay for untargeted visitors, the second by having them pay more per click without helping them understand why.
Adwords was always a "skill" activity - just like
all forms of advertising - but the change over the last year or so is that Google have gone from being on the same side as the advertiser to being an adversary.
They've gone from being transparent to punishing advertisers who fail to conform to a mysterious set of rules Google won't even explain.
While I understand that people like me - who have the time to specialise in this - benefit from this, I feel it isn't morally right.
And, as usual, it's the little guy - with the small campaign who can't justify professional management - who ends up getting hit.
Steve
Linear Mode
