Comments on: The Good, The Bad & The Pay-Per-Click Ugly

By: kocu

kocu — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:40:09 +0000

You are right on everything, great article here

By: shpallje falas

shpallje falas — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:01:48 +0000

sadly this happens to many other big retailers as well. but who cares, they’ve got the big money. Us little guys look for every penny we spend.

By: Drew Grohowski

Drew Grohowski — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:25:33 +0000

Sadly, when searching for “ssd drives” and clicking a Newegg ad, I was presented with Flash Memory rather than their Solid State Drive page. Someone missed that target…

By: Best of The Web - Blog Posts 2008

Best of The Web - Blog Posts 2008 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:29:10 +0000

[...] The Good, The Bad & The Pay-Per-Click Ugly on GrokDotCom. Extremely interesting examples of bad PPC advertising. [...]

By: Best of The Web - Blog Posts and Articles Of Year 2008

Best of The Web - Blog Posts and Articles Of Year 2008 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:35:50 +0000

[...] The Good, The Bad & The Pay-Per-Click Ugly on GrokDotCom. Extremely interesting examples of bad PPC advertising. [...]

By: Mortgage Protection Leads

Mortgage Protection Leads — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:50:42 +0000

Stunning isn’t it, how websites fail to be effective for the most obvious of reasons. I see it time and again as I re-hab existing sites: it isn’t the esoteric technical issues that are the problem – it is that the basics are ignored.

Dennis

By: Pay Per Click Advertising « AdamAtchison’s Weblog

Pay Per Click Advertising « AdamAtchison’s Weblog — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:43:53 +0000

[...] creating effective advertisements companies will be able to get the best “bang for their buck”. Using an advertising medium like this though can be risky for organizations. Companies can spend a lot of money tailoring their advertisement so that it will appear on search [...]

By: Warehouse

Warehouse — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:15:48 +0000

Try being one of the salesmen at Vann’s and using the site for reference to compare the products and looking up specifications on products. Luckily the techs have updated the software, so it works better, but still not the best. I would love if it were as efficient as Crutchfield or NewEgg. Still have problems with it though, but much happier with the recent upgrades.

By: UniqLooks - 100% Cashmere Scarf feels whisper soft

UniqLooks - 100% Cashmere Scarf feels whisper soft — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:15:27 +0000

It shows how people are wasting hell lot of money on PPC without thinking if it is worth or not. Why can not they bother to test the ad after making it. Might be they have too much money to put down the drain psshhhhhh

By: Paul Burani

Paul Burani — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:12:49 +0000

Let’s step back and see this for what it really is — a HUGE opportunity for growing businesses. There are a few examples here of large corporations that are failing at keeping their campaigns airtight… and therein lies the opportunity. We can do better, and with a growing focus on usability in landing pages, the search engines will reward us.

By: PPC News Roundup – 3/12/2007 | The Adventures of PPC Hero

PPC News Roundup – 3/12/2007 | The Adventures of PPC Hero — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:48 +0000

[...] reviewed the Good, Bad and the Ugly PPC search results for a digital camera. They looked at the top three paid search results and the [...]

By: Nishi Viswanathan

Nishi Viswanathan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:47:52 +0000

Finding poor quality landing pages is a problem with both paid as well as general search results. Then why are consumers shying away from the paid search results alone? From the consumer’s point of view, what difference does it make whether the result is paid or general?

By: Neil Matthews

Neil Matthews — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:35:54 +0000

Nice piece, I had not thought of the idea that searchers may begin to abandon sponsored links due to poor quality landing pages.

I just assumed that it was part of ppc 101 that you had a specific landing page for each ad group

By: seachangestrategies.com » your search engine marketing sucks

seachangestrategies.com » your search engine marketing sucks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:34:38 +0000

[...] This article from the grok.com boys makes the point as well as anything we have seen. My one quibble with them: anybody who buys a Sony camera must not believe in customer service. » bookmark this » hide bookmarks Effect.BlindUp(’obsocialbookmark_barA’); [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:21:54 +0000

Google has been running an ad on their content network for their AdSense program – the link has been dead for at least 7 days. Haven’t seen it yet today, but funny nonetheless.

Jeff

By: wheel

wheel — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:33:35 +0000

Best PPC ad title I’ve seen – the words “Ad Title Here”. Which would be good if I was searching for ‘Ad Title Here’.

By: Monty

Monty — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:07:36 +0000

While advertisers need to follow up and verify that clicks are headed where they want them, Google doesn’t make it easy when they “broad match” model number searches across different ad groups to a less specific ad in the campaign, to the detriment of the more targeted campaigns you build for such long tail terms.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:04:28 +0000

Oops.

Sorry Daniel, the images just appeared on my web page.

Must have been a user error.

Richard

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:02:49 +0000

Daniel,

Just wanted you to know that I think a number of images are missing from your write-up. Lots of whitespace.

I still enjoyed the article.

Richard

By: Arthur Freydin

Arthur Freydin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:51:19 +0000

Also, can anyone comment on what results they have seen with Google’s new match type?
This may actually have something to do with the poor results we’re seeing here.

By: Arthur Freydin

Arthur Freydin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:49:40 +0000

Daniel,
Agreed with your response. However, due to the very miniscule margins in the electronics vertical, it’s just hard to believe that someone like Vanns.com (who is extremely competent in the CSE space) would drop the ball on PPC. Maybe I’m just jaded by the reverse broad matching issue that I’ve seen with Google, but I’d be curious to see what landing pages the advertisers had for the keyword in this example – if they were even bidding on the keyword to begin with.
I’ve been longing to see a comprehensive analysis of the reverse broad match issue across a handful of verticals for a while now. Maybe bringing together 10 or so advertisers to share their input and a bit of data can illustrate if google has an issue or not.

By: Pay Per Click Journal

Pay Per Click Journal — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:37:34 +0000

You’re correct about everything. No wonder companies (all sizes) are wondering why their PPC campaigns are not converting the way they want. Half the battle is making those links head to the correct landing page… you’d think that would be the most important part to many. Very good examples and points brought up!

By: Daniel McGuigan

Daniel McGuigan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:00:45 +0000

Arthur, It’s true that there are many complications with Google’s expanded broad search. In many instances, like the one you listed and countless other stories, the broad search can decrease the effectiveness of advertisers’ PPC ads. But with the examples I gave, this can’t be used as an excuse. There has to be some connection between the search and the PPC ads that Google returns.

The searched term (“Sony DSC W80”) consisted of two very specific things: “Sony” and “DSC-W80”. The pages that these links were advertising had to have had some connection to one of those elements. The advertisers are likely paying for either “Sony” or “DSC-W80,” which none of these pages really caters to. In any of these scenarios, visitors could have at least been taken to a Sony-branded page featuring different options from the Sony catalog.

Don’t get me wrong. This is hard work — no question about it. At the end of the day, a machine can’t replace a marketer’s responsibility. With each term, you have to be on with relevance. That requires human (not machine) intervention.

By: Peter Davis

Peter Davis — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:16:08 +0000

Hey, what google really needs is some people doing arbitrage to remove the inefficiencies you’ve described…. oops, they killed those guys off last fall.

By: Arthur Freydin

Arthur Freydin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:04:41 +0000

On behalf of the advertisers (with the exception of Walmart), a lot of these PPC results can be the handy work of Google Broad Match inefficiencies. I’ve run across quite a few issues with broad match and I’ve had even more detrimental results than this. For instance, I was bidding on the broad matched term Seagull Lighting in an effort to get all other related traffic before I had time to really build out a proper keyword list. I found incoming traffic coming in from completely irrelevant searches such as “seagull” and “lights” which drove the ad spend through the roof in a matter of days.
One word of advice I would provide to the advertisers in question is to build out a full, comprehensive keyword list and gather as much intelligence as possible on actual typed search queries so they don’t have to resort to broad match for a significant number of their keywords.