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How can we know if paid search advertising works?

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Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#51

Post by ocdtrekkie »

charcircuit wrote: post #48
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, once you realize the most profitable Google search terms are already the top organic result paying to be on top, you realize Google's business is the guy who shakes down storefronts for "protection" to avoid their windows being broken in by the local gang on a global scale. "That's a nice brand you built there. Ya know, it'd be a shame, a real shame, if one of your competitors was to end up above you on the sea…

>Yeah, once you realize the most profitable Google search terms are already the top organic result paying to be on top What if you aren't the top organic search and you want to drive traffic. For example "mesothelioma lawyer" is a very profitable keyword that'd you would want to show up on top. If there weren't any ads you would need to out SEO other law firms and hope Google doesn't screw you by adjusting the rankin…

That's the obvious legitimate purpose of selling the ad space. If that's where Google's money was coming from, I wouldn't be irritated. Well that and if they didn't profit on the malware/support scam ads.

However, I suspect if we were to remove Google's revenue from those two categories, they would not be in the Fortune 50.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#52

Post by vgeek »

marc_io wrote: post #46
vgeek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://searchengineland.com/google-ebay-penalty-cost-197031 This relates to the ebay penalty. I think one of SEland's founders actually left to take a job at Google as an evangelist. You can probably search for "ebay seo penalty" and find more references. Other notable penalties that were well documented include RapGenius and GV backed Thumbtack and Nest, which quickly had their penalties reversed if I recall correc…

Thanks for the links, but regarding seobook.com/blog: it is quite strange to see a blog about SEO without HTTPS, which is a ranking signal since 2014 (1). (1) https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2014/08/https-as-r...

No idea why he doesn't have https enabled, but he probably knows it is disabled and explicitly wants it that way. He has covered plenty of technical SEO topics, but is more of a commentary on the industry now. I'd probably filter out the politics, but a good majority of the marketing/advertising content is spot on.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#53

Post by contravariant »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #43

Where search advertising works well for me is 'service' related advertising. As an example I have a burst pipe and I need to call a plumber out to my house. 10 years ago I'd go to the physical phone book and look up a plumber to call. I don't do that anymore now I type "my suburb name + plumber" into my browser. Where it does not work well is because I searched for the term 'plumber' every site I visit in my browser…

I'm not sure the first type of advertising is that useful. Why would I care which plumber paid Google the most money? I just want to find plumbers.

I suppose you could make a 'search' engine by just letting people pay to show up on whatever keyword, but I'm not sure if that serves the same purpose as a general web search engine.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#54

Post by cwkoss »

vgeek wrote: post #2

The article fails to mention that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities, eBay suddenly got a very large SEO penalty. Conspiracy theories aside, I once inherited a large Adwords account with nearly 25% of spend dedicated to branded KW bidding. Simply dialing back bids by 90%+ dropped impression share from 95% to 80%, but the paid branded clicks just shifted to organic branded clicks-- confirm…

It's a protection racket that allows others to use your trademark to sell their product if you don't outbid them.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#55

Post by davchana »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #29
bthrn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This information is on the bottom of every paper check. While it is probably not advisable to broadcast and post up everywhere, it is not supposed to be a secret.

Right, its security by deterrence. Besides its not like you can anonymously drain someones bank account, someone claims fraud on your 10,000$ charge you're getting a phone call from your bank.

True, yes, it will be sorted out if it is unauthorized, but if it is like in 1000 or around, most of the major banks will simply overdraft of active, and leave the customer to notice, find & call bank to sort it out. In real case of etsy, where etsy was pushing/paying money to sellers through direct deposit (& employers too), they mistakenly emptied accounts, and most of the accounts went into over draft, I believe a couple years ago.

Most of the employers', companies' direct deposit forms/agreements say they can pull money back they paid by mistake.

In contrast in India, now banks ask cheque holders to login into net banking and submit the cheque info if they write a cheque over certain big amount. One leaf of cheque allows only one withdrawal, when presented in original, and if signature matches exactly, and if account has sufficient money; whereas in US, routinely companies convert paper cheque to electronic payments.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#56

Post by morelandjs »

Suppose you could buy ads that are active every other week. I feel like after a few months you could compare the active and non-active weeks (perhaps excluding holidays) and have a pretty good sense what you are getting for the ad spend.

Sure you might have some opportunity cost, but this seems like a sensible strategy for a new company starting out.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#57

Post by camhart »

cwkoss wrote: post #54
vgeek wrote: post #2

The article fails to mention that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities, eBay suddenly got a very large SEO penalty. Conspiracy theories aside, I once inherited a large Adwords account with nearly 25% of spend dedicated to branded KW bidding. Simply dialing back bids by 90%+ dropped impression share from 95% to 80%, but the paid branded clicks just shifted to organic branded clicks-- confirm…

It's a protection racket that allows others to use your trademark to sell their product if you don't outbid them.

I don't think you can use a trademark in ad text. But companies still try to wiggle around this.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#58

Post by Spooky23 »

contravariant wrote: post #53
bigger_cheese wrote: post #43

Where search advertising works well for me is 'service' related advertising. As an example I have a burst pipe and I need to call a plumber out to my house. 10 years ago I'd go to the physical phone book and look up a plumber to call. I don't do that anymore now I type "my suburb name + plumber" into my browser. Where it does not work well is because I searched for the term 'plumber' every site I visit in my browser…

I'm not sure the first type of advertising is that useful. Why would I care which plumber paid Google the most money? I just want to find plumbers. I suppose you could make a 'search' engine by just letting people pay to show up on whatever keyword, but I'm not sure if that serves the same purpose as a general web search engine.

It’s a sort of social proof. If you want a larger company to reduce risk, you can probably correlate placement with revenue.

In the Yellow pages, display ads were the same thing. If you don’t know of them before hand, you might assume that the half page display ad was a more “legit” company than “AAAAA-1 Plumbers”.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#59

Post by cwkoss »

camhart wrote: post #57
cwkoss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a protection racket that allows others to use your trademark to sell their product if you don't outbid them.

I don't think you can use a trademark in ad text. But companies still try to wiggle around this.

But you can use a trademark as an ad targeting term... which feels a little trademark-violation-y to me.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#60

Post by kbos87 »

This article tackles one small and specific portion (bidding on branded keywords) of what paid search advertising is all about, so I think it’s fair to say that the title overstates the scope of the content.

Paid search advertising has been subject to hit pieces for the past 15 years, often authored by people who are resentful of Google for some reason and happy to cite a bunch of statistics that don’t actually prove their point.

Are there inept advertisers burning money on AdWords? Of course. Does that mean that major brands with entire departments filled with analysts running their paid search efforts can be debunked in a couple thousand words? Obviously not.

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