Comments on: Whoops, too relevant?

By: Kerstin

Kerstin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:31:28 +0000

Oh, I totally get that Google is as expensive as a… well, it’s pretty darned expensive. However, there exists the very real possibility that advertisers aren’t actually bidding on über-generics and it’s not Google’s minimum bid policy that’s causing the ads not to show. They’re ignoring generics in favor of more long tail keywords specific to their business. It’s economic reality, rather than a minimum bid issue.

By: greg

greg — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:18:11 +0000

Kerstin – why can advertisers afford them on other search engines?

By: Kerstin

Kerstin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:38:20 +0000

Wait a second, if you were limited by your budget, wouldn’t you be less likely to bid on super-generic terms (baseball, hockey, etc) on Google than Yahoo or MSN?

It seems to me that the expense associated with bidding on those ultra-generic terms would kill a modest budget in a matter of hours or days, where concentrating on long-tail build out, intelligent bidding strategy and using different match types would allow advertisers to make the most of a smaller budget across a month. It’s probably a reason why those uber-generics aren’t showing many ads; advertisers simply can’t afford them.

By: greg

greg — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:12:48 +0000

Heh – I don’t think I’ve typed in a one-word generic query in ages, John, and that’s why I missed it.

By: john k

john k — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:32:14 +0000

I’m surprised you are just noticing this. It’s been like this for a while. Google also runs fewer ads on average for many queries, whereas Yahoo stays closer to the max that will fit.

I’ve found that Google runs ads on only about 50% of SERPs. I think the rate at Yahoo and MSFT is around 80%. (How do I know this? I actually ran a test about a year ago of about 10k random queries. I forget exactly why I did this, but there was a reason at the time.)

One corollary is that Google has a lot of headroom to increase monetization if they ever deign to. I.e. they could do a lot of things to get more revenue, but they believe that they are optimizing user experience – which is good for them in the long run.