Google’s Broooader Search – Harming Advertisers and SEM PPC Economics?

Alan Rimm-Kaufman is a brilliant analyst (even has a PhD in Operations Research and Statistics and is a fellow Yalie… boolah boolah). However, I disagree with my fellow bulldog on some of the conclusions he makes about Google’s expanded search algo’s. I see those algo’s rapidly using the AI tech that Google has been developing for years to tack ahead and flank abusers and potential cpc issues of reporting. That AI (expanded match as Google defined it) allows for the AdSense platform to attempt to stay one click ahead of the frauders (admittedly, not always the case as Wayne Porter could certainly point out). But to dismiss the new results as mostly non-relevant ad serving based on a few observations seems premature. Google, more than ANY marketer, is concerned with relevancy, in my opinion (contextual, wiki’s, blogs, merchant process through Checkout, Docs, YouTube, possibly radio). I think Google has a good eye to the long term because of this concern on relevancy. Read Kaufman’s insightful piece and let me know what you think…

I think Google’s revenue maximizing algorithms have discovered that the combination of “extended match” and quality-score based auctions means they can pretty much serve any ad you have on any search related to your category. The result? Higher cpcs, less traffic because of the less targeted copy, and lower conversion rates because the landing pages are wrong: a perfect storm for advertisers, degraded results for users, but more short-term revenue for Google.

New Adwords Broad Match Can Harm SEM PPC Campaign Economics

technorati tags:adsense, google, search, clickfraud, ppc, seo, affiliate

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