Google money machine defies common sense As the economy continues to shrink, Google continues to crank the dial on its top-secret money machine. According to the latest stats from AdGooroo - a search marketing consultant that tracks search ads from a network of servers across the globe - Google expanded its ad coverage (yet again) during the first three months of the …
My company, careimages.com, advertises with Google. One of the kewords we use is, quite obviously 'care'. I monitor click responses closely. In the last month or so I'd noticed serveral clicks for phrases using the word 'car'. Quite clearly they weren't misspellings either as they'd be phrases like 'car transporters photos' and 'car racing pictures'.
Totally irrelevant to us and I had to block that by using a negative keyword. I also wonder quite what's going on with clicks on our ads anyway with phrases like that. Why would anyone interested in car transporter photos click on an ad that mentions community care for the disabled?
This also illustrates the importance of monitoring your ad clicks yourself through your own server logs rather than Google's own reports. Since Google does not provide any information on 'fuzzy' keyword matching.
I long ago abandoned the idea of their 'content network' as virtually all the clicks I was seeing from that appeared dubious (try telling Google!) and only advertise on the search results page.
Funny, i was just thinking about this, ever increasing amounts of free email space, search queries and other free online apps like google docs, google's only real business model is advertising, without it, there would be no business at all.
Adblockers are the biggest problem for google, for that reason online advertising is not going to be a viable market for google, it will have to come up with a better way of making money.
Will the government have to bail out Google as well? Wait and see, i think long-term this may be the case, we're in big trouble if they can't survive this mass-cull of credit.
I think that advertisers are generally getting wise to pay-per-click as well and going more for article writing, SEO, blogging, twittering, social networking, mailing lists etc. to get traffic to their site.
Dave you've overlooked the momentum Google has, who do you think is the middleman for these article, blog, social site ads? They may reach critical mass eventually but in doing so they become the only game in town for anyone with a large advertising budget so they secure at least a sustainable profit model at wherever they end up when the advertising market settles.
Look at their competition, a fledgling yahoo and the company trying to buy them, a company who has been paying people to use their search service.
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