AdWords For Better Business
March 20th, 2008 | by Brad King |My contention is that banner ads and the like are quickly going the way of the DoDo, despite Microsoft and Yahoo’s efforts to develop rich media planning software — and Google’s closing on its DoubleClick purchase.
The nature of the Web — from how we browse (we don’t) to how it’s displayed — will soon turn us into a largely search and keyword, RSS-run world. I Tweeted a note, asking folks what they thought about advertising in light of the quandrantONE announcement about the newspaper consortium. Here is what I got from my friend Elizabeth.
Her thoughts:
You asked about online advertisements; my comment was simply that Google Adwords have been the best investment for us as opposed to the other alternative ways to advertise online. Yes, they’re somewhat based on keywords and search, but you bid on the keywords you want to, so it’s not like the natural search results. If your ad (and site) isn’t _somewhat_ related to the search, they’ll eventually pull the plug on it; which keeps spammers from gobbling up all the keywords they can for bullshit sites.
It’s funny, too — we have a pretty niche market with our Gifts For Engineers website. So if you type in “gifts for engineers” we usually come up first in the natural Google search. However, when we decided to stop bidding on the search phrase “gifts for engineers” (because we were already high up in the search), our sales took a big hit. Why? Because people are idiots and they’ll click on ads even though the natural search gave you the same result. So now we keep bidding on “gifts for engineers”. Thankfully there aren’t too many other people out there wanting that search phrase, so we can get it relatively cheap.
At any rate, not sure if that’s what you meant but there you go…
