I tend to agree with you. I’ve got clients who have seen impressions crash, but who were getting leads at a viable rate. After the latest round of changes, they don’t get the business, because they aren’t being shown on relevant searches, at Google’s whim. Most of those suffering worst from the changes have niche markets, and look for less than 1% of the audience that uses a specific keyword. They have a built in low CTR, but can pay a lot, because the service is valuable to that segment - so they used to appear. That low intrinsic CTR doesn’t invalidate the advert, and does help the small percentage of searchers who want to see that one niche advert. That this skinny subsegment of the audience want to see it, is borne out by the high conversion rate. However Google apparently only looks at the clicks. Clicks are revenue, and IMO, Google appear to be trying to optimise revenue, not sales or businesses. It’s the Nash Equilibrium, played out in advertising - they seem to think it is a numbers game, not a psychology game - Macroeconomics rather than microeconomics.

I’ve already started pushing my clients towards alternatives - I expect to write up some of the experiences. ;)

Hope to hear your lucid thoughts here again :)

In every other medium, the advertiser controls the message, who sees, what price they pay. The vendor, whether it be newspaper, radio, tv, outdoor - has no place or business in deciding what ad is worthy of space, and removing ads because they feel it’s not relevant. This is the height of arrogance.

Imagine if a newspaper said “No, you cannot advertise in the sports section, because your ad isn’t relevant to people who read sports.”; or perhaps a a radio station executive tell a person “your ads cannot run on our talk station, your product has nothing to do with the content of our talk shows.”.

Similarly, can you imagine a radio station or tv station saying “Well, we are going to increase your ad rates on all future campaigns because those ads you just ran didn’t produce enough results.”? Crazy! Yet Google is doing just that. Any Sales Manager in the country for any medium would be fired instantly for saying such a thing. While the vendor does care about your success, they won’t punish your or make you reopen your doors if you have a campaign that performs poorly.

And finally, what mass media company would have the audacity to tell a business how to design, decorate, stock or even locate their store? Again, Google does.

It’s entirely absurd. Google doesn’t know the first thing about my business, our marketing plans, or who we want to reach. Google hasn’t spent the last 15 years fine-tuning marketing campaigns that are demographically and psychographically targeted to specific markets. They are a channel through which we can reach potential clients.

Google’s stock has dropped nearly 40% in the last six months, from over $700 dollars to just $450. This decline will continue until they stop pretending that they know everything about everything. I, like most Marketing people, don’t have the time to hassle with a company that is so self-righteous and egotistical. There are plenty of mediums out that would love a piece of the pie; and now thanks to Google’s policies, they’re going to get it.

Best wishes to your Jeremy.

You aren’t going to get transparency. How Google controls the value extraction from the market is partially a result of their asymmetric information holding. They are the gateway to value. Making changes that can cause a single keyword to vary in impression volume by a factor of five over a few weeks, when other market signals indicate that the demand is unchanged, without any announcements and even offering denials of changes, is quite reprehensible, IMO.

I am aware of the statistical flux of the Internet. I’ve been using it since the 1980’s. I have a degree in Cybernetics. I’ve run large scale experiments with noisy data (200+ houses, with more than a thousand sensors, for several years). I know noise. I *like* noise and signal extraction. There’s a signal here, which is that the Black Box has changed the transfer function.

Google won’t see a penny more of my Company’s million-dollar plus marketing budget until they allow ME to decide what’s relevant to my business and what’s not.

And to punish/poison an AdWords client for experimenting with keywords is inexcusable. How are we supposed to learn?

Google’s ego has gotten out of hand.

You haven’t made any argument against my analysis of the buying process and the impact that Search History Permutation has on that. There’s not *one* thing that Google has changed, it is a bunch of factors. Sometimes, for some clients, they combine to dreadful effect. For others, the changes are visible but the results are more complex to describe.

You commented that clicks are declining, “…This is borne out by comScore reports - declining click volumes, declining count of adverts…” I presume you mean Google Clicks. That said the comScore report is suspect at best, SearchIgnite found the exact opposite to be true. http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003717516

Additionally, initial reports from eMarketer etc. suggest that Search Advertising is as healthy as ever despite a U.S. economic downturn.

Apologies on the link being there - I hadn’t noticed that names linked directly to the website - feel free to remove it from my previous post.

I don’t believe I have poisoned my account - I did have a play in a different account before my current one - but it could well be worth a try again.

You could well be right about some of my competitors relying on the captured customer idea. In part because their products are so poorly made that they break.

We are trying to sell quality over quantity, which would suggest that we are probably incorrect in advertising on the generic keywords, and we should retreat into a quality/luxury niche.

I think what I have found is that AdWords is not a good place to try and educate people. If they already have a fixed idea of what they’re after, even if you are offering something much better, they probably won’t want to listen.

I think I will target those specific areas that I am trying to appeal to and also try out other areas such as MSN.

Paul

Yes, I know the industry. Suggestion - are you registering people for email? I suspect that many of your competitors are relying on a “captured customer” to get repeat sales and amortising the value over that, rather than a cost-for-one-sale, that is, use the lifetime value of conversion. This can justify a higher-than-you’d expect click cost.

Also, have you “poisoned” your account? If you had a period, typically when learning, when you had a low CTR, you might have driven up the base price you pay. Annoyingly, the only real way to tell is to see how a new account, starting with your best shot, performs. Large businesses will migrate keywords to new accounts, a process sometimes known as “keyword rehabilitation” or “keyword recovery” to get a better AvCPC. Small businesses - harder to do.

You might also want to consider MSN (esp targeting MSN Personals), Yahoo, Advertising Exchanges and Domain Parks. There’s stuff to do after you’ve exhausted those, too :)