Bidder, bidder, bidder
He and his people have also learned some tactics around bidding for AdWords. For example, if one competitor buys the same keyword at $1.99 and another at $1.10, Thralow may see a better return on investment by bidding $1.11 to ensure second ranking rather than outbidding the top bidder. The company has even worked out some equations for calculating ROI at given bids. "We call it surfing the gaps," he says. "Sometimes there are big gaps in [bid] position." Some search engine ad services let bidders see what others are bidding. With others, like Google, Thralow has to deduce it by test bidding.
The company spends big bucks on Google AdWords but Thralow has reservations about the service — besides just the fact that he has so much of his ad budget committed to one supplier. He's not convinced that Google has the best mechanisms in place for detecting fraud, or that it spends enough resources on tracking fraud. On the other hand, as long as the ROI on AdWords remains high, it isn't a serious enough objection to keep him away, he concedes.
He's also annoyed about a Google rule that precludes him bidding twice on a single keyword so that he can have two ads on the same search page, one sending people to his main Telescopes.com page, for example, and another sending them to a niche marketing page such as Telescopes4Kids.com. Google wants to stop porn and gambling sites from buying up keywords so that no other ads appear on search pages. "I think they threw the baby out with the bath water," Thralow says.
However, he admits he'd be interested in any new advertising opportunity Google might offer in the future — including a rumored new classified ad offering. "We're always interested in anything they bring out," Thralow says.
|
19th November 2006, 02:30 AM
