Thursday, May 11, 2006

Google Paid Search: Time for the Broom

Okay everyone is debating the search arbitrage issue right now. But that does not help me. The financial vertical is the heaviest hit in this area.

Case in point: do a Google search for "foreign exchange rate" of the 36 advertisers there are maybe 7 companies that actually give information without needing further clicks.

The usual suspects are there. Business.com - the father of search arbitrage - and all those 'best' sites and many others. Yahoo, Ebay and the kings of dynamic PPC are present.

But less than 25% of the advertisers actually work in this space, well unless you think someone whose existence is parsitic should be included.

There is a need to clean this up. Come on guys there are ring tone sellers using currency rates, money exchange etc. as keywords.... how do they get to stay for anything beyond the time it takes to get it looked at - 48 hours?

If this situation continues I think a new technology will be able to knock off Google and the rest - all that it will have to do is go back to cleaner listings.

It would be funny if this was the issue that lost the search market for the top three.

1 comment:

  1. currency trading now has 164 Google PPC advertisers... well 163 - someone had us pull one of ours down...

    ReplyDelete