Thursday, August 30, 2007

Marissa Mayer, the Holy Grail and CPA Walked Into the Bar......

In hidden rooms at the GooglePlex there are people frantically working to develop a CPA model for all of us searchers. Despite it being called the "Holy Grail" by Marissa Mayer at the Search Engine Strategies conference keynote address last week, cost per acquisition would eliminate quite a few of the search industry's problems.

Hey it would have been nice if this had been worked on and implemented before we had to pay through the nose for the "inactive" search bid process Google claimed would counter click fraud.... basically we just paid for the loss in revenue and sooner or later it was all back.

Now Ms Mayer I see Google riding along like the characters of the Monty Python in the Holy Grail movie... coconuts for horse sounds and an air of stupidity.

Wake up... if Bill Gross has not rolled this out yet then it can't be done right at this time.

The product now on offer in AdSense could be one of the first big launches that they will have to pull out.

If someone gets to this first, or Google simply gets sidetracked by another 10 projects, the balance of power in the search industry will change with it.

"Bring out yer dead... Bring out yer dead"

But I ain't dead yet! - drop the ball on this one and you will be making funeral arrangements.

Friday, August 10, 2007

The Google Honeymoon Is More Than Over

The change made recently to Google's AdWords pricing makes me wonder how the relationship ever started. We were seduced by what looked like an engine that cared and are now finding out we are being pimped.

I hear the words.... it is to help people get top positions - but come on doesn't that mean get people to spend more money.

Did someone actually sit back and say "how can we raise pricing and get advertisers to think we are helping them?"

Hell isn't having the lion's share of traffic enough. Must we be squeezed for every dollar?

Stating that Quality Score will have a lot more importance is dubious at best. The QS was already a major factor. Hey between that and the good old inactive actions the advertisers paid for Google's poor attempt to drive out the arbitragers. I brought that up at every arbitrage panel at SES and never got an answer.

This time around Google wants to jump up the bids by now using the actual Max CPC to determine placement.... I must be stupid but they have always used the Max Bid as a factor I thought.

Okay but really isn't the QS now just taking the place of the Max Bid... it is major influencer and has had the import of evaluations done by $10 per hour help. Some may be solid but the vast majority were looking for some easy money - can you blame them... so is Google.