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By Andrew Goodman, 7/25/2005
(Page 3 of 4)
Deep Pockets? Welcome Back (And Watch Your
Step)
Google used to have a Premium placement program that allowed
big advertisers to buy the top-position ads by negotiating
a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) CPM rate with Google
and making a bulk buy on a popular keyword. Typically you’d
be dropping $50,000+ on such a “buy.” There was
no CTR requirement. Prime keywords were frightfully expensive.
I heard of one legal-related ad buy with a CPM rate of $100.
The only way to sell that kind of inventory is through the
hard sell, or by banking on the ignorance of some advertisers
and their agencies.
We can speculate on the reasons why Google discontinued this
program on December 31, 2003, but we don’t know for
sure. Predictably, they mentioned the quality of results seen
by the user as a factor in the decision. I think it also reflects
Google’s preference for automation and the growing evidence
that the sales culture that grows out of having commissioned
salespeople pressuring advertisers into chunky, six-figure
media buys, might clash with Google’s image and its
culture as a whole. At the time of dropping the program they
might already have decided they’d research ways of courting
the same big advertisers in the future, but through a revamped
set of rules and procedures that wouldn’t create a two-tier
advertising system.
In the interim, Google has begun to show more respect for
the role of third-party agencies, and those agencies have
become more conversant with the rhythms of paid search campaign
management. The “training wheels” of the big-CPM-buy
model have been removed, and agencies and their clients will
have to sink or swim playing in the same sandbox as everyone
else. Those with smarts, and those who grok the Google culture
and fascination with search quality, will do well. Those who
try to ram irrelevant messages down the throats of Google
user won’t be turned away at the door, but they’ll
be asked to pay for the privilege.
The dropoff in CTR’s can be drastic once you move out
of tight targeting into semi-targeted terrain. Now, at least,
you can use money to keep your keywords alive -- if money
is something you have -- instead of fighting the disabled
threshold. Some of my clients will want to do this; others
will find the cost prohibitive.
Relevance Still Rules
It’s tempting to think that a whole new universe of
semi-targeting may now be open to you, offering the chance
of doubling or tripling your profitable click volume. For
some it might be, but for most, not. Interruption-marketing
logic will not suddenly start to pay off in search marketing.
You know, the sort of reasoning that says “well, my
target product is software that will be mostly of interest
to CFO’s trying to solve one particular class of problem.”
You’ve exhausted all the keywords on that problem, so
now you try to target the CFO crowd directly (just an example,
no letters please from long-haired accountants) by targeting
other words they might be likely to type in. “Well,
CFO’s typically tend to get short haircuts, so if we
put our ad up for haircut keywords, maybe we’ll distract
them long enough to get them to come over and look at our
software.” Yeah. Or maybe not.
The search query marketplace is nearly always telling you
something. They’re not looking for software today, they’re
looking for a haircut. And they’re not interested in
your distractions. If the marketplace is telling you this,
maybe you should, for once, possibly for the first time in
the history of advertising – just listen to them, instead
of telling them what they might want instead?
Google Search accepts users from every walk of life, so for
now, the main way you’ll be targeting is with keywords,
notwithstanding the content targeted side of the equation.
Keywords are fickle and quirky, and until ad programs like
AdWords allow better “channel control” (distribution
only in certain sections of “CFO Weekly,” for
example, which should probably be the subject of another article
about Google’s fledgling Site
Targeting initiative), you’re mostly going to have
to rely on keywords to narrow down your target. Advertising
your software on haircut-related keywords, even if there were
a special haircut called a “fraxlich” that was
only ever sought after by people with accounting designations,
is probably just going to annoy a whole bunch of people who
were looking for haircuts. The Fraxlich Hut is going to out-CTR
you, hands down.
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