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NEW May 2011 Critical Adwords Changes: Google made critical changes to PPC search results. These changes make traditional Adwords management techniques & strategies far less effective than in the past. While still critical it is no longer good enough to focus on CTR (click through rate). In fact recent changes will almost guarantee lower CTRs for all advertisers who do not fully embrace these revolutionary changes to the Adwords model. Advertisers who embrace these revolutionery Adwords changes will reap substantial rewards and bury most Adwords competitors |
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The Democratization of Market Research Using the Power of Google AdwordsIntroductionGoogle started life in the information laboratory of Stanford University in 1996 and became a registered private company on September 4th 1998 before becoming a public company in 2004. The mission of Google is stated as follows… "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." In Q1 2009 Google’s reported revenue was $5.51 Billion with 67% coming from its own website properties and 30% coming from Google’s partner websites (referred to as Adsense sites). The vast majority of people see Google as a search engine when in fact it makes something like 97% of its revenues from selling advertising. Google is one of the world’s largest media companies. Their advertising model, referred to as Google Adwords, is based upon both keyword based and contextual based search using Google’s powerful algorithms. In summary Google sells advertising space to any type of organisation or individual. When a search query is performed Google automatically populates the search results page with targeted adverts based upon the keyword used to initiate the search query. Advertisers only pay Google when an advert is actually clicked. Contrary to conventional advertising Google does not charge for the display of an advert. An in depth understanding of how Adwords works is the key to performing in-depth online market research in almost any field, on a macro or micro level quickly, accurately, over any time period and targeted to almost any language or country and even to specific geographical regions such as within a 50kms radius from Johannesburg and at an amazingly low cost. This paper presents a case study to show how any individual or organisation can harness this system to effectively create valuable marketing information. The Google Advertising Model in BriefThe Google Adwords model consists of 2 basic approaches to displaying ads. In both cases Google only charges the advertiser when an ad is actually clicked. Hence the term Pay per Click or PPC advertising. The display of an ad referred to as an "impression" is free exposure. The Adwords approach which is most commonly used is the keyword based search. In this case a search query is entered into Google and the results of the search are displayed directly within Google… Example of Search Results Display for Search Query "Maps"
Take note of how Google bolds the actually search query term in all the displayed results. In simple terms the higher the ad is positioned on the right hand side the more the advertiser will pay Google when an ad is clicked. In practice the positioning in this results ladder is a function of numerous variables. The second type of search Google uses to display ads is referred to as contextual search. In this situation Google places ads automatically on a partner website rather than on its own search site. The ads so placed are based upon the context of the page on which they appear. The following screenshot is an example… click to enlarge image
For the purposes of this paper only keyword based search is considered. To be continued |
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