Forum Moderators: martinibuster
That means no one can generate reveune from a direct user lead loop by AW/AS. Isn't it a SmartPricing ... :P
[edited by: GoldenHammer at 8:40 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
[edited by: GoldenHammer at 9:54 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
As described, I suspect it would also be wide open to error and could be bypassed frighteningly easily by MFA publishers anyway. URLs are cheap, so is redirecting.
MFAs are not Google's problem; if Yahoo were #1, their ads would be abused the same way, as would MSN's, even Ask's. Well, maybe that's going too far.
So long as Ads bring in the money, people will shove a poster anywhere there's a flat surface, unless and until they realise the real estate is losing value, or the return drops away.
Blaming the company that is the middleman between the advertiser and idiot with the hoardings is not ever going to solve the problem.
It's like the banners of old and the popups of not-so-old - people will eventually express their disgust and stop clicking on the things. Nothing else will work.
[edited by: Quadrille at 10:01 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
Remember, AdSense is about converting clicks into sales.
This business is about conversions. If the MFA is converting their traffic, this is a benefit to the advertiser. If it's not converting it gets smartpriced to the point where the cpc that leads to an eventual conversion reaches a reasonable rate. When Google reaches this reasonable rate of conversions, it benefits the advertiser.
What most people forget or don't realize is that advertisers know that a certain amount of clicks will convert for particular keywords. So the bid price is set to take into account a certain percentage of conversions and a certain spend on an amount of traffic that won't convert. Preferably it costs less to convert than the profit margin. AdWords makes calculating the cost per conversion easy to track.
So I ask: Please explain how a click that costs what an advertiser agreed to pay is hurting the advertiser.
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You are probably asking an interesting question that no one could give you an *** EXACT *** answer, neither Google, but after an experiment..... :P
As it is a dynamic system, what means "reasonable" pricing is dynamic and varies according to the system behaviours (what a living system!). If this approach does make any change of the culture, it would lead to another "balance" and we could just reach another "reasonable" pricing scheme.
[edited by: GoldenHammer at 11:26 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
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That is just one of the technical issue that Google might need to address, not necessary a real barrier in front of Google.... :P The key is if Google does have the ambition to make a real difference.
[edited by: GoldenHammer at 11:22 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
1. Personal take: I run PPC campaigns for my ecommerce site. It's difficult for me to get enough volume of clicks due to the subject matter (rehab), so I am grateful for all the MFA's that Google can find to SEND ME MORE TRAFFIC!
2. Business theory: PPC prices rise when inventory is tight. In other words, the fewer places my ad can be seen (ie - page 1 of a google search), the higher the PPC.
However, if inventory is plentiful (whether regular adsense sites or mfa's), my CPC rate can actually come down, as volume pricing takes over.
To sum it up: Conversions are my problem, but first I have to get the traffic. If I'm converting 1% and making a profit, I still want 1,000,000 more visitors!
They dont convert, great for branding, crap for conversion...
Please explain how it would benefit the advertiser by removing a sales lead
The main point is whether a click on an ad that was displayed in MFA context will actually convert to sales. Your question implies that all sales leads are the same (but they are not).
If visitors just click an ad because there is nothing else on the page to be seen, then chances are high that they are not too interested in the ad content and the product advertised.
Their first goal is to flee the MFA site, because there is typically very little content for them to explore. They do have two options to do this - (a) click the "back" button, (b) click on one of the "links" (ads) on the page. If the page where they came from is not that strong (content-wise), they will potentially click the ad (and thus burn advertiser money) without a strong interest to buy the advertised product. In other words: visitors from MFA sites are less likely to convert compared to visitors from non-MFA sites.
But this is just theory, and even at the Adwords forum there are/have been discussions about whether MFAs convert well or not. I lost track of the consensus (if there ever was one), but I *remember* that the majority of advertisers do not like MFAs to display their ads.
I don't think it would remove the lead as such in most cases, but just take one of the middlemen out of the loop. This gives more room for the final advertizer to appear on Google's search pages directly.
Of course, nobody knows how it would all balance out in the end, but for the surfer, it certainly would make for a much nicer experience.
Please explain how it would benefit the advertiser by chasing away leads they would otherwise not obtain?
As important as advertisers are, Google's policies aren't always about pleasing the advertiser. Sometimes Google takes a longer view and looks at what's good for the program--as it did when it introduced landing-page Quality Scores for advertisers on the AdWords side.
I'd assume that GoldenHammer and the other MFA critics are worried that click arbitrageurs will contribute to active and passive ad blindness by tainting the "user experience" (to borrow a term from Google's defense of its new landing-page Quality Scores). In other words, MFAs may well generate profits for the arbitrageurs--and, in the short term, for Google--but they potentially make the "Ads by Google" or "Ads by Goooooogle" box less valuable for publishers whose topics attract large numbers of MFA ads.
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Maintaining a brand is an art.
