03.26.08
Posted in Leadership at 11:17 am by Brandon Wirtz
I worry about Hillary’s recent Misspeak. I have misspoke before, when I thought I was quoting someone and flubbed what they said, or I misspoke and inverted or changed some numbers unintentionally. But the difference in my view is intent. Like when you misstep, you didn’t mean to fall off the roof you misstepped. Remembering the girl who greeted you at the airport as a sniper who you ran for duck and cover is not so much misspeaking but lying.
As an engineer I often find that is can get caught up in misspeach when quoting a specification. EIA-708 and EIA-709 are related but different spec’s, but 708 is about captioning and 709 is about color space, so if you mis-speak you can find you sent someone on a wild goose chase.
If you quote some one 6 milliamps when you mean 6 amps they may have a very bad day.
Or if you ship something to Las Vegas, NV instead of Las Vegas, NM. These are all mis-speach.
When a CEO says that his sales will be up 15% and he meant 1.5% that becomes a bit harder of a call.
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03.01.08
Posted in Google at 1:37 am by Brandon Wirtz
CTR’s are down 7% Google says that this is because Google has "Improved" the quality of the ads that are returned when users do a search. If that were true then CTR’s would be up because Ads would get served to more qualified better targeted customers. But they aren’t.
Searches are up 9% and blog traffic has risen with them. But many of us have seen our CPM’s fall steadily. More traffic and 5-15% less money.
If ads were better targeted, Google’s revenue would increase because you would get more clicks based on being more relevant, and they would be able to charge more per 1000 impressions because they would serve the best ads, and even if they didn’t get any more money per click they would get more clicks.
What we are seeing instead, is more Pay Per Impression ads. Ads that don’t need to be clicked to be of benefit to the advertiser.
I have had to take to blocking these types of ads as competitive to keep my CPM up.
I can’t say I haven’t done similar things with the ads I buy. I cram them full of the information I need to get a sale, and the information the user needs to not be a window shopper.
For example:
Buy a Widget
Our Widgets are the best click to see them now!
This type of ad gets clicked. But the below ad gets more sales per click.
Widget $29.99
Our best widget is now 50% cheaper and can be shipped overnight
This ad gets clicked less, but has a much higher sell-thru.
I’m ok with either of these running on my site, they are "Fair" enough.
What I dislike is the ads that are like this.
Get $10 off Widgets
Call Us now at 1877-4AWidget and use offer code DIDNTCLICK
These types of ads monopolize my site with $2 click numbers, but no reason for a user to click.
As Google tries to ratchet up its earnings it works harder and harder to raise it’s commissions by helping customers optimize their sell through it must balance what it does to publishers. Online advertising has plenty of room to grow, but the way to increase profits is not to do more with CPM ads, it is to remove more of the spam blogs.
Here is the scenario that every Splogger knows…
Write a post with spammy text, Google Bomb it until it glows, it sits there in the top 10 results for "Widgets" and gets 1000 hits a day. The site has no content, it just "pretends" to. And it has no outbound links. So a user just blindly clicks on anything that might take them to the next place on their search. The Splog gets a click no matter what the ad is for, doesn’t matter if it is relevant, the Ad Buyer is out a few cents, and everyone but the splogger loses.
Search result ads don’t suffer this the exact same way, but they do suffer. If you are willing to pay you can run an ad against anything, even things that you have no business advertising against. If you set your Cost per Click to $5 you can run an ad for your 900 number fortune telling service against any number of keywords. Using the ad I outlined with the phone number and setting your daily budget to extremely high numbers and you will see CTR’s that are less than 1 hundredth of 1% but will have an amazingly low CPM.
Whether Google will admit it or not Adsense is broken, not so broken that they aren’t making insane amounts of money, but enough that there is a lot of money to be made buy bending its rules. And a lot of money to be lost if you don’t know who’s breaking the rules and how.
7% fewer clicks on 9% more traffic = 16% fewer clicks per thousand users.
Want to make a small fortune? Buy ads on words that there are no Ad Search results for, and sell something. Or just arbitrage some clicks.
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