05.13.08
Google Adwords can Destroy your Website
I recently ran a campaign on Google Adwords Search and Content Network, which was a traffic building campaign. I use these partly to build new audience and partly because often I can run ads against words no one is buying. Everything was going great, until Google indexed the pages on the content network with my ads.
The ads look something like this:
PC Cheat Codes
Cheats for 1000’s of games
like crackdown
linktosite/get/gamename
And there are nearly 6000 of them for different games which my site has cheats for. Not all of them were priced high enough to run on Search, most of them weren’t priced high enough to run on the content network. But I was looking for cheap words.
Many of these a few days ago had 0 hits for the words "Cheats" and the Game title.
Day one things are glorious. I get about 200 extra visitors, I’m buying in at 2 cents a click, I’m making $9 CPM on the site, I’m buying traffic at $11 cpm, not cheap, but not awful.
Day Two: I notice that there are a lot of pages on the Internet with my ad text on it.
Day Three: None of the words which were running on the content network are affordable. The price has gone from 2cents to $1. Because there are now a bunch of sites with higher page rank with my keywords on them.
I have rarely had this problem in the past. And there may be times when you can exploit this to your advantage. If I have a phone number, this would be Amazing Free Advertising.
It also lends to some really great ideas for how to "Game" Adwords. Which would likely get you banned. Why run ads against your own page? Got a phone number to promote, run ads that point to the top hit for what ever you are advertising, run only on the content network.
Have a competitor who is kicking your butt? Run ads that say they suck and put those on the content network, now when people search for their name all of these ad hits will come up saying they suck.
You would think that if we aren’t allowed to modify Google’s ad code this wouldn’t happen. You would also think that Google would detect this and punish sites that were doing it.
Apparently your ads don’t have to always be presented the way you expect. In addition to your ads being converted to static text so they can run in Opposition to your site in search. You may find they are presented as jscript, but made to look not like an ad.
You don’t get to the top of the Adsense ladder by following the rules.
So am I exaggerating? A little. In a few days my ads will stop running because I won’t pay enough to keep my ads running, and in a few days after that those pages that had run those ads will stealing someone else’s ads, and my ads will start up again if I haven’t paused the campaign and the vicious cycle will start over.
Assuming that works out to 50% of the time, I’m only making this twice the deal it really is.