Google AdWords Costs Jump 400%. Unless You Can Avoid That
For all the time I spend telling you about Search Engine Optimization, I don’t talk very much about Search Engine Marketing. While SEO is but one part of SEM, most commonly we think of SEO as a separate, focused act — getting you more organic traffic in Google and other search engines’ results — and refer to Search Engine Marketing as something more “controlled”, like buying Google Adwords.
But buying Google Adwords is nothing resembling controlled.
I remember a few years back being able to buy certain Adwords for $.20 to $1.00 per click. Those same words are now running in the $6 per click — and higher — range. The most obvious reason for this, of course, is that as internet marketing has become THE way that many businesses do their marketing and advertising the competition for many words has become increasingly fierce.
But then there’s the “Google does whatever they want and there’s nothing the rest of us can do about it” factor.
One of the many, many thing that effects the way your Adwords campaigns work is something called “quality score”. In essence, this means that just because you bid higher than anyone else does for a particular keyword, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get that coveted #1 placement in the search advertisement listings! Quality score is an extra step Google takes where they look at the content of the page you are trying to draw people to, decide whether that page is actually germane to the thing you are advertising, and tweaks your position based on your page’s “quality” (hence, quality score).
Which explains why we typically recommend that our clients get their SEO houses in order before trying to undertake SEM. If your page aren’t good, your ability to draw traffic through paid ads is lowered.
Google doesn’t explain this very well. Frankly, Google under-explains lots of things, which is probably a big reason that a company that gives the world so many neat things sort-of-for-free is criticized so strongly. You know; that and the whole anti-trust thing.
So I was intrigued when I came across this story about Google gouging customers who buy AdWords. And I commented to the author:
As for your comeback: “Every AdWords advertiser knows that low quality scores can lead to CPC
prices drastically being increased in order for the ad to show up in the
search results.” … I THINK you meant to say that if your quality score is low then Google might encourage you to raise your bid so you can convince (bribe) them to place your ad higher? Which is on the right track but not really how it works.
Of course, since there IS NO ‘really how it works’ when it comes to relating your quality scores to your bids and your liklihood of getting high up, this is a moot point. Let’s refer back to Mike’s original hard-to-believe story and give Sheetal the benefit of the doubt.
If you’re an SEO Consultant, this makes for an interesting conversation. If not, you probably get to the part about there IS NO ‘really how it works’ when it comes to relating your quality scores to your bids, your head explodes, and you give up.
Which is fine for me; the thing you do next is likely contact The Answer Guy about handling your SEO and SEM. But it’s confusing. Search Engine Optimization is pretty tricky — and yet something you all but must be doing.
It all brought me back to why we talk almost exclusively about SEO rather than SEM. In a piece I wrote almost two years ago I noted the wisdom that the author was putting forth on the SEM side of things, and while I’ll stick with how great the advice being given at the time was, it’s become a smaller and smaller piece of things.
And we have Google to thank for it.
