George sent me an email earlier this week. It had one of those subjects which confirms my long held thought that I am indeed a clever fellow! The subject simple read: “you’ve been saying it for ages”…Google Adwords in this case. Google protests that its rules and guidelines for SEO are transparent and simple to abide by. Even if you believe that, you have to admit that the Google Adwords system is far from transparent – how else would Google make its money?! It seems to thrive on confusion, normally resulting in non-savvy advertisers increasing their bids in desperate attempts to scramble after leads with ever decreasing margins.
George’s email contained a link to a Mind Valley Labs blog. My first thought was to ridicule the self confessed IT bod for crawling through a Market orientated blog. Having got over my schoolboy need to stereotype, I began to read and examine the post. It turns out that it confirms what I found out for myself. The author basically outlines the fact that Google is known to carry huuuuuge amounts of traffic but that new advertisers don’t seem to be able to get any of it. Why? Well, it is probably one of the few strategic problems with the Adwords quality ranking model …because the Big G is in fact one big elephant – it never forgets.
Admittedly, I’ve offered nothing groundbreaking here!
The real problem with the Adwords quality rank and emphasis on historical performance is that it will simply continue to stretch the market out. The top performers will always be there or there abouts whilst the tail end and new advertisers will continue to struggle to pick up the tail end of searches…and within the world of insurance PPC, this is about as short as Ronnie Corbett limbo dancing games with the seven dwarves.
A short while ago, I conducted a little experiment. I took content from a long established Adwords account and duplicated it into a brand new one which was created solely for the purpose of this experiment. The ads held identical copy, keywords and URLs. The two accounts were not run at the same time but both were live for a 24 hour period on similar performing days of the week for insurance searches.
The established account told me that the top end bids for the term ‘car insurance’ sits at a maximum of £8 CPC. This would comfortably put you within the top three slots. This is also confirmed by the account manager bods at Google. For the new account, I placed a maximum CPC of £25 (twenty-five pounds). Frustratingly, that whopping chunk of cash (something I know Google has a taste for) could only achieve an average position of 78.3 at a CPC of £4.21. So Google, prey tell, what on earth does a new advertiser have to do to get into a position where it can be shown to prove its worth. Position 78 is only ever going to get some click happy robots or some seriosly lost and confused customers.
The advice from Google – bid higher!!!
Capital One
Credit Made Clearer
lovemoney
Relationship with Your Money
CashQuestions
Personal Finance Problem Solver
Life Cover
Insurance Made Easy
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Google don’t make it easy for advertisers. That’s because of the position they’re in – the internet is their panopticon – and they have full control!
George
New accounts have low quality scores because of the lack of history. Google guesses what the quality scores should be from an average. So there’s no way around it, if you want to compete at the top you have to be patient and establish a good account history.
The natural results for the search engine works the same way. They probably think it helps keep spam out of the paid advertising.
@Steve L – your comment is fair but the problem most people see is that they can establish an account history with patience – however – this history either needs to be costly (to get a decent CTR) or your history is built as an under-performing advertising because you’re only getting the tail end impressions and rarely on the first couple of pages of results.