The Heavy Chef Project

Whilst the final adjustments are being made to the site, our resident PPC expert, Andy Harris from Custwin, felt it worthwhile to express some of his frustrations with using Google Adwords. Its really useful information to know so we thought it would be worth sharing it with you:

It’s well-known that Google would love advertisers to use very generic keyword phrases when setting up campaigns.  Quite simply, the more people competing for obvious phrases, the easier it is to push up click prices and there’s much less potential for advertisers to prove that Google aren’t playing fair. These conspiracy theories arise due to very little transparency and advertisers have no idea whether advertisers above or below them in the results listings are paying more or less per click and the gaps between just one position can be huge in terms of click costs (contrary to the old 1p difference).

It’s also long been thought that Google discourage advertisers from using numerous variations of keyword phrases when setting up campaigns.  Quite simply, if Google decide that a phrase isn’t ‘good enough’ then they’ll make it inactive, quite often as soon as you create a campaign.  Suppose you want to use a phrase such as ‘SAP R/3 Logistics Execution Forum’ - now, that’s a very specific phrase that has no meaning to most people but to certain groups of people, that means something and as an advertiser I’d want an advert to appear when someone types that phrase.  However, Google, as always, plays God and decides to disable that phrase as soon as it’s created, saying that it doesn’t match its quality criteria.   

Disabling of such niche phrases is more common when creating huge campaigns with thousands of phrases in them.  Admittedly, many of those phrases may not be typed much, if ever, but as an advertiser, if I want my advert to be visible when someone types such phrases, then surely that’s my prerogative?!   I’ve seen several cases where owners of companies want to have their name set up in Google but the system rejects them saying that their name isn’t of high enough quality - total insanity when it should be the advertiser that has choice.  What appears to happen when creating a large campaign is that, after some time, the Google system will effectively say "hello, someone’s creating lots of niche phrases that won’t get typed much, and therefore don’t have much competition so we have to offer them for cheap costs per click".  As a cynic that works with Adwords on a daily basis I believe the system then says: "I know, let’s penalise them now and make them think that they have to use more generic phrases so we can make more money from those".

Some would say: "But have you got enough monthly budget and click cost allowance set up for the phrases?".   The answer to that is: Yes.  Anyone can run this experiment - try creating a campaign that initially has a huge budget allowance and huge cost per click allowance - fill it with very niche phrases, thousands of them, and you’ll see that after a time of setting up, the Google system starts to disallow phrases.   If budget is ok then the only blocking factor would be the ‘Google quality score’, another phrase that to me means ‘Google discouraging people from using niche phrases’.

Bit by bit, Google appear to be penalising advertisers that innovate with their keyword phrases, preferring instead to push people down the route of paying for more expensive phrases.   This is an extremely short-sighted approach, and is certainly something that Google would deny they’re doing.  The majority of businesses in the world are small businesses who don’t have deep pockets and those that innovate can gain huge amounts of business from Google for little cost.  It’s not uncommon for clients to gain 1,000 visitors to a website in a month for just 100 investment in clicks but unfortunately, it seems Google are trying to stop this happening, which creates a smaller number of keyword phrases that can effectively be bid on and makes Google unattractive to small businesses.   In time, small businesses will start dropping out of using Google Adwords and will start using other systems that (hopefully) will have a fairer system.

Having said all this, Google is still a good system but it’s far too dominant.  It has huge holes in the way that it works (or doesn’t), which, as a PPC expert, I see much more easily than advertisers who are just getting to grips with PPC.  My view is that it’s time that Google had a more open dialogue with people in the industry and started to develop a sytem that will continue to be mutually successful for the longer term instead of going down the path of pushing up click prices and sending small advertisers elsewhere.   I have no doubts in my mind that if they carry on this path, there will be lots of reports about Google’s reduced market share within the next couple of years.