May 4, 2007

Is Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its terms of service for adCenter, with some key changes: Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements. Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.

In a thread discussing the changes in the Search Engine Watch forums, user Mel66 notes that she's seen some other uses of "criteria other than keyword searches." Apparently, Microsoft is running ads through IntelliTXT, the much-maligned inline text ad provider. Mel66 clicked through on the ad to find it pointed to a search results page with one of her PPC keywords on it, which she believes is related to a recent drop in performance of those ads:

I wondered why we had a pocket of keywords with huge leaps in clicks and no resultant increases in conversions. This sucks. Is MSN really so desperate for traffic that they've resorted to running crappy ads for their own search results???

What this amounts to in my book is MSN running their own garbitrage ads. You click on an ad and get a page with more ads on it. This is bad, bad, bad, folks.

Mel66, whose real name is Melissa Mackey, is the search marketing director for MagazineLine, the magazine subscription division of American Collegiate Marketing. Mackey happened across a publisher site running IntelliTXT ads, and one of the keywords was "magazine," which is one of the keywords Mackey targets in her adCenter campaigns.

The IntelliTXT ad included a Live Search box, with "magazine" pre-filled, which links to the Live Search results page for the keyword:

The ad is part of a campaign by Microsoft to bring new users to Live Search by highlighting the relevance of certain queries.

"We turned off Yahoo's content network over a year ago, partly because of IntelliTXT and its poor results," Mackey told SEW. "What makes this even worse than that is that it looks like MSN considers this type of ad to be search, not content. We have opted out of MSN's content network."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:24 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

PPC Back Fill Map or Who Is King Of Garbitrage

While this is not news - it really should be. Most of the small search engines are arbitraging one way or another. And the Big Three (clearly 3 since Ask back fills Google PPC) make their cuts on the front end.

A Bruce Clay map for all the PPC partnerships and the rules that govern them would be handy.

My rant here started when I noticed at Ask that we were not being served Ask ads but rather our Google ads. Spoke to one of the people over at Ask and was told that they back fill with Google when the CTR drops below their acceptable level.

Guess that is the level where Google would pay them more to put their ads in... so some of our $10 plus Google terms pay Ask more (rumors of what percentage vary but let's work with 60%) - they get $6 a click from Google when we advertise for say $3 on Ask.... so the CTR would have to be 200% to make them enough money to change....

They are not the only ones.... I see many of the small engines pushing their results out into even thinner search provider portals.... the search results may stay at the site but the results are feed straight from another engine... yet many of these engines also arbitrage their onsite inventory with one of the Big Three so they force their advertisers to bid up to at least what these other people are willing to pay.

Not making much sense - after a while people are going to realize they are just using variations on Google, Yahoo and MSN and just go there first.

I want to start a Back Fill Map - so everyone post what you know in the forum and I will develop something that we all can use.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:05 PM | Permalink

December 10, 2006

Search Arbitrage Gets Forbes Attention

Forbes did an article on search arbitrage Friday featuring interviews of Jeremy Shoemaker and Michael Gray. Shoemaker said he had made $2 million over the past two years arbitraging Google.

"He (Shoemaker) estimates that around 50 people are earning more than $1 million a year from Adwords arbitrage, some making several million a month. Web marketers following the scheme agree Schoemaker's estimates are in the ballpark," Forbes wrote.

The story reported Shoemaker said he uses cloaking to show searchers a page of ads while the Google spider sees other content.

According to Shoemaker the Forbes reporter misinterpreted him. His reply can be found here.

Posted by Frank Watson at 9:13 AM | Permalink

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