4 ms·

Companies buy those ads on their own search results so a competitor can't target them for advertising

• joshspankit 7y ago
  Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?
  • akiselev 7y ago
    Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. It's one of those "the sky is blue" type of things in advertising. You NEVER want a competitor to have a shot at advertising to your potential customers, especially when they've gone to the point where they're typing in your name into Google so their conversion rate is likely significantly larger than your average site visitor.
    • ce4 7y ago
      I'm not into that stuff much but this may be the reason why there's often bad ads if you search for popular foss software binaries like LibreOffice or Gimp.
    • z3t4 7y ago
      The browser vendors are in bed with the search providers. You can't bookmark a site or go directly to it, it always goes via search. No wonder companies want native apps rather then web pages, then the user get an icon on the app drawer/desktop, and they don't have to pay the middle man.
    • pishpash 7y ago
      See, this is the kind of thing I knew would happen, rent seeking from the rest of the economy because the bar has risen and you have to pay, not because you get some economic benefit from paying for ads compared to the baseline prior to Google. Google has become a bloodsucker on the economy. You and I are the ones paying in higher goods and services costs passed on to us. Worse, the bidding has no natural upper bound.