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One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result. See
by ALittleLight 6y ago
One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result. Seems like a waste of money.
An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which, yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google with the search result that Google should've (and does) already identified as the right result.
I assume the reason these ads exist is because if they didn't competitors would take them, but still, it feels like an odd arrangement very much to Google's benefit where companies pay Google up prevent competitors from taking their traffic.
- ThrustVectoring 6y agoThose ads have very good click and conversion metrics, if you're not sophisticated it looks like a good idea to cannibalize your organic traffic that way.
- amelius 6y agoThe problem is that your competitors can use your name as keyword, and become the top result for your company name ...
- jldugger 6y agoOnly if people actually click on competitor ads. I imagine it's pretty rare anyone searches for ebay and clicks on amazon ads instead. So you're uniquely situated to outbid the competition with absurdly low CPC because click through rate is dramatically higher. And sure, it's not fun handing over money to defend your brand. I could see an argument be made that you want the competitors to outbid you because the costs are so high for them.
- xnx 6y agoIt's also the best way to get accurate data on how many searches for "heroku" there are. Without an ad running, you only get estimates.
- rosstex 6y agoThis is quite an interesting idea. Hm.
- ALittleLight 6y agoThat's an interesting idea. I just looked up "heroku" on Google's keyword planner and the max cost per click is 3.00. Is it really worth three dollars a click to know the ratio of people who click heroku over people who search it? Seems like a crazy loss of money to me.
- rosstex 6y agoMaybe Heroku gets a deal by virtue of being Heroku?
- qwertycrackers 6y agoAfaik, on Google ads, cost per click scales inversely with page quality. So clicks on the heroku ad searching for heroku generally find what they are seeking and therefore don't cost very much. If Google thinks you are advertising people toward trash, they charge a lot more.
- kevmo 6y agoIt's a digital protection racket.
- pb7 6y agoIs this any different from putting up a billboard next to a restaurant for a competing restaurant?
- topicseed 6y agoIt is, because it is not always perceived as an Ad. Looks like a duck, talks like a duck, and Google has it #1, so it must be my duck. So in principle, you're right, but in my opinion, it's a lot more powerful than a billboard (clear ad) next to a real storefront.
- pb7 6y agoThat's the cost of directing customers to your website even if they misspell your brand name or don't remember if you're a .com or .net or many other things. After all, if they knew to go to topicseed.com, why didn't they type that URL in and go directly there? I certainly don't search for Hacker News or Apple.com or Twitter on Google each time I go there, do you?
- topicseed 6y agoMost people going to a specific store do Not know its address. You just know where to find it. You trust that the storefront you're roughly familiar with belongs to the actual shop you're wanting to get into. You are right but in practice it's just not the same as street stores and restaurants.
- fuzxi 6y agoIt's more like asking for directions to a restaurant and getting directions to a different restaurant.
- 6y ago
- Spooky23 6y agoIt's definitely a questionable business model, whose obvious problems are underscored by the fact the Google doesn't allow you to do it with some some entities. In other scenarios, it's a borderline protection racket. For example, you can't use ads to squat on search terms for government agencies. I haven't tested it extensively, but I'm pretty sure even searches for things that are outsourced to third parties still land on the .gov page. Search for "<state> state park reservations" and you'll usually see only organic results, with the .gov as the top result. The actual provider (Reserve America in many states) is below the .gov in most cases. Sometimes (most notably california), the provider is the top organic result. In most verticals, you'd see a wall of bullshit ads for affiliates to the reservation provider.
- xapata 6y agoI was told that these ads are very cheap, because Google scores the relevance very high.
- Ericson2314 6y agoYou give them a choice between divesting all their various businesses, or the FCC dictates how the business is run. The latter will be boring stuff like % of search results that are ads, etc., rules for auditing algorithms, etc.
- hinkley 6y agoI don’t recall which, but I searched for a brand name recently and their web site was number five or six. Pinterest was higher, which drives me nuts.
- xapata 6y agoPinterest might be bidding very high for that phrase, or maybe other consumers prefer Pinterest to the manufacturer's site.
- commoner 6y agoeBay used to pay Google $20 million/year for ads with the "eBay" keyword. When they stopped, they noticed no impact on sales: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24 https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
- three_seagrass 6y agoOn-brand keywords are defensive plays, and should not be paid for unless others are targeting them as well. It's possible that the competition stopped advertising against ebay searches as online shoppers migrated to Amazon.
- superasn 6y agoYou're right. when i searched "digitalocean pricing" today the top results were ads saying "linode is better", "free $100 vps coupon", etc. It seems borderline fraudulent that Google is doing this to companies that clearly should be the first result on the page.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoTry it in a private/incognito window and see if you get the same results. When I did that it was all about digitalocean. I'm guessing they used your "anonymous" profile to figure out which ads were best for you.
- temporalparts 6y agoI think having competing ads make sense because it shows consumers alternatives which is competition. Google does add a relevance factor to the cost which means Heroku would have to pay a lot less for the spot than its competitors.
- autokad 6y agoits kind of a form of ransom. now they can seek rent from roku to pay for their own word to stay on top or else their competitors will do so