AdWords disabling YOUR keywords based on someone else’s CTR
by Sapphire (April 21, 2005)
So it’s not just me? I’m new to AdWords, and my first campaign was somewhere between dismal failure and “well, there went a few dollars I’ll never get back”. I figured it was just a factor of me not knowing what I was doing. Which is true.
But apparently, my ignorance may not be the whole problem. A thread at SearchEngineWatch is discussing Google’s standard procedure of preventing you from using certain keywords or keyphrases based on those words having a low click-through rate for other advertisers. Come again?
It seems to me Google is assuming some things here:
- That the others who used that keyword and racked up the bad CTR were using it correctly. For example, they couldn’t possibly have been Spamsters abusing it. I mean, that just couldn’t happen, right?
- That the keyword hasn’t recently changed context. I.E., pop culture has recently retooled the word to describe some very hot product niche. In short, by disallowing the keyword from the get-go, Google is preventing itself from tracking its future trend. I assume they plan to track it on other sites instead, but since Google normally gives rather different results from their competitors (hence their success), I’m not sure this is really going to help.
- That the keyphrase was based on offline lingo that hadn’t yet made it onto the web… but might yet. (Yeah, this is roughly the same point as #2.)
AdWordsRep’s nutshell response to the whole issue was:
A very brief answer is that a keyword will be disabled when the AdWords system has gathered enough information to be certain that it will not meet the minimum performance standard over time. This can happen in a very few impressions, or in can happen over the course of many thousands of impressions.
I’m just questioning how that’s possible, and whether letting that data determine future trends is good for us. It may be good for Google, but maybe those of us encountering this problem should look elsewhere for PPC? While my adventures with MyGeek were far from satisfying, I have yet to try Overture.
And Overture lets you pick your keywords.
Posted in PPC
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