Thursday, December 28, 2006

Flaw In Google Adwords Algo

When it comes to making sense, Google is way off on this one. I ran a tiny test with a ringtone campaign using the term "eminem" broad matched.
So I was staring at a perfect Quality Score the moment my ad started running. Then I got a few thousand impressions and my CTR was extremely low. One, because my ad was down the right side of the page. And from the looks of it, there are ZERO Premium ads up top. This tells me one thing. This term has way too many searches with too little click volume overall. So right now I'm looking at 33,228 Impressions and 59 clicks. I'm 100% certain that Google must change their algo to include some weight system based on volume of impressions vs overall Adwords CTR on certain keywords. As it stand now, they have a bottom line of like 3% CTR in order to get a Premium listing above the organic results, this term, along with millions of other high traffic terms simply will NEVER receive this sort of CTR. Period.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Ringtones and Yahoo Search Marketing

For anyone working with Yahoo Search Marketings old platform, you'll feel my pain on this, and may not even know it.
Few weeks ago, I was checking out some stats on my ringtone sites. Looking at logs, and found some sickening info. 30% of my unique clicks are coming from outside of the USA. And to make matters worse, I'm using Azoogle, and in their geotargetting, they send non USA clicks to other places, some go to a UK ringtone program, some to an Australian program, and the rest go to a little program that produces about a $0.0000001 earnings per click. So what I did was start geotargetting myself. And what a change it made. So instead of making a very small fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent, I've turned that into $0.05 per click redirecting all my non-USA traffic to an Adsense page, and while it may not sound like alot, it sure is making a difference on the ROI. But here's my gripe about it. I'm still losting money on those clicks even with this geotracking. I'm still paying a max of $0.10 per click, and I'm earning $0.05 back on it. And this is about where it stays, they still send that junk traffic, and I have to put up with it. Good thing about it though is they have their new console they're coming out with, so I hope Yahoo's geotargetting really takes a turn for the better after ALL my accounts are upgraded to this new version. I only have one account upgraded, and I haven't checked it yet. So we'll see.

Christmas

So it's xmas time, and all went well. Wife got her $3,000 diamond earrings. Kids got everything they wanted. And on that note, so did Yahoo. Luckily for me I was able to get enough clicks for them to charge my card 1,000 British Pounds. Good thing? Dunno haven't seen too much revenue on that account to make it look like a great ROI.