Google Tightens Screws on Advertisers: AdWords Black Box Gets Blacker
Google search advertising is a costly Pandora’s box that continuously increases in complexity, opaqueness and Google centricity. Google nevertheless has an uncanny ability to envelope its black box auction driven by a vast sea of rules, regulations and restrictions that it imposes on advertisers within a Googley mantra that “relevant advertising can be as useful as search results.”
Traditionally, and still, in many lucrative advertising venues, advertisers are courted and catered to. In the Google 50%+ search market share world, however, it is the advertising vehicle, not the advertising client, that must be catered to.
Google rules, big time. What’s more, Google’s rules are getting even more stringent.
While all media platforms exercise editorial controls over advertising placements within their advertising vehicles, Google has unilaterally turned the tables to its unique advantage. The Google medium not only dictates its advertising pricing scheme and the content of ads it accepts to place, it amazingly wields significant influence on the content of its clients’ proprietary Websites as well.
Google grades advertisers’ attempts to buy Google AdWords with a Google “Quality Score.” If a prospective AdWords ad does not make the Google grade, Google will disallow the purchase.
It seems counterintuitive for an advertising medium to integrate a robust advertising rejection platform into its business model, but Google proudly underscores it “has chosen to ignore conventional wisdom in designing its business.”
For all of Google’s talk of “quality,” though, higher bids win the privilege of buying ads from Google.
Bottom $160 billion market cap Google line? Google’s mission is not really to organize all the world’s information, it is to organize the information it can reap super duper profit margins from.
Latest Google effort to wring more money from advertisers: Change in “formula” for top ad placement at Google.com:
In the current top ad placement formula, we consider your Quality Score and your actual CPC, which is determined in part by the bids of advertisers below you. Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position.
With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.
The Google AdWords “Help Center” engages in its typical pages and pages of circular Googley double speak to ask and provide a Google-centric answer to the obvious question: “Is this just a way to charge advertisers more”?
“No way,” Google claims, while actually confirming YES GOOGLE WAY, big, expensive time: “you now have more control to achieve a top position through your CPC bid.” The “control” Google is obliquely implying is the “control” to ”increase your maximum CPC.”
What control is Google really giving AdWords customers? Control to give Google more money.
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