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Monday 13th November 2006.
Traffik, traffik, traffik, it's all about traffik! (see a previous post about this) So, last month I tried out
some search engine advertising. This is those 'Sponsored Links' you see, usually on the right hand
side of the page, when you do a search on Google or Yahoo or other search engines. To explain how it
works I'll use Google as an example (all the other search engines use a similar principle for the
advertising they display): the Google advertising structure is known as 'AdWords', and it all starts with
bods like me, who want to get traffik to their web site in order to make sales. Bods like me bid for key
words and phrases that folks will type into a search engine and thus trigger the advert to be
displayed; ie, "Pantyhose" is an obvious one, yet perhaps too generic (it could be a housewife in
Idaho who wants to buy a pair of tights), but if someone searches for "pantyhose fetish" or "cum on
pantyhose", et al, the meia-calca.com advert will come up and it'll be exactly what that person is
looking for. In otherwords it's precisely targeted advertising; and the beauty of it is that you don't pay
for how many times your ad is shown, you only get charged when someone clicks on your ad (and
that click means one more visitor to your web site).
To anyone unfamiliar with search engine advertising it no doubt all sounds a bit complicated, yet this
is a multi-million dollar industry so I'll give a brief account of how the bidding works on Google
AdWords:- supposing a bod like me bids 2 cents a click for the phrase "pantyhose fetish", which
obviously lots of other pantyhose sites will bid for, and let's suppose another pantyhose site bids 4
cents a click for this phrase. They don't automatically get top spot for the phrase/traffik due to the
higher bid because it also goes on the 'click through rate' (CTR); ie, if my ad gets displayed 100 times
and 10 searchers click on my ad that's a click through rate of 10%. If my rival gets a click through
rate (CTR) of only 2% I'll win the top spot, despite having a lower bid. You see, Google multiply the
bid by the CTR to determine who gets top spot on a key word or phrase - 10% x 2 cents = 0.2 (that's
my score). 2% x 4 cents = 0.08 (my rival's score is lower than mine). I win top spot for the keyword
or phrase. Google's thinking behind this is that a high CTR means that the advertiser has produced
good quality ad copy and is selling a product that searchers want.
All well and good, it seems. Thing is, just lately the AdWords programme has been heavily abused.
It's all because of the flipside of AdWords, which is called AdSense. AdSense is for web site owners
who want to earn a bit of money by carrying ads on their sites, in this case AdWords ads. You may
have stumbled across, say, a stamp collecting web site that carries such Google ads, which are
AdWords ads paid for by bods like me; and once again it's highly targeted advertising. The abuse has
come about because there are now a plethora of 'parked' domains carrying AdSense ads. A 'parked'
domain is a www.whatever.com (or .net or .org or whatever) that is not a real web site. They're sites
that have either fallen fallow, or the owners have run out of $$$ to run them, or the domain name is
being held unused in the hope of making money out of selling it. Certain companies, who will remain
nameless, make a tidy profit by offering to host such domains free of charge. Such companies 'park'
these domains and put Google AdSense ads on them. Most of the parked domains make little money,
but if you're a company who's got millions of domains 'parked' the little for each domain adds up to a
lot of money.
The upshot for you, dear surfer, is that your search experience is being ruined. You've no doubt come
across these junk parked domains, which will contain a Google search box and lots of links to
gobbledygook (much of which is computer generated with just enough keywords to keep the search
engine bots happy).
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