Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.
Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?
The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.
Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.
So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.
So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!