Google Ad Words

The local American Newspaper ad revenues have been plunging and the papers keep getting thinner and thinner as business advertises in other media. We have found Google Ad Words and Bing Ad Words to work great in our business.

It used to be we could spend as little as a quarter on a click where someone is drawn to our web site. We could measure our business by the week by the total clicks we had on google. However, google would encourage business to bid on first page exposure. This means that when somebody searches hotels in Pensacola, on the right side or on the page, and ad will show your hotel business. A person clicks on the ad and Google makes a quarter. Now, if they get folks bidding higher and higher for first page exposure, it is easy to have the average click go over a dollar. The bidding wars which google encourages, soon make the profitability of a click marginal.

We have found that lowering the bid below the first page bid and increasing our daily budget has taken our ads down from the ninety cents range to fifty cents for a second page search. The nature of our service usually results in the consumer looking at the second page. Out of thirty clicks a day, we find that we get a third of those clicks as customers, and we almost get a tenfold return on every google ad dollar we spend. We used to use Yahoo and found it equally successful, and Bing took over and we are trying them this year.

If we run a four hundred dollar half page newspaper ad for one day, we are lucky to get 25% of our ad investment back......Google is about 40 times more efficient bringing customers to us, and it is not by accident they have become so big.

Google plays games with advertisement rates. I will see how bing does the next month, but google tries to unilaterally create bidding wars between competitors in a given market, and they also have virtually no human contact after you have set up your ads. I see poor souls who have set up their google ad word account where they have not limited their geographic area.

So a hotel in Jersey suddenly pops up on the hotel search of somebody looking for a room on Pensacola Beach........somebody sees the ad and clicks on it. The person placing the ad gets charged a buck, and nobody is driving to NJ to get a hotel. However, if they have put in your account a minimum bid to get first page and it is 90 cents, and you manually change it to fifty cents, you will start getting robo calls that you need to call a google rep to maximize your ad, but they let the poor guy from NJ waste his money because he has not put proper geographic parameters on the ad. Now when you ignore Google who is slowing pumping up the price, your competitors no longer see you on the first page and they begin lowering their budget, but with the google default setting of 90 cents they are still wasting forty cents a click. Google tries to create the competition and get more money from both, so I have simply doubled my ad budget and cut what I will pay per click in half which means every day dollars that google could get when my ad is clicked on sits in my account because I will not play their game, and my competitors have cut their ad budgets, so now google is getting significantly less ad revenue, and I have doubled my clicks for the same budget. Google is not some benevolent tech company doing the right thing.....they are the monopoly and they do not play fair, but their ads are so effective, few have internet ad choices which compete with google.

Google is a friend and a monster at the same time. I will use no other search engine, however.


Agree. So when I am searching Mexican restaurants in Pensacola.....the ads pop up, and I am an immediate customer, usually going out that night or the next. The restaurant can see the clicks and realizes they will probably be busy Friday and Saturday, and call in an extra server. It is an incredible tool which does not waste resources throwing your hook into the ocean, rather you have the catfish in the bath tub and simply pull them out. I use the ads all the time to get deals. I can predict business based on clicks.

2seaoat wrote:Google is a friend and a monster at the same time. I will use no other search engine, however.


Agree.   So when I am searching Mexican restaurants in Pensacola.....the ads pop up, and I am an immediate customer, usually going out that night or the next.  The restaurant can see the clicks and realizes they will probably be busy Friday and Saturday, and call in an extra server.   It is an incredible tool which does not waste resources throwing your hook into the ocean, rather you have the catfish in the bath tub and simply pull them out.   I use the ads all the time to get deals.  I can predict business based on clicks.

Forget google....just go to Cactus Flower.

Forget google....just go to Cactus Flower.


Been there done that.....the Navarre branch has the best soup. I have not had a Mexican soup that good since living in Saltillo in 1975.