Wed 28 Sep 2005
Every day I learn something new, and today I learned that Google considers the customer always right.
I thought I was the customer from Google’s perspective, as I am involved in purchasing ads from them for our Russian language site, GodLovesRussia.com. Well, no. Actually I’m not “the customer” from Google’s perspective. Or at least I’m not always right. My customers are always right, and since Google feels confident that they have access to what my customers are thinking, via their database of most frequently searched terms, they now qualify my judgements against their own data. (”My customers” would be anyone potentially clicking on the site we are advertising on Google.)
For example, if I buy the word, “???” (God), for my ad campaign and Google finds that few people search on that word, they change their price upwards. Instead of $0.10 per click, the price might become $0.50 per click whenever someone clicks on our ad.
Such is the dilemna we are apparantly facing with our GodLovesRussia.com ad campaign. Google doesn’t like our keywords and has increased their prices.
I’m not sure whether to be grateful for their service or angry at their arrogance. Regardless, Google.com is now the 800 pound gorilla in the Internet search world, and if you don’t like how they do things it doesn’t really matter.
September 28th, 2005 at 1:23 am
Maybe if you take away that gorilla’s caffeine, you could win.
September 28th, 2005 at 10:14 pm
As I thought more about this I realized that with Google, if no one clicks on your ad, you don’t pay Google. If Google runs a bad ad, they get no money, so I guess it makes sense that they want to avoid running ads that generate no revenue.