Big companies said to be wasting billions on Google search ads

[onehandle]

Source: Quartz

US companies spent $14.8 billion on search engine advertising in 2011. And many of them probably didn’t need to.

That’s the argument in a new research paper that measured the effectiveness of search-engine marketing for eBay. ”The results of our study show that for a well-known brand like eBay, the efficacy of [search-engine marketing] is limited at best,” the researchers write, explaining that “search advertising only works if the consumer has no idea that the firm has the desired product.”

The researchers are from eBay Research Labs, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. They contend that already internet-savvy customers understand what sort of products a major site would offer, and are therefore not influenced by ads. In other words, that $14.8 billion might generate traffic to a site, but the vast majority of it is traffic that would have happened, anyway. (The authors emphasize that this is only true for companies with well-known brands; small companies and those with low brand recognition may benefit from appearing higher in a search page.)

For many people, this is probably confirms a long-standing hunch. The eyes of habitual Google users have long since gotten used to skimming over ads. And how many people Google Kindle books instead of going to Amazon directly, or pause to search Google on the way to a Steampunk Victorian “Diviner” keyboard purchase?

Read more: http://qz.com/62008/big-companies-said-to-be-wasting-billions-on-google-search-ads/

[Orrex]

1. I have never in my life--not once--clicked on a Google ad

I'm sure that I'm not alone in this. The whole business model baffles me.

[OldRedneck]

2. I've never clicked on an ad on any website, anywhere, anytime

. . . and I don't plan to start.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Is this meant to imply "Steampunk Victorian “Diviner” keyboards" are as well known as Amazon

and you'd know the one place to go to get one? Or is that paid ad placement inside the article, designed to get people to click on it (it's a link - to eBay)?

Having just done a Google search for that product, I see it's available in a wide variety of places. I'd have thought that was the kind of thing sellers might well want to use Google ads for - be the first of 20 suppliers of a product.