I don't usually enjoy articles in the SEO category, but I skimmed this out of idle curiosity and was rewarded by the amusing example showing how ebay paid for ads saying
Vomit Sale!
New and used vomit!
Check out the deals now!
Black People!
New and used Black People!
Check out the deals now!
I'm fairly certain there is a filter of some kind because the first time I saw this circling the internet I wasn't able to replicate the "screenshot" of the ad. Still, it didn't take long to find a substitute phrase that was substantively identical but successfully triggered the dynamic keyword insertion ad.
When my team is testing new AdWords functions or whatever, we like to pick a funny keyword like that, which is also guaranteed to have no one competing against us, so we can easily view our ad in the #1 spot. Sometimes Amazon will actually outbid us on ads for things like "Pre-Chewed Bubblegum" or whatever stupid phrase we've chosen that week. It's always funny to see. You can't even be angry that your ad isn't visible when that happens.
They're using dynamic keywords in the worst possible way. Often times the landing pages will be empty, junk, or misleading.
What that means is that they will form an ad around your query targeted to a particular page on eBay, often times insensitive to the existing inventory or improperly matched.
Compare this to Amazon's dynamic keyword campaigns, which usually only trigger when they have relevant inventory, and match to a dynamically generated page that does its best to match the inventory results to the query. This is not easy to do, but not impossible, either. eBay looks to just set up their dynamic campaigns and scream #yolo.
I used to work on buying keywords at eBay 10 years ago, and one of the first features we built was a suppression list to prevent exactly this, so I'm a little surprised to see this. These ads can be costly, embarrassing, or carry a legal liability. It's possible they dropped the ball with a big bug that no one noticed, but it's also possible an affiliate was buying these ads hoping to turn a conversion.
eBay should have shut down these affiliates years ago; they're not adding marginal value and they hurt the brand, because it lets any moron associate a crappy ad message with eBay's name.
I remember in high school searching for info on the W80 nuclear warhead and seeing a similar ad for "New and used W80 warheads". Not sure what the shipping's like on craters.
Worse, it seemed that the more esoteric the search term, the more likely it was to show up in one of those goofy ads. I'm not sure if that's actually the case, or if I was just more likely to notice because the dearth of organic results prompted me to pay more attention to the ads.
But, in any case, it was definitely noticeable that they were "spamming" AdWords with worthless ads that frequently led to nowhere useful on eBay's site.
that is the case - because there is ~no one else bidding for those keywords, they are more likely to fall under their (usually very low, relative to competition) maximum bid.
They're not so bad when they're not broken; a lot of the time, you can't even tell that an ad is using them, because it's natural and appropriate.
Here's the (best) use case: let's say I sell garden equipment: hoses, sprinklers, garden gnomes, etc., so I advertise on those terms as keywords. I could have one ad that says "Best Garden Equipment", but tests show that ads work better if they specifically name the product that the user is looking for. So I can use keyword expansion to have the ad say "Best Garden Hoses", "Best Garden Sprinklers", "Best Garden Gnomes", etc., and not have to manage a lot of different ads.
This can be used in much broader cases, too, such as if I have hotels in 500 US cities: load up the keyword expansion with the names of all 500 cities and run an ad with title "{CITY_NAME} Hotel Rooms".
The problem is when people load it up with a jillion keywords in the hope that, if they get a click, they'll look for matches in their product database afterwards, and sometimes they fail.
So, yes: frequently lame. But when it's not misused, pretty useful.
When we ran the AdWords account for [major UK travel agency that you will have heard of] we never used templates. We created 50000+ keywords and thousands of associated adverts -- with a mix of hand-written keywords/ads and custom code to generate them. And we tuned the results frequently, which often involving writing more code. (In OCaml, no less!)
If you don't take shortcuts, you get better results.
Yep, it's extremely frustrating to find that a google search result that claims to contain what you've asked for, only to click through and find a search page with the following:
'No results for "what you just searched for" found here'
I see why you do, but that's such a shame. DKI a damn useful feature that could help both customers and businesses, but it's 'exploited' in a way that doesn't even help the people who are destroying it.
When used appropriately by the business it could alert the consumer of a relevant product/service and hopefully a special deal. This helps the consumer easily find the product/service and possibly save money. It also helps the business nab a sale they weren't necessarily organically ranking well for.
Let's say you're looking to buy a lawn chair on Google.
Without DKI: You search "Lawn Chair" and see a list of ads with headlines like "Target", "The Patio Store" and "Summer Furniture".
With DKI: You search "Lawn Chair" and the first thing on the page is "Cheap Lawn Chairs".
This is better for you as it's immediately clear where to click to find the thing you were looking for. DKI allows small advertisers, who have neither the time nor capability to manage hundreds of ads, the ability to still present an ad that is tailored to your search when they offer what you're looking for.
The ad still has to actually link to the lawn chairs you wanted. If it doesn't, that keyword would be rejected by the AdWords editorial team in the advertiser's campaign for that landing page. Even if it made it through review, it'd suffer algorithmically compared to ads that do link to lawn chairs; the bounce rate and poor landing page relevance scores would drop the ad's Quality Score, which means ads that do link to lawn chairs will rank above it, or the ad won't be displayed at all no matter what the store is willing to pay per click.
TBH, it seems like eBay just hasn't moved along with the times; as the article points out, their landing pages have very little content and a ton of old-fashioned 'SEO techinques' with keywords and internal links pointing everywhere.
They now have a reason to rework their website, improve sales listings with the user in mind, clean up their pages and make them nice and lean, etc. I hope Amazon gets the same treatment, their product pages are a mess too IMO.
Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible.
It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer.
One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre.
Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....
Amazon's request that I 'Choose a department to enable sorting' of search results is an abomination.
How am I meant to know how they have categorised something? Should I look in Cameras & Electronics for an SD card or Memory? Or one of the other 24 Departments they suggest?
> How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?
Maybe because they are dominating internet retailing so much that they don't feel any need to, largely through low prices achieved through (1) narrow margins, and (2) not doing anything that isn't aimed at reducing long term costs per sale.
You think it sucks, I think it sucks -- but if empirically its working good enough and fixing it is a cost without a clear payoff for them, why do it?
See also Ebay, where sorting SD cards by price gives you people selling you an adapter for 0.99 or a card for 8.99, which pushes that listing into the 0.99 end of the list.
(Yes, I am aware that searching ebay for the cheapest sd cards is foolish!)
It's possible that Amazon's analytics demonstrate that you're more likely to purchase if shown a wider variety of products, even if you attempted to narrow it down.
Not that their short term bottom line is a worthy excuse for deceptive and confusing search practices.
Best result | popularity | cost: ascending | user rating | date
On Amazon.com this feature is missing! Why?
Btw. the technology: A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search and advertising technology: is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
For that matter, I'd quite like it if eBay unfixed their search so that when I searched "worldwide" it did actually find all items worldwide that shipped to my country, rather than some random subset of them.
Whats the deal with ebay? To me seems like the site hasn't improved in a decade, even simple and seemingly common features like search are buggy— e.g. go save a search with a price restriction and set it to email you: It emails without heeding the price limits.
In a word: management. They seem to have made a lot of missteps, and are squandering their reputation and resting on their laurels. They upset their small vendors, tried to lock in payments to Paypal, charge large fees, have a terrible SEO strategy and an appallingly designed website. I'm seriously confused why so many people still use them!
I've been using ebay once or twice a year for over a decade, and I've noticed their product pages are almost worthless these days. Almost the entire first scroll-page is filled with the bidding and shipping info and ads. For media like video games, there's another page of default info for the game which is identical on every single page for that game. I already know what I'm buying, you don't need to tell me the ESRB score. Then there's usually one or two lines of description from the seller. Then another page of ads and another page of the eBay footer. And this description is with AdBlock enabled!
Content I want? Current price, shipping price, and the description from the seller. Everything else is garbage. The default pictures and descriptions are especially worthless. I want pictures of the actual product I'm buying, not whatever marketing shot of a pristine product from the company.
And the seller rating. I think a big selling point for Amazon is that all sellers are grouped by product and it becomes very easy to choose the best one. I'm never going to want to sort through 20 listings of the same product and I just don't see how eBay can overcome that fundamental problem. That, and as a seller I hate getting taxed twice for one sale.
It is a bit weird that "Harvard Business Review predicted that Amazon, Walgreens and other major internet retailers would soon follow eBay's lead and ditch AdWords. If you’re doing SEO, you get that prime SERP placement for free, right?"
And then shortly there after eBay dropped significantly in Google's rankings. To be honest, the above statement from HBR is a major threat to Google's business.
eBay was likely one of the largest AdWord buyers. They seemed to have spamming landing pages in Google for a long time but were never penalized. They stopped being a huge AdWord buyer. Soon after they were penalized in Google's search engine rankings. Coincidence? When there is that much money involved, and a possible exodus of Wallgreens and Amazon away from Adwords, I am not completely buying it. Google would be stupid to allow that to occur.
This. Can't be said enough. There's almost certainly not a concerted effort in Google to de-rank eBay, and you'd immediately hear it leak from one of the many people who would have to be involved if there were.
It doesn't have to specifically target eBay to have the effect one wants. One just has to go after characteristics of spamminess that they didn't prioritize before. Like i said in another post, eBay has been spammy for a while, but it was not penalized.
Think this was one of those cases where doing what's right by user also happened to be a crafty business move. They might have had it coming a while and decided to time it right.
Mostly I'm curious to see what kind of bottom-line impact Google is capable of inflicting upon eBay, given eBay's immense scale. Just how dependent upon Google organic traffic are they at this point.
Nothing will rev up regulator interest like a $65 billion company willing to cry to D.C. as they lose a billion in sales due to algorithm changes.
They are indirectly penalized for it. Bounce rate is a factor in google's organic search algorithm. If a lot of users click-through a given search result, find a bad experience, google has incentive (and makes an effort) to penalize those results.
They get direct data on click-back. (Search, click, come back to google after a very short time, is a fair signal, in aggregate, that the users don't like that site's search results or other experience factor.)
I don't believe they directly have bounce data, but they infer it from click-back. They have publicly stated that they do NOT use google analytics data to inform organic search rankings.
This is basically the BloomReach approach to SEO and Google seems to be going after it in a serious way lately. The big issue is quality control. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to create these sorts of landing pages if they surface highly relevant results. Google's product search is not comprehensive or sophisticated enough yet to be useful for the common shopper so it's a mistake to penalize highly refined results with no good replacement.
It's a shame that Google cares more about propping up ad click numbers for quarterlies than actually solving product search. They surely have the talent, data and traffic incentives for stores to do a much better job at it than anyone else. Instead, they went paid-only a while back, so Google's Shopping results are nothing but ads from the limited number of stores willing to upload a product list and pay for anything that gets clicked.
I worry (for BloomReach's sake) that Google will be unable to distinguish algorithmically between search-powered landing pages like eBay's, which (as mentioned in the article) are barely-usable collections of links designed specifically for SEO, and BloomReach-like auto-generated landing pages that are, quite literally, optimized for consumer usability. Just because a page is auto-generated and not curated doesn't make it spam. What makes something spam is that users treat it like spam, consider it spam. But unless Google's using (abusing?) its analytics cookies to track users on sites and see whether they treat an autogenerated page like linkspam or like a content page, they'd have no way of making that decision.
I buy from eBay from time to time in spite of the fact I'm not completely crazy about them and wish they were better at what they do. At the moment, for better or worse, they seem to have the most sellers of the type I sometimes look for.
That being said, as a Google search user I am delighted to see them lose search ranking. Is sucks seeing eBay listed in first page search results for just about everything. If I wanted to look for an item on eBay I would go to eBay. What I want is INFORMATION about the item/topic, not a link to eBay. Now, if they could just get ehow and about.com.....
On a sidenote, did anyone else notice the popup that only appears once you're going to close the page? I've tried to re-create it, but it actually appears to be pretty intelligent. I was initially annoyed, since that's the standard reaction, but then I realized it didn't block my reading of the article at all, since I was attempting to leave anyway. Kind of cool.
I saw those for the first time yesterday. Apparently some asshat has a patent on displaying an interstitial when the mouse moves above a certain x coordinate dressed up as "measuring exit intent"
In this case it was BounceExchange, but others like Exit Monitor & Picreel do the same thing. Its popular on e-commerce sites where you have a funnel for converting vistors to paid customers.
This reminds me that there was a time when eBay had no organic search traffic. A few pages were indexed. About the same time eBay launched their API. An enterprising college student created a site from ebays API. Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal but the new site had static pages, easy for googlebots to crawl & pages with affiliate links. The site went from generating a few hundred dollars per month in affiliate commissions to millions. eBay clearly didn't care about SEO back then so it's a bit ironic to read this today.
Wasn't eBay pretty much buried by Google for a while now? It's been ages since I've seen useless eBay results when searching for stuff like info on particular consumer products.
Not completely, recently I was in the market for some very specific pull handles for a dresser that i'm building. When I googled it, 2 websites selling very expensive recreations came up, and 1 ebay auction selling a modestly priced antique version, and an etsy store. Actually, the ebay link was quite useful to me to be honest.
and for good reason. I don't need to be linked to a scammy or expired auction from ebay when I'm searching for a retail product or review.
Can you imagine going to Target or Best Buy and having some guy with a megaphone screeching at everyone about his used wares in the back of his van in the parking lot?
Wait, are they buying AdWords and then putting Google Ads on the pages that people land on? Does that make any sense? Does Google pay out for those impressions?
This practice is called arbitrage and can actually make money. I know a few people that live of this.
It's against the TOS of almost any ad serving company but that doesn't mean it does not happen. (which is interesting, because you'd think it would be very easy to detect, and yet, people do it):
What's interesting here is that you could argue that if you bought the traffic from party 'A' and sold it to party 'B' you should be free to do so. The only reason Google can (and does) put a stop to this is because they see both sides of the trades and your take is technically their loss.
But people buying traffic on adsense or another source of traffic that is cheaper than the one where they are selling it could likely pull this sort of thing for years.
There are very few cases of advertising arbitrage that still work today. I certainly wouldn't tell anyone about it if I found an arbitrage opportunity in the market.
However, sites like info.com advertising or shopping comparison sites are the most classic examples.
While arbitrage is forbidden, placing AdWords ads on the pages that have value and purpose other than serving ads and simultaneously buying AdWords traffic is legitimate.
Jacques is correct here, if the ads on the landing page are substantially similar to the ad word buy then Google will penalize you. So if you buy and Ad for 'hair dryer' and you have a page which says "a hair dryer drys your hair." and a bunch more AdSense ads around it for buying a hair dryer from different vendors, that will eventually get you in trouble.
It is however "ok" to buy an adword to a page about, say a '65 mustang restoration article you did. Have it be mostly an article about restoring a mustang and a "few" (for some opaque definition of a few) AdSense ads on the page which may or may not be related to the AdWords buy.
But what is really the bottom line is that the variations are endless :-)
Then you're asking for trouble. Some google flunkey will have to determine what 'value' is, come down on the wrong side of your imaginary line and boom gone is your adsense account.
It's a risk some are willing to take but I would be very careful with that strategy, especially if the pages are used in this combination right from day 1.
With all the products eBay moves and so many users it shouldn't be difficult for eBay to reward in some way (less paypal fees, more prominent listings etc) users for writing reviews of products, creating cheap and reasonably good content. But I mean, if they buy ads for "By X" where X is any search term...
Regarding eBay using Product Listing Ads, they already do this heavily, often to the point of being unfair (listing the same product say 5 times for 5 separate sellers on ebay)
I think it will just hurt incremental sales, rather than them being able to make up the shortfall on Google via paid means.
"The implication of this report was that eBay was going to drop AdWords as a channel and focus its efforts on organic search engine optimization.
So how did that work out for them?"
Hmmm.....just hmmm....
I do not buy that Google Search is not doing Google Adword's bidding, directly or indirectly. They know why advertises and who doesn't, by name and by category ("large brands" for example. ) So unless Google is separated in two separately owned parts (Search and Ads) I think people have every reason to question this. Especially since a drop in traffic essentially forces a site to buy ads.
the same goes for Android and Chrome, many of their features are to drive people to Google search.
