I performed a few bing searches for a few cheap keywords today and found a pretty interesting ad. I have a search screen above and in case you want to see the ad text, here it is:

What was interesting to me is that the keywords for this ad were cheap – I assume around .05 since google was not even in the first position for the term. The page actually went to google’s site (http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en) with a button to make google a home page. If I were to assume that their conversion rate is under 10%, which is the average on my campaigns, it means that they get a visitor for over $0.50, which is probably worth every penny. Here are a few reasons behind my assumptions:

1) People who click on the ad actually click on sponsored listings. $.05 will pay off the first time user would click on the ad on google since it is the lowest bid on adwords for search network. A converting user may be clicking on sponsored ads throughout the rest of his/her life.

2) People who use bing convert better since they are usually less computer savvy and many don’t pay attention to the difference between sponsored and regular links.

3) Seems that bing is gaining some market share, would google be able to slow down the growth with $.05 bid for lower end keywords? Google has a lot of adwords data and it doesn’t take them much to figure out high volume lower paying keywords.

However, there are a few things that I find odd:

1) Google is all for “Positive user experience”, no unrelated landing pages, right? Well, what is this page then – http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en? One button? On “Create avatar” keyword? I find it interesting when a company does the same thing it tries to fight, kind of doesn’t make sense to me. I know Microsoft adCenter has some sort of “quality score” system as well. I find no solution to “create avatar” on this landing page. How did google manage to get unrelated traffic to low quality one page site?

2) Google assumes that the user who clicked on the ad did not find what he was looking for on bing and therefore may want to check out google for results. Having some knowledge in affiliate marketing, their landing page seems awful to me. Nothing to compare the results, nothing to say why I should make google my home page, nothing to convince me to switch.

Oh well, it’s google. They can do whatever they want I guess. I can just take it as a lesson. The lesson #1 here is – study your competition, pay close attention to what you can do to decrease competitor’s market share and gain yours! A lot of time I notice that the competition is running adsense. I then can use adwords to run my ads on their sites. I can make unique landing pages to take over customers from 0ther companies, write unique ad text for each of the sources that I find. It is possible to make a bank this way and seems that google just illustrated this perfectly.

As for lesson #2 - work on gaining authority! Then you can do what you feel like doing, even if it contadicts your own policy.