Google Adwords Changes 1

Nowadays, even Google is sometimes questioning it's rose-colored portrait of it's ever-expanding monopoly of search engine advertising...

If Google's senior vice president, Jonathan Rosenberg puts it the way, that Google will gradually tweak and improve it's AdWords PPC advertising platform until it displays almost no ads. Sounds like Google's committing suicide, but there are other thoughts behind the insanity.

Ad "coverage" has been shrinking continiously on the world's largest search engine. What we all have really noted is that there are less advertisings displayed for many keywords on Google's search result pages when performing a particular search.

According to Google senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg this is a direct result of Googles's efforts in regards of "continued focus on quality advertising". The shrinkage on the number of ads displayed, says Rosenberg, will therefore continue.

Google's co-founder Larry Page puts it that way: "We'd better off when showing an user only one ad per page - the perfect ad".

But Sergey Brin, the other co-founder of Google tries to pacify the situation a little. In front of reporters and financial analysts he stated that the target of "one ad per page" was "somewhat exagerated". "It seems," Brin stated, "that there is evidence that we have been a little too aggressive in decreasing our ad coverage than we should have been." According to him, Google will now review it's ad shrinkage policy and make appropriate changes.

Google had in fact been overturning a little too much. With Adwords ad click prices sometimes rising up to more than ten times and extremely punishing treatment of harmless advertisers that where not acting 200% within the Adwords Terms of Service, many small and medium sized advertisers where turning away from Google, taking their money to other search engine and online advertising services.

When Google's second quarter profits dropped clearly below Wall Street expectations, the alarm bells began ringing. The Adwords Money Machine has gotten a defect, a fault that could harm Google's business reputation for a long time. Remember: when Adwords ads had more coverage on the search engine result pages, that meant not only more views, but also more clicks and corresponding more money.

A view weeks later, Google was then announcing some "significant changes" to its Adwords advertising platform. The most important change seems to be that they are going to drop the "minimum bid". The Adwords "minimum bid" was intended to kill what Google considers to be "low quality ads". But it's effect was more the way to shy away small scale advertisers, many of those that in their large numbers used to bring fundamental amounts of money into Google's pockets.

Google says they will first test the changes on a small number of advertisers. But search engine marketing experts including Wall Street analysts believe that Google is heading back to more advertising coverage for revenue purposes.

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