On 8/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I *never* click on those ad links to right of a Google search *because* I know they are ads. I assume you don't either.
The ads to the right of this email thread right now are "Forget Pay Per Click", "Need Help With AdWords?", "Pay Per Click Advertising", and "Data Entry Workers Needed". Completely useless, and they usually are. Most of the time the ads aren't even for something I want. And even when they are, I most of the time never click on them. In fact, I don't even see them most of the time. But! I once went searching for web hosting companies using Google. I got ads for web hosting companies, and actually started clicking through to them and ended up purchasing from one. Google charged them for my click-through, and I ended up giving them my money. Eventually, I started thinking of the ads as a sort of commercial search engine. Google has price searching, newsgroup searching, web searching of course, searching on maps, and other stuff. Sponsored links are like commercial product searching. I only bought from an AdWord that once, but I've searched for stuff using the AdWords a couple of other times. I can easily see text ads working well for Google. I've seen people who load up a page and just aren't that skilled at visually parsing what they're looking at. They see the words related to what they want, and they click. If it's an ad they'd never know the difference, unless the merchant screws up and assaults flashy moving images at the surfer, in which case these non-savvy users will sometimes say, "Huh? That's not what I want." and click the back arrow. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
