Perhaps one can deal with this by excluding the company name from Adwords criteria – but if you do then another company will likely show at the top of the page – especially if your name is “The Blue Widget Company” as then every competitor with “blue widgets” in their Adword campaign will be ahead of your organic result.
As has been said before “Cui bono?” ( Cicero) and as usual one does not have far to look.
A situation which reminds me of the way that some printed publications monitised their pages by charging for “editorial” press releases with “seperation charges” and lost a great deal of credability in the process – so to with Google, especially since I and many others prefer not to click on the Adwords – using instead the organic searches which are there on merit.
Lets be clear, a system which charges for referrals from people who already know us is perhaps worth paying for, but let’s at the same time understand exactly what it is that we are paying for and what we are getting.
So if most of Google referrals are of low value where does that leave us?
Well clearly there are a lot of referrals from Google so it still leaves a valuable number – let us not desert a system which works – however expensively. But it does leave us to ponder the value of the specialist publishers in all this – the people who have for years been saying that they give us quality not necessarily quantity – could they have a point? Well I think they have.
The printed and technical online media often appear disappointing and with limited available metrics in comparison with the giant Google machine but – and here completely without evidence – let us go one step beyond the graphs and tables of data to an area they cannot measure – let us next consider the rationale.
