Culled from my email this morning:
AD TEXT:
Relocating to Phoenix AZ?
Hit the ground running. Tour homes
by net with smart, hi-tech Realtors
www.BloodhoundRealty.comAd Status: Suspended – Pending Revision
Ad Issue(s): Trademark in Ad ContentSUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad: “hi”.
Adwords has been very good to us, for years now. There was a time when the ROI on our Google spend was incredible. But it’s a diminishing return. Other Realtors have discovered it, bidding up our keywords and thus bidding down our positions. And regular users have trained themselves to prefer organic over paid results.
So it’s doubly-smart for Adwords to tell me that “hi” is a trademark just when I’m turning the boat, as it were.
“Do no evil” but go right ahead and shoot yourself in the foot. It’s the American way of doing business…
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing
Victor Lund says:
Your post was very timely this morning. We are getting about 3% of our daily traffic from Search Engines, and about 1% from paid search (I use the google optimizer for more then 250 key words and end up getting about 1600 hits a month for $1000.)
We are in the process of getting a Real Estate Blog Site to see if that helps us get more organic search. At $500 per month, I would expect to get at least 800 people from the blogs organic rankings to justify the cost.
How many visitors a month are you getting to your blog?
Are those visitors more or less likely to become a customer than visitors from search engines or paid search?
October 16, 2006 — 9:01 am
Lenny Gurvich says:
Even 2.5 years ago when I got into this biz the ROI was pretty good on PPC. But now the ROI has shifted away from the advertisers and is in Google’s pockets. Too much competition and the cost effectiveness is questionable. I dropped all PPC advertising a few months ago and doing my best to market online otherwise. “Hi”, trademarked?
October 17, 2006 — 10:39 am
Jon Ernest says:
Hiii Greg (sorry, my attorney told me someone also trademarked hii….crap who do I owe?)
Google Adwords went the way of print ads about 8 months ago for me. We sued it pretty heavily in the summer of ’05, and it was alright. Since then, more companies are using it effecting the bidding as Greg said, but also, so many other companies started offering the pay per click advertising on their site, and I feel like the consumers got so bombarded from PPC that it fell off their radar.
I totally ignore the stuff on the right side of any page now that looks like advertising… I wish they had an online TiVo for that stuff.
October 18, 2006 — 6:43 am
Greg Swann says:
> I wish they had an online TiVo for that stuff.
Give Me Back My Google. A google front-end that strips some (not all) of the advertising.
October 18, 2006 — 10:23 am