PPC Pay-Per-Click Editorial Guidelines - Cowboy days are gone

It’s interesting to see the “weeding out” process used by search engine advertising companies, such as Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adwords, and MSN Adcenter these days.

The days of PPC when you could just simpley out-bid your competition with a few more pennies per click are long gone. ALL of these search engines are trying to protect the quality of their search engine results, and thus have setup discriminatory and arbitrary “editorial guidelines”.     

These guidelines vary between Yahoo, Google and MSN (only mentioning a few here because they are the biggys), so you can’t rely on using the same strategy for writing your ads, or creating your landing page content.

Yahoo is the toughest these days becuase they have actual people reviewing the ads you place, and approving or disapproving your ad on their editorial guidelines. The truth is that it’s completely subjective. We’ve ran tests where we simply re-submitted the same ad that linked to the exactly the same page content, and they were approved by some “editors” and disapproved by others. We’ve even tried just changing the color theme of the landing page to get the ads approved.

The bidding war is a thing of the past as well. I’m sure there are some major companies with deep pockets who are pissed right off due to the new “rules”. Now, if your ad is deemed “better” by the Yahoo Sponsered Search system you will be placed ABOVE a competing ad that is actually paying much more per click. Now the same game is being played on the natural search results.

This forces businesses to out-smart and out-work the savvy webmasters that know how to build a search engine friendly site and domain. This narrator believes this new style of PPC to be ridiculous - the whole point of pay-per-click is to give the companies with real products to sell a place to advertise. Now these “real companies” can have their ad placed below some 14 year old kid that has a busy blog.

I believe this will result in a weaker Internet and a dwindling PPC business, but we’ll just have to see won’t we.

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