Google Display URL Double Standards

[Julie H]

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There certainly seems to be yet another Whiff of double standards from Google Adwords, with leniency towards merchants & imposing policies more strictly upon affiliates.

Take for example searching for "dell" which has been reported to them on the telephone or by email at least a half dozen times, purely to illustrate their seemingly double standards

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

Their display url is www.dell.co.uk rather than www.dell.COM or euro.dell.com which are both the destination url's. According to Google, it doesn't matter if they own the url or not, it must match. So several months later they still do nothing.

Another is "the link"

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

They have their display url as .co.uk rather than .com

Now it may not be a major deal, but if they want to impose this policy which they unpolitically correctly refer to as an affiliate display url policy (which says something within itself) .. it's more about the principle of it.

Now, personally I don't think this reflects well on Google, or are double standards something we should come to expect of Google in every capacity?

[drivetowin]

Julie

I agree with you that it is double standards but suspect it is more down to marketing spend than whether you are a merchant or affiliate.

My guess would be that if Google threatened Dell over this, Dell would threaten to remove their multi-million dollar ad spend from Google and Google would say "ok then, carry on"

I agree with you that it's not fair, but then big business seldom is.

[Darren M]

Fairness is not a term I'd associate with Google.

I had a nice little highly targeted Adwords campaign that had been running well for a few months, my CTR was mega high, my CPC had come right down and conversions were good. One day Google decided to bump all of the minimum bids up to about £5.50. I was averaging 5p per click before that, so they effectively shut the campaign down.

When I contacted Google they said it was to do with the quality of my landing page. I thought the landing page was pretty good myself. It certainly contained a lot of pre sales text.

I checked my competitor’s ads that were (previously) sitting below mine. There were only four ads and three of those were breaking the rules eg. Incorrect display URL etc and only one ad was relevant to the search term. I reported all of this back to Google, but they brushed me off and all of these ads are still showing. It’s just not worth wasting time on though; I cancelled the campaign and moved on.

[Julie H]

Perhaps one of those things which should be brought to the public domain in trade publications and what corporate bull they consistantly come out with.

Their latest response today was the same text book answer churned out previously.

As for minimum bids, totally agree, so often we are the only one, or one of a small handful of ads appearing for numerous terms with totally relevant terms & landing pages yet they want to ask anything from £1 to £5 for a click. Examples were various dvd titles. Perhaps increasing minimum bid is just one way of reclaiming that $90 million law suit.

Roll on MSN search?! or is it better the devil you know?

[Qui Gon Jinn]

It could have something to do with deal struck up between Google & Dell, with New Dell Machines pre-installed with the Google Toolbar & desktop search.

http://news.com.com/Dell+embraces+Go...l?tag=nefd.top

http://www.google.com/ig/dell

[MattSweet]

Is it because www.dell.co.uk redirects to the same URL?

If someone typed it into the browser, they would reach the euro.dell.com page.