Some Google Ad Results

[Deja Letov]

I was bored. Thought I'd play around with the Google ads on Second Life. :)

I made an ad for my store in Google adwords and placed it into the network on Google Ads and did a force to only display my ads on the SL website. It was kinda funny and yes I got a kick out of searching for furniture in the marketplace and seeing my ad at the top of the page.

I can totally see how this will become a problem with merchants. My ad showed up not only when I searched for furniture, but also when I went to the "store" home page of anyone selling what I do, especially niche keywrods like "gothic furniture" which is what I make and is one of the keywords I listed for my ad. So....my ad was at the very top of the page of a competitors store, in fact, several competitors store. In my opinion that's kinda jacked up and honestly would tick me right the heck off as a merchant if you're at my store but SL is promoting my competitor.

Now here is the other sucky part. As a google ad, of course you only pay for actual clicks. And thank goodness...cause the impression rate to click through rate was absolute crap. You can see below that in over 27,000 impressions yesterday that I ran the ad for, it only got 18 clicks. And those 18 clicks...probably mainly consisted of my own clicks and my ticked off competitors trying to make me spend money LOL So overall...if SL starts offering advertising for merchants, I don't see it being very cost effective for us, UNLESS you go through Google Ads and only pay for what actually gets clicked on. But then again, you run the risk of competitors just trying to run your budget down.

 

It also got me to thinking that those paid enhancement listings are probably pretty worthless as well. I mean if they won't click on a giant banner ad in their face at the top of a page, why would they click a tiny little product image? I think I will go back to focusing on my in world sales now.

*Note: my ad is down...cause I know I would have been clicked to death today after posting this lol

[Madeliefste Oh]

Interesting experiment. Thanks for sharing, Deja.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Most people I know don't want to see those ads are are running Adblocker.  If Google attempts to show you the ad and it is blocked I wonder if that counts as an impression. 

[Deja Letov]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

Most people I know don't want to see those ads are are running Adblocker.  If Google attempts to show you the ad and it is blocked I wonder if that counts as an impression. 

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That's a good question. I'll submit a support question to Google and ask.

[Marcus Hancroft]

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Deja Letov wrote:

<snip>

I can totally see how this will become a problem with merchants. My ad showed up not only when I searched for furniture, but also when I went to the "store" home page of anyone selling what I do, especially niche keywrods like "gothic furniture" which is what I make and is one of the keywords I listed for my ad.

So....my ad was at the very top of the page of a competitors store, in fact, several competitors store.

In my opinion that's kinda jacked up and honestly would tick me right the heck off as a merchant if you're at my store but SL is promoting my competitor.

<snip>

__________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

/me gets instantly angry!

I KNEW this would happen!  I use "AdBlocker Plus," so I don't see the ads, but, I'm gonna turn it off for SL so I can see when/if some other merchants ad appears at the top of MY store!  I don't want a competitors ad at the top of my store page!  That's ridiculous, unfair and unjust.  :smileymad:

[Deja Letov]

I tota

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Marcus Hancroft wrote:

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Deja Letov wrote:

<snip>

I can totally see how this will become a problem with merchants. My ad showed up not only when I searched for furniture, but also when I went to the "store" home page of anyone selling what I do, especially niche keywrods like "gothic furniture" which is what I make and is one of the keywords I listed for my ad.

So....my ad was at the very top of the page of a competitors store, in fact, several competitors store.

In my opinion that's kinda jacked up and honestly would tick me right the heck off as a merchant if you're at my store but SL is promoting my competitor.

<snip>

_______________________________________________________________________________________

/me gets instantly angry!

I KNEW this would happen!  I use "AdBlocker Plus," so I don't see the ads, but, I'm gonna turn it off for SL so I can see when/if some other merchants ad appears at the top of MY store!  I don't want a competitors ad at the top of my store page!  That's ridiculous, unfair and unjust.  :smileymad:

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Totally agree! I don't have adblocker on and I'm glad I don't.  I did have to refresh several times to get my ad to appear, I'm assuming it has to do with the whole bid per click number I chose, which was really low, but I'm sure if it was higher it would be showing up a lot more. But I picked 3 competitors and just kept hitting refresh to see if just being on their page would do it and sure enough, all 3 showed my ad. Anyway...if it's Google ads I guess we can't complain too much because that's put out by Google and SL can't do much about that, but if they start offering their own advertising merchants and allow them to be shown on my store page, there will be rioting.

[Niall Braveheart]

Wonders if this would really be worth the investment for many merchants.

Your 18 clicks cost $21.8 which equates to approx 5300L$, what click to actual purchase ratio would be required to provide an acceptable return that?.

Edit: Noticed you'd already questioned the effectiveness of this in your OP

 

 

[Deja Letov]

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Niall Braveheart wrote:

Wonders if this would really be worth the investment for many merchants.

Your 18 clicks cost $21.8 which equates to approx 5300L$, what click to actual purchase ratio would be required to provide an acceptable return that?.

Edit: Noticed you'd already questioned the effectiveness of this in your OP

 

 

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I don't think it would be cost effective at all. That's why I only did it for a day to see what kind of results I would get. In fairness, to do a real test it should be done over time, but I just don't see getting that kind of sale out of a few clicks. Maybe if SL did a monthly or a per CPM charge perhaps, but definitely not a Google ad. I could see it being useful for a high volume type store like we all see the meero ads that are up right now. I'm sure that's getting a good deal, especially since it's been on the opening page as well. But for regular old merchants like myself, waste of money.