• imedia Connection, Friday, January 19, 2007 11:31 AM

Google continues to take a hit for not being as profitable a media buy as it used to be. Brandt Dainow of the Web analytics firm ThinkMertrics proclaims that bidding for first position simply isn't worth what it used to be.

That goes against nearly six years of search-marketing wisdom, but Dainow says a recent analysis of a campaign his company conducted at Christmas time shows there's no relationship between the position of an Ad Words ad and the chance of it being clicked on. The big factor is the text itself.

The reason: people are "more discriminating" in their use of Google AdWords than they used to be--in other words, most people know that the listings on the right side of the search results are ads, so they read them now for relevancy.

In truth, Dainow's analysis is of a single campaign during October and November; the Christmas period is hardly reflective of the rest of the calendar year, so search marketers are encouraged to conduct their own analyses to see if they come up with similar findings. It would be stunning if his results proved to be somewhat uniform, no doubt resulting in lower costs for advertisers and lower revenues for Google.

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