The sin of Naivety is committed when you place unreserved trust in Google, believing that they will “Do No Evil.” Believing that a multi-billion dollar company has your back is an attractive concept on the surface, but as we learn from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Don’t forget where Google got those billions.
First Page Bid Lies
Regular readers of my blog know that I have been suspicious of Google’s First Page Bid Estimator since its inception. I ran the keyword tool and would play around with different bids all the time. What I began to notice was that if you used $5.00 as the bid you would see numbers like $4.67 for position 1-3. Okay, I can live with high bids if justified, but then I would put in $2.50 and get an estimate of $2.33 for position 1-3. Ummm… That seems odd.
I figured it was a glitch and let Google slide. However, I began checking it more frequently and noticed that it was more a trend than an anomaly. Basically I just learned not to trust the keyword tool’s bid estimates. No bid deal.
The Deal Killer
The straw that broke the camel’s back (IMO) was when Google did away with the Inactive status on keywords and implemented the Suggested First Page Bid directly into the AdWords interface. Now the suspicious info from Google was sitting right next to my keywords telling me that my bids were too low. But what Google was saying didn’t match the performance statistics Google was displaying.
In short, remember that Google is a publicly-traded company that has stock-holders to please. In this economy they’re looking for revenue and it’s easier to get more revenue from existing customers than getting new customers. Armed with this wisdom you will be able to overcome the sin of Naivety.
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