ClickEquations Blog
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Secret Truth Series #15: Bid Lipstick on a Keyword Pig
Bidding is the magic elixer of paid search.
It’s the solution to any problem, the driver of all success and the cause of all failure. Once you have the right keywords, bidding is the main activity of paid search management.
It’s critical to get your bids right. If your bids aren’t properly set, intelligently managed, and constantly cultivated it’s effectively impossible to succeed at paid search.
This all is common knowledge.
And it’s all untrue.
The idea that bidding is important/critical/central to paid search is based on several assumptions:
- We have good data on which to make bid decisions.
- The data we have from the past is predictive of the future.
- Our algorithms are able to take this good and predictive data and recommend a better bid
- The effect of a bid change is clear and direct
Let’s look at those one at a time.
Lipstick On A Pig
Keywords are the false gods of paid search, as we discussed earlier, but they have another problem too: keyword metrics aren’t really reporting on the keyword itself, but rather on the combination of the keyword and all the options that are set around it.
Click-through rates and conversion rates, for example, are the result of how targeted the search queries were based on the match type used and the quality score received, how appropriate the ad copy was for those queries, and how persuasive the landing page and offer were to the people who clicked through.
That same keyword matched to different queries, with different ad copy, and different landing pages and offers would/could perform much differently. It’s shorthand to say that the keyword had a 2% conversion rate – it was really the entire advertising program built around the keyword that earned that result.
Yet bid algorithms, with our approval, make bid decisions as if the keyword metrics were much more conclusive than they really are. Suppose the queries change (which they do every day) or the ad copy is rewritten or tested (which it should be several times within the 30 day window used for most bid decisions). Isn’t it kinda kookie to ignore these variations and just pretend that the data is clear or reliable?
In ‘21 Secrets‘ I talk about getting keywords ‘bid ready’. The idea is to create a stable and functional environment around the keyword, to deliver better and more stable data, before putting much effort into bidding.
As the book points out, worrying about bidding on keywords before they’re ‘bid-ready’ is a text-book case of garbage in, garbage out.
Past Results May Not Suggest Future Performance
So if our keywords aren’t bid-ready the data on our keywords is pretty dirty. And in most cases (probably 80% of active keywords) the data is also really sparce. There just aren’t many clicks or conversions on most keywords over a week or even month long period.
Predicting the future based on sparce data about the past is extremely difficult.
And even is there is plenty of data, it’s a pretty big assumption to think that last week is gonna be like next week.
The world and our businesses don’t operate at a steady state. So even if we’re not in a strictly cyclical business – where summer dresses have a rise and fall – there are all kinds of time-based or external factors from competitor promotions to weather to holidays to news events.
One only has to look at a performance trend report of any keyword – on CTR, conversion rate, even impressions – to see that if you picked any one period from the past and projected forward as if that period was representative, you would have misjudged a bunch of what in fact happened later. Yet that’s what the bid algo’s do.
It’s hard not to believe numbers – as pointed out in the recent post on averages – especially when we’re working so hard to get them. But it’s not really that the numbers are lying, we’re just reading more into them then they can accurately provide.
The Smart Black Box or The Perfect Rube Goldberg
But forget all of that – take all the imperfect data, assume the past predicts the future in ways it probably doesn’t, decide which and how much data to consider (another massive black hole we’ll skip over), and hand it over to your bid algorithm for analysis and a recommendation.
There are all kinds of bid algorithms. Some use simple math while others rely on very complex mathematics.
There are also all bid rule systems (which differ from algorithms) and base decisions on a series of measured factors and nested If/Then/Else criteria.
Few or none of these take into account that the data they’re based on may be flawed or even terrible.
All of them ignore dozens or perhaps hundreds of variables and factors that almost anyone would agree clearly effect ‘the right bid’.
Regardless, they do their best and out comes a new bid recommendation. Good luck with that.
Why Does The Garage Go Up When I Flush This Toilet?
What does raising (or lowering) your bid mean anyway? The relationship is not simple nor direct.
We know how bid connects to Ad Rank (Secret Truth #9) and how Quality Score impacts bidding (Secret Truth #10). Together these explain that what we’re willing to pay (our Max CPC or Bid) is only indirectly related to our the amount we do pay (our actual or average CPC).
And many other factors are at play:
- In some cases, our actual cost-per-click is far below our bid. In other cases, our cost-per-click is consuming 100% of our bid.
- If we change our bid but our position (ok, average position) doesn’t change, what effect did the bid change really have?
- Quality score is unique to every keyword-text ad combo, changes per geography, is influenced by the query, and evolves over time.
- Raising a keyword bid also expands the scope of matched queries for which you can enter the auction and earn sufficient ad rank to appear. So like butterfly wings changing your bid alters the environment you were trying to control or effect.
I could go on. And yet just about every bid algorithm I’m aware of ignores – all this and more.
It’s hard to shake the notion that bid up = pay more = higher position, but strictly speaking it’s far from that simple.
The Twenty Percent Solution
So what is an advertiser to do? Two things:
1) Spend your time organizing and optimizing your campaigns and keywords before you worry much about bidding. As the 21 Truths in this series highlight, there are a lot of ways to impact your results that are directly within your control. Master them.
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2) Think about bidding as having *at most* a 10-20% impact on your success. Bids interact with keywords and match types and quality scores and text ads and landing pages and everything else. Treat them as part of the system.
It was via Brad Geddes via David Szetela that I first heard the significance of bidding put into its place with these kind of numbers. I’m pretty sure I later saw Dennis Yu give a clever talk and example that drove home the same point. I’m sure others have said it as well.
There is no way to say whether bidding in general a 5% factor or a 45% factor – it doesn’t matter and it certainly varies from keyword to keyword.
But what is clear is that for even the best bid algorithms or rules or strategies to do their job, they must be applied to well designed, managed, and optimized campaigns and keywords.
- A good bid on a bad keyword (or based on bad keyword data) leads to a bad result.
- A good bid on a good keyword-system plays an important role and can absolutely make or save you money.
Bidding Is Important
This post wasn’t intended as bid-bashing. As the book says, I believe you should spend a lot of time on bidding after you’ve spent a lot of time on everything else.
But bidding is very often over-emphasised, mis-represented, and mis-prioritized.
The right way to bid, the right algorithms, the role of rules, the solution to sparce data, the implications of time, the way to factor in all the factors – these are all topics for another time and place.
Until then, make sure your keywords are ready before you set or manipulate their bids. And have reasonable expectations for the bids and bid changes you do make. They’re doing the best they can, but the available information and state of the technology limits severely limit their potential.
What Do You Think?
This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.
What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”
- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.
Secret Truth Series #10 – Bids and CPCs
The AdWords auction is not a purely economic auction. If it were the high bidder would always win.
But in the AdWords auction the high bidder can wind up in 1st, 3rd, or 5th position – or even wind up out of the game with nothing.
Imagine a new kind of eBay auction; one where you could browse for a searcher or search query you wanted to have see your ad, and enter a bid. The auction would go on for a while – maybe a few hours – and you would even be notified when you were or were not the high bidder.
Like many eBay auctions there would be some jockying for position as the end nears. First you’re you’re the high bidder, then you aren’t, and then you are again.
Now pretend that as time expires, it turns out you were in fact the high bidder. But just before the display updates to say ‘You’ve Won’, a funny thing happens: eBay applies a secret multiplier to everyone’s bid. Some bids are multipled by 3, while others are multiplied by .3. The ranking order of the results is completely transformed.
You – the ‘high bidder’ – winds up in 3rd place. Someone with a rather low bid vaults to the top and they’re declared the winner. They pay only a fraction of what you had offered and yet win the auction and claim the prize.
If you were bidding in these kinds of ebay auctions, once you understood the game, would you focus purely on your bid?
Wouldn’t you want to learn all you could about the secret multipier and try in influence that? Wouldn’t you feel a little silly just bidding in earnest as if there were a direct relationship between your bid and the result?
Ignoring The Secret Number
Yet make no mistake, this is how the AdWords auction works. Everyone bids in the same currency (effectively) but that bid is then transformed by a secret number before the winner (or rankings in this case) is declared.
The secret number, in this case, is quality score.
Your bid is not multiplied by quality score, but quality score transforms the results of your bid none-the-less.
To see the actual way bids are calculated, read Secret Truth #10 in the book.
(Note: the download sign-up will have some downtime today, 3/27, sorry)
Bids impact, but don’t drive, CPC. Repeat that to yourself a few times. “My bid does not drive my CPC – My bid is only one factor that impacts my CPC.”
My View of Bidding
I’ll admit it. I kinda have a chip on my shoulder about bidding.
I’m not a big fan of over-simplification to begin with (hence the whole ‘high-resolution’ thing) and with bidding there are only two modes – over-simplified and mind-bendingly complicated. Guess which one most everyone chooses?
As described earlier, the idea of bidding-for-position is obsolete and inaccurate. And now we see that bidding does not directly define CPC.
Bids indicate the maximum amount you want to pay for any single click. But they’re only one factor in the determination of your ad position, and beyond that they’re not a factor in the calculation of CPC.
None of this is to say that bids don’t matter. They matter a lot. They have an impact – changing them has an impact and not changing them has an impact.
Plus, bids are concrete. Bids are accessible. Bids are easy to understand, even if they summarize or stand for something that on further inspection isn’t entirely true.
What Bids Do and Don’t Do
There are four key steps in the AdWords Auction. Let’s examine the role your bid plays in each:
- When someone executes a search, quality score is calculated for the keywords in your account which may be eligible for the auction. Bid plays no role in the calculation.
. - AdWords determines whether or not your ad (via your keyword) is eligible to be in the auction. Bids are a direct factor, because there is (despite the retirement last year of the Minimum Bid metric) a minimum bid to trigger display for any particular query. This is by no means the only eligibility requirement.
. - AdWords calculates Ad Rank to determine your position in the results. Bid is direct factor, as discussed in Secret Truth #9.
. - CPC is calculated to define how much you’ll pay if the ad is clicked. Bid isn’t involved beyond via the role it played in the deciding your Ad Rank. Really this is a Quality Score driven issue.
Putting Bids In Their Place
The punchline is that bid management and quality score management should, at worst, get equal attention in the process of managing paid search.
A year or two ago, almost nobody was talking about let alone working on quality score. Now the topic gets a lot of attention, but the confusion remains thick and the specific action steps are often not well defined. Quality score reporting has improved dramatically, but there still is a lot of information that we’re missing. We’re making progress, but there remains a long way to go.
There are two more Secret Truths concerning quality score, and two more concerning bidding, so we’ll cover more specific ground in those sections of the book and in future posts in this series.
Earlier I asked you to stop thinking about position purely as a result of bidding. Here I’m suggesting that you also stop thinking about cost-per-click as a direct bid result as well. These shifts will help you to have reasonable expectations for bidding, and to remember to consider and pay appropriate attention to qualty score in order achieve your position and cost related goals.
What Do You Think?
What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”
- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.
.
PPC Bidding and Flat Conversion Rate Curves
When Google’s Hal Varian talks, we listen. We first met Mr. Varian – Chief Economist at Google – in his ‘Introduction to the Adwords Auction’ video and it sparked one of our most-read posts (The Economics of Quality Score) in which we took his information and used it to determine the financial of specific Quality Scores or Quality Score changes.
Last week Mr Varian spoke again, this time on the AdWords blog, but with equal import. He shared the fact that his team had studied the impact of position on conversion rate, and found that conversion rates were about the same no matter if your ads are run in position 1 or position 8.
Today SearchEngineLand published an article I wrote concerning the importance of this revelation.
While the video shared new truths that helped our understanding of Quality Score, this new information has impact almost entirely on bidding.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working to really understand bidding – I’ll admit it’s not something I’ve focused on before because it always seemed vastly over-rated as a factor in paid search success. I still believe bidding gets more than it’s share of attention in the PPC world, but for very different reasons than in the past.
Bidding is probably the most misunderstood component in a system full of misunderstood components. This is true because we bring assumptions about the role of bidding in an auction which turn out to be true in the modified ‘auction’ that Google and the other engines run.
The result is often wasted money, but more often it is deliberate actions which have virtually no chance of accomplishing their objectives. We change bids as if raising them will push our keywords up and lowering them will drop them down. The problem is it’s not that simple.
As the the SearchEngineLand article describes, Mr. Varian is doing us all a huge favor by clarifying how various elements of the AdWords auction and system really work. But we’ve got a long way to go…
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Surprise: Your Bid Doesn’t Determine Your Cost-Per-Click
The fall-out from Google’s Hal Varian Quality Score Video continues.
One early impact was finally understanding exactly how quality score impacts your cost-per-click.
A more interesting idea to get your head around: Your bid is not used in the calculation of your cost-per-click.
Isn’t that amazing?
How CPC is determined
Using the information from the Google video, and some other Google-documented facts, let’s look at the exact sequence of steps that determine the position and cost-per-click of your ad.
- Joe Smith types his search query into Google and clicks ‘Search’
- Google and (using their ‘infinite wisdom’ machine) decide which advertisers have keywords and match types and budgets and geo-targeted day-parts that make their ads eligible to be shown.
- Google calculates, in real-time, the Quality Score for each eligible keyword.
- Google multiplies Quality Score x MaxCPC for each eligible keyword to determine the Ad Rank of each keyword.
- The eligible keywords are sorted by Ad-Rank, highest to lowest.
- Starting from the top of the list, the CPC for each keyword is calculated by taking the Ad Rank of KW below it, and dividing it by the KW’s QS
.
So if my Ad Rank is 50 and my QS=7, and the following keyword’s Ad Rank is 45, my CPC = 45/7 = $6.42.
Bid Is Not A Direct Factor
Notice in Step 6: The bid was not a direct factor in the computation of the cost-per-click. It has a major influence, but it’s indirect, by determining your Ad Rank, which determines which keyword your rank above and that keywords rank is used to determine your CPC (by dividing by your quality score).
The ramification of this, beyond being a cool way to trip up friends at PPC cocktail parties, is that we have to rethink the idea of changing bids to change our costs or positions. There is an effect and relationship, but it is far less direct that we typically think.
Additional Steps
Just to finalize, there are some steps after the above sequence before the entire process is complete.
- For the last keyword in the list, Google uses some minimum required bid to determine the price.
- There is a minimum CPC below which ads will not appear – so not every keyword on the original list is displayed. Google decides this CPC, and perhaps how many ads they want to appear. The point is that some (or many) eligible keyword’s ads are not shown.
- After the rank and price is set, Google checks the MaxCPC of each KW against the MinBid required for a TOP position (ads that appear over the organic listings rather than on the right) and may move some ads to the TOP. Note that this decision is based on MaxCPC not CPC, and an ad in Position 4 may jump over an ad in Position 3 to get to the top if it had a higher MaxCPC.
PS: I’m hard at work on my way-behind-schedule ebook ‘High Resolution PPC’. If you like this kind of how-it-really-works thinking about paid search, I think you’ll enjoy the book. Sign up now and we’ll alert you as soon as I can finish and you can download.
Why It’s Called First Page Bid *Estimate*
Because you can bid less and still have your ads shown on the first page.
In my experience it isn’t unusual to see the following:
A Portion of The Keyword Report from ClickEquations
On the top line we see a keyword with a FPBE of $1.93, a MaxCPC of $1.50, and an AvePos of 2.82 (clearly on the first page). And we see a healthy impression count. It seems like something doesn’t add up.
I can only surmise (I have no direct information from Google on this) that this proves it really is an estimate. The actual bid required to be on the first page varies on a query-by-query basis. (Our post on the Quality Score discount or penalty.)
This makes sense given what we now know about how Ad Rank is calculated and the fact this is done in real-time for every query. So for each search Google:
- Calculates the Quality Score of each bidder, then
- Calculates their Ad Rank to determine position, then
- Determines price based on the Ad-Rank and Quality Score, then
- Figures out if any ads are eligible to get a Top Position, then sometimes
- Decides how many ads they want to show
So there are two chances for your ad to not appear on the first page:
- Your Ad Rank is too low to earn a spot on the first page.
This (again) is Bid x Quality Score so you have to variables to work on to fix this. - Google limits the number of ads they display, even though there are more bidders.
What This Means For Bidding and First Page Bid Estimate
You shouldn’t feel compelled to bid all the way up to or past the FPBE number. Check your Average Position, and Impression counts before making a decision.
The effect of seeing the First Page Bid Estimate is to feel compelled to raise your bid to hit it – at least. That might be a good idea, it might not, and it may not be necessary (assuming your goal is a page 1 appearance with 100% Impression Share).
Test the impact of bids around the FPBE on both your position and impression count – it’s possible you’re below but losing very few impressions.
What Else It Means
Google is still hiding too much from advertisers.
The move to First Page Bid Estimate was a positive one, but we’re still not told:
- How they decide how many ads to show for any given query,
- How they establish minimum bids for a particular query (the price the lowest appearing person pays)
- How they determine the bid requirements of a Top Position (and what it is for any particular keyword or query)
- And our only clue about any of this – Impression Share – is still available at the Campaign Level only.
We’re left guessing and testing when we’re rather be considering and deciding.
NOTE: This is the 2nd post in a series. The first one is here.
Google Grants Clarity on Search Network Stats
A nice surprise from Google today, with the release of independent statistics for ad-group performance on the Google ‘Search Network’ – sites like AOL and Ask.com.
This is no doubt related to the Google-Yahoo deal and clammoring on this blog and elsewhere about the issues involved in integrating those reports. It’s great that reporting is now separate – next we need separate bidding options like they provide for the Content Network.
Interestingly, in one of our campaigns the search network bid is set to ‘auto’. I don’t know what that means. Are they going to auto-lower bids on search partners? Better than keeping them the same as bids on the Google network, but I’d still prefer advertiser control.
Fisking A Yahoo Blog Post
The search engines have an inventory of ad space they want you to buy. They want you to pay the highest price possible, although they obviously have to work within market conditions and create (or even deliver) value.
They operate highly complex, extremely secretive ‘auctions’ based on rules and algorithms they choose not to share – in small part for competitive reasons but mostly because doing so would degrade their revenues and the relationships they have with advertisers.
And when they make a change to the rules or algorithms under which we all choose to advertise, they inform us via blogs and notices within their software, which not surprisingly puts the changes in the best possible light.
The same is true when they simply try to explain how the system works in an effort to educate. This is fair and reasonable, to a point.
As mentioned in the earlier post on this topic, their job is to make money, yours is to be an educated and wary consumer. But there is a point where self interest and ‘marketing bluster’ turns into white-washing and deception.
How Honest Should They Be?
I think the line between marketing hype and accuracy should in part be based on the complexity of the topic, the chance that the advertiser can know or will likely be advised that the positioning is rather one-sided, and the magnitude of the cost of the deception, among other variables.
Against these measures, I think all the engines regularly go way too far in surrounding important and costly issues in friendly sounding and rather inaccurate language.
Take for example the following excerpt from a recent Yahoo blog post about what to do (and even think) when your ads aren’t displaying all the time:
If your ads are not being displayed as often as you like, it may be time to take a look at how your spending limits and bids are set. To help get your ads displayed more often, consider increasing your spending limits. If that’s not possible, there are ways to work within your means and still compete with the deep-pocket competition.
While you may not have the advertising budget to maintain round-the-clock ads in top positions, there are ways to help get your ads in front of searcher eyes more often at lower cost. First, go for specifics. Consider selecting keywords that have lower minimum bids and are targeted for a specific service or product that a searcher may specifically type in. Not only are these “tail” terms likely to be more affordable than general terms, they are less liable to blow your budget.
If you translate that happy sounding stuff into english, you find that Yahoo suggests spending more money and buying more of their unused inventory.
They do this while perpetuating the falicies that one searcher is as good as the next (regardless of the keyword they match let alone the query they type) and that higher positions are inherently better than lower ones. And they get a bonus 10 point for gratuitous use of the pop-culture phrase ‘tail terms’.
They also fail to discuss the many other ways you could likely work on improving the situation – the ones that don’t make them any more money.
Yahoo Fisked
Let’s take it line by line:
If your ads are not being displayed as often as you like, it may be time to take a look at how your spending limits and bids are set.
We start by subtly setting up what is probably a false premise, although they do it cleanly by disclaiming that ‘it may be time’.
If your ads are not displaying as often as you’d like, the first things you’d want to consider are the keyword selection itself and the associated match types, and then the reported (or likely) ‘quality index’ in terms of alignment between the keywords, ad-copy, and landing page terminology and content.
If a bike has a flat tire and rusted chain, pushing harder may work but it isn’t the best initial advice. Paying more is usually just pushing harder on a system where something is out of whack.
To help get your ads displayed more often, consider increasing your spending limits.
Again, the first suggestion is to push harder. There’s no margin in putting air in the tires.
If that’s not possible, there are ways to work within your means and still compete with the deep-pocket competition.
OK, a positive statement. You can find a way to make your business work. We’re here to help. Great.
While you may not have the advertising budget to maintain round-the-clock ads in top positions, there are ways to help get your ads in front of searcher eyes more often at lower cost.
Uh Oh. A quick drop into bad-assumption hell. Four things you may not neccessarily want to do – maintain round-the-clock ads, run them in ‘top-positions’, get your ads in front of more ‘eyes’, and even get a ‘lower cost’. It’s a nice sounding sentence, but based entirely on an over-simplified characature of how PPC works.
What we want, in the real world, is to get conversions at the highest ROI. From there we work backwards and get the best clicks (ie from the most qualified users as defined by the topic of their query and/or the history of similar conversions) at the lowest price. To do this we want the right people to see our ads, however many of them there are. Eyes are generically not valuable, cost is relative to return, and time of day and position are not ‘more is better’ things regardless of the common perception.
First, go for specifics. Consider selecting keywords that have lower minimum bids and are targeted for a specific service or product that a searcher may specifically type in.
The first piece of good advice thus far, ironically, is to ‘go for specifics’. To bad it’s passed off in such a general and ultimately misleading way. We want keywords that attract queries which are both highly relevant to our subject and if possible demonstrate intent towards serious prospects.
While we all want to have lower costs, making lower bids the (or only) criteria is silly. We want the lowest possible bids for keywords which generate conversions. If you really want lower minimum bids, leave Yahoo and go bid on a 3rd-tier engine. That’s not good advice because the traffic is of such substantially lower quality that it more than offsets the lower bid – obviously.
The idea of ‘going for specifics’ is excellent advice if it’s clear that it means increasing the targeting of your keywords (or more specifically narrowing the range of the queries you attract) and doing a better job of valuing specific keywords via the use of negatives, match types, and bids. I’m sure that’s what they meant.
Not only are these “tail” terms likely to be more affordable than general terms, they are less liable to blow your budget.
The tail wags the dog here, again. Buy cheaper words so you can stay in the game longer. Shouldn’t the idea of conversions, revenue, and return get a mention?
Are we playing at the $5 table in Vegas or Atlantic City because we know we’re going home broke but we really want to be able to play all weekend? Sure sounds like it.
Let Me Try It
This review may sounds a bit harsh and over-reactive. Yahoo is just trying to give some friendly advice, and taken with a less critical eye it’s just another generic piece of questionable advice.
But this isn’t advice from just another search blogger or ‘guru’. This is from a company getting thousands or tens of thousands of dollars from people who will take this advice to heart and move forward making bad decisions as a result.
Consider this alternative:
If your ads are not being displayed as often as you like, make sure you’re bidding on keywords directly relevant to your offer, and that your text ads and landing pages are directly aligned in both word usage and clearly focused context for those words. If they are, it may be time to take a look at how your spending limits and bids are set.
Your goal should be to see your ads displayed as often as possible to searchers who are likely to purchase your goods or services. With proper setup and management you should be able to generate a good number of sales within your means – even when competing with the deep-pocket competition.
Make sure that you’ve chosen as many different highly relevant keywords as possible – the more specific the better. Very general terms and category names usually have a lot of competitive bidders and therefore see higher per-click costs. If you want your ads to appear for these keywords it may be necessary to both raise bids and increase budgets – although a better Quality Index (a big part of which is higher click through rates that come from well written creative) can help minimize those.
More focused words and phrases are often overlooked by many bidders, despite the fact that advertisers often see higher conversion rates from more detailed keywords. So you may experience lower costs and higher revenues!
An approach like this gives more balanced information to search advertisers, helping them to become successful and therefore keep advertising. Which produces better long term results for Yahoo as well as their clients.
Sure it takes a little longer to think through and then write with more meat and less marketing fluff. And it both provides and expects more from readers – they may not undertand all the terms and concepts and will therefore have to seek out explanations.
But I think advertisers deserve and would appreciate the additional effort and information. And it would be great to not have to be so suspect of everything the engines say and do.
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