Google split bidding: What we’ve been asking for

December 8, 2005
by Latitude

Latitude has been asking the big three search engines – Google, Overture, and Miva – for some time now to let us bid separately for search pages and content pages. (’Content pages’ are websites which are members of the engines’ affiliate networks and which display their ads.) So we welcome the news that Google has decided to take our advice.

As Nic Howell reports in this week’s New Media Age, the new policy to split bidding on search and content networks is “a minor milestone in the development of Google’s advertising strategy…”

Here’s what I told Nic for the NMA story, as quoted in the article:

Even though we knew some Google partners perform poorly, we still had to pay the same price as prime Google real estate. The recent announcement means specialists like Latitude will create alternative bidding strategies based on real conversion data, paying different prices for different parts of Google’s distribution.

This is all about investing in different nodes on Google’s distribution network according to the conversion levels which each node brings us and our clients. The practice of paying the same price for each node on that network, regardless of how well or poorly it converts, was long overdue for elimination. I hope that Overture and Miva follow suit – and quickly – in adopting separate bidding based on genuine ROI.

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