Why Keyword Advertising Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past For All But the Wealthiest Companies

Michelle Slatalla makes an interesting point today in a New York Times (sub required) article about vacuum cleaners.

She searched www.vacuum.com and www.vacuums.com "only to find that both had become useless domain name parking sites full of automatically generated ads relevant to the word “vacuum.”

What happened? Put "vacuum" into Yahoo! and it produces 47 million results. You'll get 74 million results in Google. Coming up in the top of those searches consistently is expensive. Keyword advertising is over-saturated, expensive and tired as an ad medium.

The store owner who'd been smart enough to buy both urls in 1993, gave up and now uses his company's name instead. He says he still sells a lot of vacuums online.

When only the biggest companies can afford keyword advertising, it will fade into the sunset of outdated marketing tools. And for vacuum cleaner sellers, that has already happened.

I don't really buy this because the example is a really generic word that potentially hundreds of companies could be bidding on. So it's worthwhile to set up some silly spam site like that because even if it brings in a dollar a day, do that enough times and it starts adding up.

But a lot of the keywords out there that are more specific are just a few cents a click and they bring in traffic. Others are $2 a click but they bring in customers willing to spend a grand or two. So unless it suddenly stops working and stops being measurable in terms of bottom line ROI, THEN people will stop using it. Where are the signs that's happening?

It has happened for several of my clients. Rates start at, say 50 cents a click, and then a competitor sees that they're getting good placement and the next thing you know, they bid the word up to $5.

There are less expensive ways to drive sales, and blog advertising is on the top of my list.

BL,

This is just one more example of what I termed crackvertising http://www.grokdotcom.com/2006/07/26/crackvertising-are-you-addicted/
.

Thanks for pointing this one out.

Bryan