Why I don't pay much attention to CPC estimates

Conor · Mar 11, 2013

Hey guys

So as far as I know, a lot of people won't consider a good keyword if the Adwords CPC estimate is low. I think that's a bit of a waste of a good keyword and here's why:

Google's ads are not specific. They don't know what your "Primary Keyword" is supposed to be. What I mean is you can rank for a zero competition, low CPC keyword, but pop a few high CPC keywords onto your page and Google will show ads based on that as well. Here's an example:

I want to rank for "orange toothbrush suppliers in South Africa". This keyword is worth nothing. I could incorporate the phrase "payday loans" into my article somehow. This phrase is worth a lot more. Voila, you will now probably have some "payday loans" related ads on your site.

Profit.

Panther28 · Mar 11, 2013

This is only really any good if the user has just cleaned their cookies, in the last week, i have been on a mix of more sites than i've ever been on, and every single one of them has targeted ads at me, not the ads related to the website.

Years ago we used to call this keyword stuffing, and google is pretty wise to it.

muxmkt · Mar 11, 2013

As Panther28 said, the ads shown on the sites are related to me not to the site at all. When i search someting on google and than after sometime enter some sites with adsense, i aways see the same ads related to my search even thought the sites have nothing to do with it.

Conor · Mar 11, 2013

Panther28 said:
This is only really any good if the user has just cleaned their cookies, in the last week, i have been on a mix of more sites than i've ever been on, and every single one of them has targeted ads at me, not the ads related to the website.

Years ago we used to call this keyword stuffing, and google is pretty wise to it.

Thanks for the input.
I just want to add that I am not a fan of keyword stuffing, nor will I ever promote falsely that it actually works. My point was that from my experience, the ads are related to your content as a whole, not for any keyword in particular.

As a matter of interest, lets say your cookies have just been cleared, you visit the site directly, am I correct in assuming the ads will be based purely upon the content?

Edit: I think it's safe to say that your post also proves my theory that CPC estimates are irrelevant ^^

Debugger · Mar 11, 2013

Subscribed.

Panther28 · Mar 11, 2013

Treeofl1 said:
As a matter of interest, lets say your cookies have just been cleared, you visit the site directly, am I correct in assuming the ads will be based purely upon the content?

Yes, try it yourself, your tracked from the moment you start searching

Conor · Mar 11, 2013

Panther28 said:
Yes, try it yourself, your tracked from the moment you start searching

But I'm talking about not searching at all. You clear your cookies and type in the URL manually. Quicker still, browse the site incognito. What will you see?

-Jericho- · Mar 11, 2013

Panther28 said:
This is only really any good if the user has just cleaned their cookies, in the last week, i have been on a mix of more sites than i've ever been on, and every single one of them has targeted ads at me, not the ads related to the website.

Most people don't turn off the feature of relevant ads so their search patterns tend to have more of a factor on what is shown than what the page is about.

Conor · Mar 11, 2013

Thanks for the input everyone, I hope I'm not giving the wrong impression. I'm genuinely curious on how this works and I'm not claiming to be correct at all. Open to criticism/corrections

Thoughtful · Mar 11, 2013

This is what Google says on their FAQ:
At this time, AdSense only targets ads based on overall site content, not keywords or categories.
If you'd like to display ads related to specific topics on your website, we recommend including more text-based content about these topics, including complete sentences and paragraphs. . .
The AdSense program uses geotargeting to serve Google ads to your pages - ads are specific to a user's region and language, based on their IP address. This means that the ads that are served to a user from Australia may be different than those that appear for a user from Canada. Geotargeting makes the ads even more relevant for visitors to your site, and also means that you may not see all of the ads that can be served to your pages.

JacksonMalloy · Mar 12, 2013

Thoughtful said:
This is what Google says on their FAQ:At this time, AdSense only targets ads based on overall site content, not keywords or categories. If you'd like to display ads related to specific topics on your website, we recommend including more text-based content about these topics, including complete sentences and paragraphs. . .The AdSense program uses geotargeting to serve Google ads to your pages - ads are specific to a user's region and language, based on their IP address. This means that the ads that are served to a user from Australia may be different than those that appear for a user from Canada. Geotargeting makes the ads even more relevant for visitors to your site, and also means that you may not see all of the ads that can be served to your pages.

This would explain a lot, actually. I've been scratching my head for a while trying to figure out why my adsense blogs were giving me completely unrelated ads.

Why I don't pay much attention to CPC estimates

Conor

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Debugger

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Conor

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