The Google Slap

As stated, both Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs have been massive successes. Perhaps it was therefore inevitable that this success would eventually start to bite them back… enter The Google Slap!

Since the initial launch in 2000, the Google AdWords Pay-Per- Click program has literally empowered hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to achieve huge success, and make a lot of money.

These internet marketers and online business people would decide on what keywords they believed that anyone using a search engine would input when looking for their type of product or service.

They would then create three line ads based around these keywords, and bid as much as necessary to get their ads to appear on both Google search engine results pages and private webpages and blogs.

So, for example, let’s imagine that I am in the dump truck business.

I would create my dump truck related ad and then bid on the short phrase ‘dump truck’, because my business is selling or servicing such machines.

The next time someone uses that phrase when they search Google, for example, my advert would show assuming that I have bid a high enough amount.

AdWords allows you to bid whatever sum you want over a market-led minimum level, and is important to note that it is not necessary to be the top bid to be seen.

If you bid lower, then you rank lower as well, but the chances are still good that you can still expect to receive some traffic, especially if your advertisement is good.

However, in mid 2006, Google decided that they were not happy with the way that some folks were using AdWords and they gave them the infamous ‘Google Slap’, increasing the minimum bids that were required for a massive number of keywords by huge amounts!

Now, of course, there were many reasons that Google put forward as evidence that this price hike was absolutely necessary, but the fact is that this one draconian measure drove hundreds of thousands of previously happy AdWords customers away.

Indeed there is plenty of evidence that it drove many people out of business too.

Literally overnight, AdWords was no longer a cost effective advertising medium for millions of business people and online entrepreneurs.

These people therefore had little choice but to start looking for viable alternatives to AdSense, that is, other places where they could place comparable adverts at a more reasonable cost.

Google lost a huge number of customers almost overnight, whilst other advertising networks picked up new buyers.
And the key factor was (and is) that PPC advertising really does work.

Quite a few sites, which prior to pay per click would have trouble making money, are earning more than $10,000 per month. Large sites such as NY Times, CNN, BusinessWeek and ESPN are also using PPC to supplement their ad revenues too, thus clearly proving that it must work.