Google Content Network Search Arbitrage Explained
Many people new to the search industry may already have heard plenty times the term “Search Arbitrage”.
What Is Search Arbitrage?
Search arbitrage is to buy paid search traffic from search engines (e.g. Google’s Search Network) at a lower cost and to re-sell the PPC traffic to an advertiser (e.g. Google’s Content Network) at higher price.
Why Does Search Arbitrage Occur?
Search arbitrage is an opportunity of extra profits to any webmasters who can manipulate such an opportunity. Google’s Adwords and Adsense programs are a perfect combination for webmasters to operate on search arbitrage.
Though, in one of my previous posts about search arbitrage, Searchquant has an interesting insight about search arbitrage and explained it should rather be re-defined as distribution fraud.
How Does Google React To Search Arbitrage?
Last year, Google made a series of changes to Adwords to combat search arbitrage, including: Adwords Automatic Minimum CPC Change and Adwords Content Targeting Quality Score Change.
How Does Search Arbitrage Affect Advertisers?
There is nothing illegal for webmasters to use Adsense arbitrage to make money online. The problem really arises when the number of webmasters utilitizing this trick to generate profits online and the number of arbitrage-tailered-made websites both keep increasing each day. The single obvious outcome is that all the websites or web pages of those webmasters of the arbitrage-intent are giving visitors low or even no value.
The single main purpose of the arbitrage websites is simply to attract visitors to click the ads on the web page, without giving them any other alternatives. With the purpose solely on the click there was no value for Adwords advertisers.
This also concludes to one of the few reasons that PPC traffic from content network mostly has lower conversion rate than that of from search network. Read more about this on Google Adwords Content Network Strategies.
Final Words
Search arbitrage may be an easy way of making profits online for certain webmasters who know the trick thoroughly. It is constant cash coming into their wallets, but they are paying for that cash, and for once when they are paying more for the clicks that what they are getting paid for, they will have some serious cash flow problems to cope with. A good knowledge of both Adwords and Adsense, is vital in making a successful business out of search arbitrage.
Posted on February 13, 2007
Filed Under Adwords, Contextual Advertising, Google, PPC |
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4 Responses to “Google Content Network Search Arbitrage Explained”
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[...] on lower-quality clicks. Since then, there have been many instances that Google tried to combat search arbitrage (or Adsense-made [...]
Gordon, thanks for the info on arbitrage in this post.
Also I like the human detection system “please add 0 and 0″ LOL…simple is always better!
Regards, Jared Blake
[...] Often with this model, the client is the party that makes the marketing decisions. Depending on the client’s marketing goals, it can be to increase sales, to improve brand-awareness, or to do search arbitrage. [...]
[...] monetizing via Adsense. This will definitely push more websites with low quality and purpose of search arbitrage into other lower-tier ad publisher networks. There were also several content network updates last [...]