Interesting way a Bidding War can help you.

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dastuff

dastuff

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Sep 28, 2006
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Just to give the usual props. I found this on DP here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=164358#post1619358
A guy/gal name Slava mentioned it, and it's a good idea, which I've never considered trying.

But the DP'ers don't think it's all that ethical... So of course I brought it over here. :rasta:

Basically what he does is he found a campaign that payed well, then targeted the misspelled word version of it. (you know like mortgage --> morgage or something)

Now say that the misspelling is being bid on by a couple of companies, and is relatively unknown to the masses of webmasters.

What he did was create an adsense campaign, for his mispelled word, and began slowly increasing the other competitors amount through a bid war.

Seeing that the advertisers already are known to spend more for the normally targeted keyword, but then are spending less on an obvious misspelling, they'll raise their campaign higher b/c it's basically a lower version of relevant clicks as their normal campaign...

He then drops out of his adsense campaign, and they'll keep their prices high for x amount of time. When they begin to lower their prices he jumps back in w/ another campaign...

He mentioned doing this on YPN but it could also be done on adsense just as easily.

So basically the criteria for this working (i can think of) would be:
  • Find a relatively unknown market
  • Slowly bid up a campaign to see if the competition follows (ideally the competition is a large corporation w/ a nice sized marketing budget so that this is possible)
  • Drop out and let the competition stay up at the higher bid
  • Repeat
I think that's why Salva uses mispellings for words.. Because you know what the advertisers are willing to go up to for the actual spelling of the word.

Basically if all goes well you can raise your click throughs by quite a nice sum. If anyone tries this out (b/c I think I will) and has some success, feel free to come back and comment on what worked/didn't work so well.

I mean yes this is unscrupulous, dishonest, deceitful, decieving.. Basically, it's WF :thumbsup:
 


LOL Chris. That made me laugh.

It seems like it would be hard to get enough traffic through the misspelling to make it worth it, but it couldn't hurt to try.
 
I don't understand the strategy. How does it make me money? It seems like you are just costing your competition money. Not really a great strategy for making millions.

A more sound strategy is to focus on the mis-spellings and try to get the highest rankings you can for the lowest price and work on converting. Who cares what your competition is doing?
 
because you are targetting that keyword on your site. Like in his example you would be targetting mortage on your site so you run up the mortgage keywords and then bid low on the misspelling. Creative way of doing arbitrage.
 
Jdog said:
because you are targetting that keyword on your site. Like in his example you would be targetting mortage on your site so you run up the mortgage keywords and then bid low on the misspelling. Creative way of doing arbitrage.
Click to expand...

Duh. I was not even thinking about the content side.

Sorry, was totally thinking on the other side.

I got it now. :)
 
Sounds like an interesting technique in more of a communist kind of way. Doesn't seem very doable from a practical standpoint. The only logical website to point the traffic to would be your own. So if you got 100% click through rate than you would get about half of what you paid for the traffic. So if you campaigned for a week and pushed your competitors up. Then if you got twice the organic traffic than what would be available in the estimated click inventory than after you dropped your campaign you would logically have to drive that many estimated clicks/day for twice as long as your campaign ran for in order to break even. You'd have to have some very quick and then suddenly very slow to react competitors. You would have to have a huge ctr rate. The fucker still probably wouldn't work out for a profit even in that idea environment.
 
aeiouy said:
Duh. I was not even thinking about the content side.

Sorry, was totally thinking on the other side.

I got it now. :)
Click to expand...
Sorry I guess that was a little confusing.. Yes it's talking about driving up the competition who advertise on your own site...

I know it's kind of funny to think about advertising on your own site but, hey..

Also deliguy, the theory is that after you raise the prices, they'll stay raised for quite some time.. Obviously if they drop right back down to where they were it's not worth it...

But If you're able to increase the cpc for 3 months or 6 (while the other advertisers fight amongst themselves), you can potentially reap in some money.
 
this would only work if the advertisers in question also advertise on the content network
otherwise the only people benefiting are Google
 
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