Comments on: Google AdWords Bans Price Comparison Sites

By: Richard Kershaw

Richard Kershaw — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:55:41 +0000

@Geoff: I’ll if QS does start ot take into account factors like how long a user spends on page.

As for dynamic, I fear that’s spin rather than reality. Last time I got a domain burned on AdWords, Google told me not to expect anything to change if I overhauled the site.

By: Geoff Dodd

Geoff Dodd — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:23:09 +0000

Google says that their ‘quality score’ is a dynamic variable meaning it’s an algorithm which responds to a lot of data such as keyword density but also, I suspect, it may measure the amount of time a visitor spends on your landing page. Therefore they may get a user-determined measure of ‘relevance’ and usefulness? Geoff D.

By: Price Comparison

Price Comparison — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:30:57 +0000

This has really shattered online price comparison sites in markets like Australia where they used Adwords to generate traffic and then onsell that traffic to retailers. This was though creating a middlemen between retailers and Google and obviously Google didn’t like this practice. The idea is perhaps to motivate small advertisers to go directly to Google instead of paying comparison sites.

By: YLGP

YLGP — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:42:20 +0000

Could you perhaps have written an entry without such an obvious bias towards Adwords users? Google’s policies on adwords are reflective, not affective. Price comparison sites are one of the biggest bugbears people report when using the search engine.

And they’re not ‘lying to [you]‘ – in plain english, they’ve said they will probably be difficult to use affordably. What I would give for all service providers to advise me if their model would make it difficult to make a profit. Most of the time we find out the hard way!

Personally, I think Google Products is actually one of the best sites for price comparison, probably because it charges no commission so is written with a focus on relevance AND price – the rest stick to cost alone. This is why big name companies like Direct Line have openly refrained from being listed on these sites, because blindly comparing apples and pears just leads to everything else that matters going down the drain. Then those same customers are the first to complain when they get poor customer service.

The bottom line is relevance. The vast majority of price comparison sites piggyback on keyword like “review” “specifications” and others, when they make little or no effort to build a reviewing community. For as long as a search for almost any product on Google returns eight pages of the same category of site, when only a handful are relevant (at a push), I welcome anything which disincentivises these people from advertising.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:35:02 +0000

A very interesting development – good post.

Regular affiliates have no chance with the ridiculous cost per clicks but I noticed that a few larger comparison sites are still advertising on AdWords (ran a search for Sony KDL-26T3000 and got Pricerunner, Ciao ads etc.). They’re decent sized companies – have they negtotiated a deal maybe? Or maybe it’s a loss leader with branding in mind?

Either way it’s a worrying trend – who’s Google going to pick on next?!