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Anybody seeing the big buzz about this stuff lately?
I've been doing a lot of research around that space the past few weeks/months and these are my findings:
1. This space is blowing up. Tons of large media buying companies have been quietly built over the years, and it's actually coming to light now. This space is a true marketers playground as there's enough approaches/angles/techniques to acquire and sell traffic it's mind-boggling.
2. Facebook/TikTok are FULL of media buyers monetizing via search partners feeds. It's all creative based. None of these guys run SEO sites. It's all paid media. Turning FB/TT/Natives/GDNers into search clicks.
3. Dirty little detail: even Yahoo and their PRIMARY search property (not search partners) is getting in on the game (plus they change the keywords as they go....to maximize the keyword value.....yikes). Based on seeing that I'll probably never buy on Bing/Yahoo search for a long time.
4. It's a pretty dirty game. My hypothesis based on my findings is there's little value added, and the game mainly is about scorching SEM buyers who don't realize they're buying display intent clicks at best and at worst people who have been manipulated to click on some keywords.
A super common strategy for example is advertising for people to get high-paying jobs in say roofing. They do a social ad all about how much you'll make as a roofer. Then they send you to a page with keywords like "roofers near you". The end-buyer business is bidding on those keywords thinking it's advertising to potential clients. The search arbitragers are sending job-seekers to those keywords who are looking for a job. Funny when I see on reddit some poor PPCers complaining, "all of a sudden my %local biz% account has so many leads coming in for employment and not services! What's happening?" sheesh...
...Not to mention, search arb. is a great place to monetize GDN bot traffic and turn it into a search arbitrage click as well. If the bot traffic passed the filters of GDN-land, search clicks outta work too!
The list goes on with manipulations of this nature. One common thread all the arbitragers talk about is how they gotta continue to find keywords, cuz the keywords get "burnt out". What does that mean? Sounds to me like they flush through keywords, send you tons of traffic on a "good looking keyword", but then the advertisers realize it's garbage traffic, and negative out the keyword/domain. Rinse and repeat. It's a big game of cat and mouse, with the SEM buyer paying the bill.
I've been looking for something new to put my media buying skills into and this market looked perfect initially! But after some time digging into this, and even running some ads myself, I'm not convinced it's a sustainable model. I think it's more of a "gotcha sucker" kind of play that's robbing Google Advertisers (Google itself is probably not that upset, they get a cut of this revenue after all and it increases total searches). The EPCs in steady decline in search arbitrage is the key symptom of just how sustainable it is. Making display/various angles look like search is pretty BS. It's been going on for YEARS - but just like the US economy, I don't get how it can go on like this forever.
Thoughts? Experiences?
I've been doing a lot of research around that space the past few weeks/months and these are my findings:
1. This space is blowing up. Tons of large media buying companies have been quietly built over the years, and it's actually coming to light now. This space is a true marketers playground as there's enough approaches/angles/techniques to acquire and sell traffic it's mind-boggling.
2. Facebook/TikTok are FULL of media buyers monetizing via search partners feeds. It's all creative based. None of these guys run SEO sites. It's all paid media. Turning FB/TT/Natives/GDNers into search clicks.
3. Dirty little detail: even Yahoo and their PRIMARY search property (not search partners) is getting in on the game (plus they change the keywords as they go....to maximize the keyword value.....yikes). Based on seeing that I'll probably never buy on Bing/Yahoo search for a long time.
4. It's a pretty dirty game. My hypothesis based on my findings is there's little value added, and the game mainly is about scorching SEM buyers who don't realize they're buying display intent clicks at best and at worst people who have been manipulated to click on some keywords.
A super common strategy for example is advertising for people to get high-paying jobs in say roofing. They do a social ad all about how much you'll make as a roofer. Then they send you to a page with keywords like "roofers near you". The end-buyer business is bidding on those keywords thinking it's advertising to potential clients. The search arbitragers are sending job-seekers to those keywords who are looking for a job. Funny when I see on reddit some poor PPCers complaining, "all of a sudden my %local biz% account has so many leads coming in for employment and not services! What's happening?" sheesh...
...Not to mention, search arb. is a great place to monetize GDN bot traffic and turn it into a search arbitrage click as well. If the bot traffic passed the filters of GDN-land, search clicks outta work too!
The list goes on with manipulations of this nature. One common thread all the arbitragers talk about is how they gotta continue to find keywords, cuz the keywords get "burnt out". What does that mean? Sounds to me like they flush through keywords, send you tons of traffic on a "good looking keyword", but then the advertisers realize it's garbage traffic, and negative out the keyword/domain. Rinse and repeat. It's a big game of cat and mouse, with the SEM buyer paying the bill.
I've been looking for something new to put my media buying skills into and this market looked perfect initially! But after some time digging into this, and even running some ads myself, I'm not convinced it's a sustainable model. I think it's more of a "gotcha sucker" kind of play that's robbing Google Advertisers (Google itself is probably not that upset, they get a cut of this revenue after all and it increases total searches). The EPCs in steady decline in search arbitrage is the key symptom of just how sustainable it is. Making display/various angles look like search is pretty BS. It's been going on for YEARS - but just like the US economy, I don't get how it can go on like this forever.
Thoughts? Experiences?
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