The Return of Click Arbitrage… Sort of

Two weeks ago we did a series about the two faces of quality score, with the focus being two of the seemingly motivating factors behind Google’s now infamous metric. The first is strategic and long term – building a mechanism that attempts to create a virtuous cycle of better quality ads for a better user experience. The second reason or perhaps application of the quality score is tactical, and it’s what we initially called plugging the leaks, but you could also call it their means for making sure certain types of advertisers do not have a chance to spend money on Google. In many ways, the two go hand in hand, but certainly in the performance marketing community, the application of the quality score often appears targeted towards specific companies instead of being broadly applied. Certainly no documented proof of that exists, and I’d suspect Google would deny targeting specific advertisers both with their quality score updates and independent of specific updates, but a handful of anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. In our article on the topic, we looked at several different pages within the performance marketing sector in an attempt to understand the various types of pages which have in the past fallen victim to the changes. One type in particular tends to always irk Google’s ire, and Google has had no issues publicly stating its dislike for them, of course in language that emphasizes users and advertiser value, and it’s hard to disagree. The hardest part might be giving them a name. All too often they get lumped under the "Made for Adsense" moniker, a label that refers to a site whose sole purpose is to generate clicks on Google’s publisher program.

Instead of "Made for Adsense," we have preferred to group them under a larger umbrella of sites that perform pay per click to pay arbitrage, or click to click arbitrage for short. The majority of marketers in the performance world perform click to action arbitrage because they buy traffic on a click basis in hopes of converting into an action other than a click, for example a lead, sale, download, etc. Click to click arbitragers buy clicks and make money when a user clicks on a pay per click ad on the page; call it the search equivalent of the daisy chain. The largest operators of click to click arbitrage don’t buy traffic from Google in order to sell it back to Google; they tend to buy Google traffic and sell it to Yahoo. The changes in quality score have dramatically cut back on that business, with it much like the Ringtone space where a handful of people still make a significant amount of money, but the small to medium guys have found their bounties unavailable. Recently, though, a new crop of click to click arbitragers has sprouted, and while they make only a handful of money compared to their overall business from this activity, it serves as another example of the potential bias that exists within Google and the conflict of interest that continues to grow as they expand. That the questions of bias and conflict of interest can be found in click to click arbitrage is perhaps just a little ironic, or at the very least somewhat humorous.

Who are the last man standing arbitragers? Two of Google’s biggest (one of whom is or is soon to be) syndication partners – Yahoo and Ask. Here is the Yahoo example beginning with the ad:

Enrollment
Everything to do with
Enrollment items.
Yahoo.com

The online education minded people will probably have an interest in the "Enrollment" page. Here it is:

It’s an interesting execution, a little different than the typical comparison shopping engine page, and certainly a more robust site than a standard click to click arbitrager, but it’s hard to say this isn’t a click arbitrage site given the prominent placement of the ads on top. For as complex as it looks, someone could replicate this without doing all the leg work through various feeds. That leads us to the possibility too that this isn’t actually Yahoo but one of its shopping affiliates or a third party that used to do Yahoo feed based arbitrage trying this instead.

Almost everyone knows that Ask wants more traffic. Hard to say how much they receive through this method, but I hadn’t previously seen them among the click arbitragers. It could be that they have always been there but not shown when others could bid more aggressively. This is the ad that I saw.
Personal License Plates
Over 30 Million Number Plates To Choose From at Ask-Amazing Deals
License-Plates.Ask.com

The landing page is not what you might expect from reading the text, which seems quite specific. Rather than going to a shopping page or any page that might fulfill the expectation of "30 million to choose from," you land on a search results page. Even if you consider every possible result, it still comes to 1.6 million, but who is counting.

The levity of these examples aside, Google does give preferential treatment to certain relationships. It’s why one person can advertise something successfully while another could find themselves banned from Google. And, as we’ve belabored but never enough with Google’s market share at 70% according to a recent report, comparable alternatives just don’t exist. The latest issue involves their Wiki-like Knol, which has Google competing with other sites in the index for organic traffic. And, while Google doesn’t create the content on the pages, it’s hard to think that those behind its infrastructure have the same level of opacity into the search algorithm that the rest of us do.

Google needs to grow, and sending traffic to its own properties where it can show more ads helps it do that, but the conspiracy theories and questions over what exactly Google is and should be will continue another day. Conflicts of interest are dangerous though and are magnified when that company has the power that this particular one does. This being such a new field, no one knows how to best manage it, and that will continue to work in Google’s favor…for now.