

Cash4Gold Competitor's Clever Adwords Hack - byrneseyeview
http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/a-clever-adwords-hack-how-to-get-your-advertorial-on-marketwatch-com/

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jbenz
Fascinating. As the author touches on, this is technically a violation of
Adwords guidelines. You are not allowed to use Adwords to send traffic to a
particular page for the sole purpose of having those visitors click through to
another domain, in this case, GoldFellow.

I wonder though, could GoldFellow argue that they really just want these
visitors to read the article, as opposed to just wanting them to click through
the link at the bottom?

I guess it's a moot point, because GoldFellow can argue all they want. If
Google comes down on them, it won't matter. Certainly doesn't seem like it
would be worth it if you ended up on Google's bad side.

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DanielBMarkham
Yep it gets more interesting if you flip it around.

Say you pay $10K for the mother kahuna press release you've always wanted. Now
you can't pay to send people to go look at your work of art on some other
site, simply because they might/could/probably click through?

The assumption here is that the only reason to have a press release is to get
people to click on something. Is that assumption always true? Sure if I
_owned_ the intermediate site, I could purposely set up various schemes, but
these guys just made a PR and bought some ads. The marketwatch site could pull
or change the links tomorrow and they can't do much about it. Not a very smart
or secure conspiracy.

Perhaps you can't use adwords to send people to sites that host your press
releases? Nope, that doesn't sound right either. I dunno.

Just playing devil's advocate. Seems like, as the author indicated, you could
tell this story two entirely different ways.

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nostromo
"PRNewswire is cagey about their prices, but it looks like it might cost less
than $1,000 to get a press release out."

For online-only it's quite a bit less. I think it starts around $250.

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dcdan
This is ending up on marketwatch.com only after a JS redirect from the ad
landing page.

<http://www.goldfellow.com/currentmarketwatchlink/>

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jbenz
Interesting that they managed to use "marketwatch.com" as the display URL at
the bottom of the ad. If the link is going to the goldfellow URL first, then
then the display url should match goldfellow. It is another violation of
Adwords policy if your display URL and destination URL are different.

(Although in this case, I guess the destination URL is marketwatch.com....
eventually. But if they are using the redirect this Adwords user did not enter
a display URL that matched the destination URL they entered.)

~~~
dcdan
It is against the terms.

[http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&...](http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=23679)

"...advertisers cannot use destination URLs that automatically redirect to
another website or that act as a bridge page."

~~~
maxniederhofer
They're not using a destination URL that redirects or acts as a bridge page.
They're using a redirect to the destination URL.

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chopsueyar
So is it a 'deceptive ad' or a 'clever adwords hack', or simply 'marketing'?

Adwords is pretty strict when it comes to techniques they will and will not
allow.

The advertiser paid for the clicks and the press release. I assume the person
clicking on the ad is able to read, as well.

~~~
byrneseyeview
All of the above! It's deceptive in the sense that when I saw the ad, I
thought Marketwatch was promoting an article. (That's why I clicked.) And I
spend all day on this stuff. I would bet that a decent number of people read
that article and _don't_ understand that it's paid for by the company
discussed in the ad.

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narodick
It's against Adwords guidelines, so the case is pretty much closed. It's
inappropriate.

That being said, it seems like a perfectly acceptable method of marketing to
me -- what's wrong with directing people to positive press about your product
in the first place? Loads of products do this, from movies and bestselling
books to startups and universities. Is this just another round of demonizing
companies that give people cash for gold?

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GeorgesJanin
The funny thing is that because of this article, Goldfellow's budget is going
to get completely drained. I already clicked twice.

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jsf
This reminded me of this article from some time ago:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Of course, what they are doing here is much less sophisticated.

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il
This is hardly a hack. Advertirials have been used for decades, long before
AdWords.

~~~
mattmanser
The hack is that the advert directs to the Advertirials on someone else's
site, looking like it's legitimate.

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BluePoints
Against Adwords guidelines or not - it's brilliant. I'd like to meet the man
behind the curtain here.

