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I just received the following from Google.
Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We are writing to inform you about an upcoming online gambling advertising policy change that may affect your Google AdWords™ account, which has been identified as potentially being in the online gambling category.
As of April 27, 2004, we’ll be discontinuing online gambling advertisements from Google AdWords. All campaigns in violation of our new policy will be suspended. Specifically, Google will stop accepting and running ads for online casinos, sports books, bingo, and affiliates with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites.
On a case-by-case basis, we may allow advertisements for:
Location-based gambling (ads for destinations where gambling is legal)
Books, magazines, or TV shows that discuss gambling
Contests or sweepstakes that are legal where offered
Please reply to this email if your account falls under one of the categories listed above. You’ll be notified by email when we’ve reviewed your situation.As a business Google must make decisions regarding the advertising we accept. As stated in our Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when reviewing AdWords ads created within the program. This only concerns our advertising and in no way affects the search results we deliver. Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
I am still being solicited by Overture Site match on a daily basis.
I got the same email today Professor. Sigh.
Does Findwhat perform for anyone?
My goodness, that “case-by-case” statement suggests a nightmare for Google. If they don’t abandon it, the amount of ads on everything except a few terms is likely to remain the same.
On the other hand… they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too. Stop taking ads for an “online casino” search, but allow booksellers and “stalking horse” sites (like partypoker.net) to advertise on most everything else.
Just turn your portal into a gambling magazine. Doesn’t that pass the test?
And aren’t most online casinos legal where they are offered?
This is gonna be an interesting summer.I’d never seen PartyPoker.net before. Interesting.
Our gambling ads will be switched off by Google in the UK as of the end of April.
Marc Lesnick commented on how interesting the timing of this announcement was (in Amsterdam). And how he was sure it had nothing to do with the sports betting season being over (lol).:p
I have read numerous articles about the Google, and Yahoo banning online casino sponsored links. I would like to let you know that Industry Brains works with a number of search engines that receive a large number of gambling related searches each month. We allow online casino’s to take advantage of our sponsored links program. Please let me know if you would like to learn more about our service. We work on a pay per click basis and have no setup fees whatsoever.
If IndustryBrains could get some content/contextual partners for gambling like they have for the tech/PC stuff then they’d be a strong player. However, I have to say that I think their search engine partners are dreadful which is a shame, ‘cos if you have a tech product to sell, their contextual partnerships with things like TechTarget and PCWorld make them a good buy.
Some contextual partnerships with sports related sites, etc. would be good, IndustryBrainsGuy – so, what about it ?
Hi Try,
could you elaborate on what you consider to be dreadful partners?Is it a lot of Asian and Indian traffic? I’ve heard that the Asian traffic doesn’t convert well but that was a few years ago and I thought perhaps that OG had gained trust therefore better conversions from that part of the world. I mentioned India because of a recent thread in CAP about India’s army of paid clickers.
thanks in advance for your reply
S.
Well, my experience of the search engine side of IndustryBrains is fairly limited, but they are partnered with a lot of those SmartSearch PPC engines and I just don’t trust the quality of traffic originating from these search engines. It’s not so much Asian and Indian traffic as poor quality traffic.
As I said though, they do have extremely good contextual partnerships with some major players in the tech and IT industry and if they could expand these and get on board with some large sports and entertainment portals, they would be a good bet. Until then, I’m steering well clear.
It is my experience that with almost every PPC you kiss a lot of frogs before finding your prince, or princess as the case may be.
So for me; if I can just get some real people that actually DO want to gamble; I feel I can show a positive ROI.
What I can’t do is turn automated scripts into a positive ROI, and neither can I with surfers that are there to earn money for clicking on PPC links.
after FW shuts down, If anybody here is advertising at GoClick; *arguably the “next best thing” (or at least, in the top 5 for paid placements – still accepting OG ads of course), then they’d better get used to a lot of fishy looking clicks which if you speak up to GC about it; they will compensate you for the lack of quality.
I believe it was Randy that said they (GC) did this for him without his even asking. (You live right or something Dude, because GC was never that quick to do me a fair-turn. But you know me, perhaps I didn’t give them enough opportunity to do so; because I started bitching as soon as I saw an undesired pattern forming).
what they wanted me to do; was to go thru and weed out the clicks from questionable sources; and they’d refund me for them. Well crap, it got to be rediculous. So I basically quit promoting at GC but now like all others, I’m forced to entertain the idea of using GC again (and putting up with the afore mentioned).
I got a few unrequested refunds from GoClick last month – more than half my expenditures.
I wonder what’s up with that? — not that I’m complaining, mind you!
And I know no one’s going to believe this, but I get some pretty decent traffic from a “get 50,000 casino targeted visitors for $149.00”. By following my visitors on-site (time spent, pages visited) and stats at the casinos, I know I have gotten regular players from it – not a very big percentage, but some.
And it doesn’t make sense – as professor pointed out – if anyone has access to targeted casino traffic, why the hell would they give it away for a fraction of a penny per visitor?
I just got more money back from GoClick this month. The amount of traffic I’m receiving isn’t much, but like bb1 said, they’re the next best thing to FindWhat.
I think what a lot of these PPC outfits do to get traffic is serve up results to those spywares that launch themselves every time you type in an invalid URL. Not the best traffic, but still, sometimes, you’ll see something worthwhile.
Believe it or not, I’ve had a little bit of luck with 7search even though they’ve gotten expensive.
I can assure you that IndustryBrains does not outsource sponsored links into spyware programs. One of our search partners is Mamma.com. Go to the site, type in the term “memory” and look at our sponsored links at the top of the page. You’ll notice the amount of room we give for your creative.
Slipping in sponsored links into spyware seems like a shady and unrespectful way of establishing a business IMHO.
