Google's Pay Per Click advertising

[DaveJ]

This is something that came up at work, but it also pertains to my own academic curiosity. Does anyone have experience with this service? Although I respect Google, they certainly know how to take the best advantage of the free market.

I found out an ad on the sidebar of Google typically costs a couple of dollars to the business each time it's clicked! Theoretically, of course, this may make the business money, and people think it's perfectly fine for Google to collect 90% of their internet sales.

What's more, I don't know of any way to go onto Google's site and find out how much they will charge. We're paying $250/mo just to find out how much Google will charge for a particular phrase. Google can't just be upfront about their charges.

That's bad enough.

This, though, is my main beef -- does Google charge for ALL clicks or just UNIQUE clicks? If they charge for all clicks, that doesn't seem fair, because I think charges should be for initial exposure, and there is nothing to prevent a competitor from clicking on an ad over and over again in order to wipe of another competitor's ad. Is this the way it works? It seems to me that only unique clicks should be counted.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this just seems to be another corporate scam that is well hidden from the public eye.

[Duer 157099]

1. I can't really speak to how it's done today

but several years ago I was familiar with how it worked, and all of those caveats you bring up are addressed in their strategy. So, for example, they have a way to prevent you from having to pay excessive charges if a competitor (or any malicious person) were to repeatedly click on your link. And they had different prices for different terms/phrases, depending on their popularity, etc.

Like I said, this was several years ago, and I know that they have to constantly evolve to keep it real, just don't know the specifics of how it works today. What I recall was that there was a balance between getting lots of hits (which meant you're overall ranking would go up, a good thing) and artificial hits (which would cost).

Hopefully someone else will weigh in, I'd be curious how it works today too.