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Comment by apowell | Hacker News Reader

In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants.

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it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants

Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite learning curve.

That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against them.

Incorrect IMHO.

In the last year I've seen both bids, and average per click payouts from adsense drop significantly. Like halved.

The OP is about divorce. Legal, finance, class action lawsuits. They're all crazy click prices because they're potentially very lucrative.

Managing your own campaign is extremely easy. You don't even have to set bid prices any more if you don't want to.

Your experience may be different than mine, but I've been advertising in a couple different verticals (including legal, so I'm familiar with the insanity there) for the past couple years and I've been involved on the Adsense side since early 2004, and I haven't seen click prices drop dramatically.

Here's some data, ending June 2009: http://www.clickz.com/3634374 (Click 'prior month' to get a feel for the trend. A chart would be nice. Some verticals, like mortgages, obviously took a beating.)

Sure, it's easy to set up a campaign and start blindly feeding money in to the Google machine -- but that's a long, long way from effectively managing a campaign.

This is one of my problems. I recommend that a lot of my smaller clients experiment with AdWords as an alternative to Yellow Pages. Try $50/wk and see what happens. Many are eager to continue but don't have the time or understanding of AdWords to do it themselves.

The problem comes when setting up and managing a small weekly account is as much work (billed hourly) as is being spent on the ads. That's a little difficult to justify and never worth my time to handle.

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