Cash4Gold Competitor's Clever Adwords Hack | Hacker News Reader

Cash4Gold Competitor's Clever Adwords Hack

byrnehobart.com

65 pointsbyrneseyeview16 comments

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.

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.

"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.

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

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

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.)

It is against the terms.

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&...

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

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

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.

I'm assuming Marketwatch have some sort of financial incentive for reproducing press releases verbatim too.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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