This morning I was adding a few items from my Amazon store to my Adwords account, fishing maps in particular. I did what any other marketing person would do, I came up with an attractive ad that portrayed the products with meaning and purpose, formulated a very relevant set of keywords, put it all together and stuck it all out there for the world to see.
Much to my surprise, me bidding on the phrase “map of toledo bend” and sending the traffic to this URL, was low quality in the eyes of Google. Even more to my surprise, nobody else is bidding on this term. At this moment, I am the only advertiser I see using Adwords to sell a map of Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Google insisted that I pay 40 cents for this click. In a chat session with one of their support people, I was told that the term I am bidding on is one that no advertiser has ever succeeded in using. So, Google wants to insure that advertisers are not doing poor work and that all elements of the advertising equation are relevant so the shopper is happy with their Google experience.
Below is a copy of my ad text:
********************
Map Of Toledo Bend
Laminated Map with GPS Points for
Hot Fishing Spots. Other Great Info.
********************
The traffic from this ad goes directly to my page on Amazon that offers a Laminated Topographical map of Toledo Bend for sale. It is a very cool map, it shows all of the submerged structure in the lake, boat rows, even GPS coordinates to hot fishing spots as determined by local Toledo Bend professional guides. It is priced right for the quality of the map, but Google apparently does not take anything into consideration except maximizing the price they can charge for a click by fleecing their advertisers in the name of quality.

Which Brings Me to My New Use for Google Adwords
Google Adwords Editor is a very nice tool that makes setting up and managing PPC campaigns very easy. But I am forced to ask myself what’s the use of they hammer me so hard to click pricing?
Set up all campaigns in Google, using their tool that really is very efficient. Next, use the export feature to export your campaign to a text file, then log in to Yahoo Search Marketing and you can import the Adwords campaign in minutes. Yahoo’s interface is slow and cumbersome. The Adwords Editor is a great way to build Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns.

Granted, search volume on Yahoo is less, but they don’t seem to be quite as greedy as Google is. Yahoo seems to be OK with letting the market dictate how much a click should cost.

On a final note, any of you affiliates out there with fishing traffic, please promote my maps through Amazon. At this time we are offering these high-quality laminated topo maps for:

• Lake Fork
• Toledo Bend Reservoir
• Sam Rayburn Reservoir
• Cedar Creek Lake
• Lake Ray Roberts
• Freeport
• Lower Gulf of Mexico
• Sabine/Calcasieu Lakes
• Upper Laguna Madre
• Lower Laguna Madre
• Matagorda Bay
• Galveston Bay

They are wonderful maps and your customers are sure to love them! Conversions run 5% and better.