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Permalink Reply by Matthew Maisel on December 6, 2007 at 4:23pm

Less traffic in an unexplored or unsaturated market isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that there are less impressions and clicks. It's the clickthrough rate that matters, and as long as it is good, the ad will get a good quality score.

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Permalink Reply by Daehee Park on December 6, 2007 at 4:37pm

You're right, CTR and Quality Score may be good. But don't you think that the volume of conversions/sales is an important factor?

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Permalink Reply by Daehee Park on December 6, 2007 at 6:14pm

To add on, a saturated market may not work in this competition because you would most likely end up with a ridiculously high CPC which would quickly drain your $200 budget.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Maisel on December 6, 2007 at 6:40pm

Exactly...you would have to compete against companies that spend $200 or more on a single click.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Maisel on December 6, 2007 at 5:41pm

In respect to Quality Score and Ad placement, the volume of sales or conversions doesn't play a role. These are determined by the CTR, keyword and ad text relevance, the landing page quality, and CPC bid.

The volume of customer transactions(sales/conversations) is proportional to the size of an industry or market. The important factor is how large the percentage of the total volume of customer transactions that the client gets in their particular market.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Jansen on December 7, 2007 at 11:11am

Keep in mind that for this challenge we have 2 artifical constraints -- (1) a 3 week time limt and (2) a $200 budget

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Permalink Reply by Avijit Paul on February 9, 2008 at 1:45am

Hi,
I was just curious, can a team choose a business that they / their family own?
If a professor owns a business and he is interested to put that business as one of the client for one of his student groups, would that be illegal?
Someone asked me about it and I was searching in the Google TOC for this competition, but could not find anything. So i was thinking to ask here.

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Permalink Reply by Jamie Murphy on February 9, 2008 at 2:12am

Hi Avijit,

Thanks for your comments and questions. Apart from suggestions on which industries to avoid, the only restriction I know for choosing a client is "Please note that the business or organization should not currently use AdWords in any capacity."

Thus a team choosing a business that they/their family owns seems fine.

As for choosing a professor's business, this should be fine except the students may have an extremely difficult client ;-)

Cheers, Jamie

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Permalink Reply by Avijit Paul on February 9, 2008 at 2:48am

Haha, quite agree. Thanks =D
From our uni we have 5 teams so far. But we are going to get a few more soon. one of the team was working on that prof's family business. Lets see how far they go.

Thanks for the info ;)

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