Caps for emphasis is one thing, ending a sentence with two exclamation points immediately following my name is another.

Branding isn’t about CTR.

Please don’t cry. I wasn’t yelling, see note about ‘emphasis.’ My apologies if you felt otherwise. Just too lazy to see if the comment stream handled html tags, and there’s no edit mechanism if it doesn’t. (Which I really hate about posting comments.)

>Mrs.

Ah. I confess that I took the cheap, marriage-neutral posting route.

>helping search marketers

A marketer posted in WMW that he’s been allowed to use the beta of this for about 5 months now.
“it’s been good for me as an advertiser but it looks to me like it might not be as good a deal for publishers as ctr is incredibly low.”
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3484415.htm

Knowing that a non-contextual branding campaign is going to produce poor CTR is not marketing rocket science. Making the small leap to assuming that Big G knew that this would be the likely result, then I’m disappointed that they chose to devalue their publishers’ inventory.

Also, I’m Mrs. McCollum. And please don’t yell at me.

“giving AdWords more viability as a BRANDING tool”

“ADS ARE NOT FOCUSED on keyword or contextual cues, and Google also offers images, and click-to-play video formats, in addition to text.”

“the initial CPM-only pricing caused friction between traditional search marketers and publishers. ‘Some search marketers weren’t aware of what was a REALISTIC bid, and the sites weren’t accepting CPM ads because the bids were so low,’”

“CPC bidding for placement targeting was one of the most common ADVERTISER requests we received for Google content network campaigns”

And now a quote from Interbrand’s BrandChannel.com taken from their definition of branding:

“From the perspective of the brand’s owner, the value of the brand often lies in the security of higher FUTURE earnings”

And finally a quote from me:
“Hosting a branding campaign on CPC ain’t good news for the PUBLISHERS, Ms. McCollum!!”