I'd like to think that a lot of PPC practitioners are ethical. I also think that there's a lot of room to be unethical in the search business, and without many checks and balances we've kind of gone down the road of "if I can't be stopped, why should I?". A lot of the discussion around ethical PPC has to do with affiliates; what are they allowed to bid on, what are the rules that they have to play by.
Brand Bidding
The cause célèbre of the unethical/black hat PPC world - to bid on brand or not to bid on brand. You have to ask yourself whether or not bidding on your competitors' brands is getting you an uplift in revenue, increase in brand awareness or is simply cost effective.
Here we've got Sixt.co.uk, NetFlights.com and CarRentals.co.uk all bidding on a search for Avis. Having worked in the car hire space for a couple of years, I can tell you that the concept of bidding on other brands is not entirely effective at all. The three brand bidders (excluding Avis) are likely to get a large impression share, abysmal click through rate and high cost per click.
Why? They've got zero page content (especially in the case of Sixt, which isn't an aggregator like the other two) on Avis, so the landing page component of the Quality Score would be low. I'd imagine, especially with as uncompelling an ad as they're running, that the click through rate is going to eat into that Quality Score as well. So, you've got a crappy landing page QS, a crappy CTR QS which equals higher and higher cost per click. Given the margins on car hire, I'm guessing this can't be paying off fantastically for Sixt.
Duplicate Display URLs
So, you're an affiliate of Argos and want to poach incredible amounts of traffic to your site. Great. You start rotating ad copy with argos.co.uk as the display URL - identical to the real Argos. Unless you've got a white label solution that looks exactly like the company's site, be prepared to experience a high bounce rate, a low average time on site and a large number of new (but not returning) visitors. Why? Site visitors will, upon arriving, feel duped. They take off, only to be left with a sour taste in their mouth and the idea that they've been deceived by not only you but the brand. It doesn't do a lot for brand equity, and it devalues your offering.
Also, Google will not rotate ads which have identical display URLs, so you have to outbid the large corporation that is allowing you to be an affiliate. Once you've outbid them and they cotton on, not only will you be tossed rather unceremoniously from their affiliate program, but you're risking being dumped from an entire affiliate network. Yes, I know there are a myriad of ways around this, but going from earning to not earning kinda sucks, even if it's just for a week.
Next week in part deux: Dayparting Tricks and Fooling Automated Editorial. Have a great weekend.
