Bidding on Hot Products You Don't Carry

Why are companies that do not currently carry the Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation 3 bidding on those terms to send customers to pages that do not have the product? Why is it that their landing pages do not offer the option to sign up for priority notification when they become available? How many 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars are these people wasting?

People are getting shot waiting for Playstation 3 systems, and then you have these huge retailers bidding on the associated keywords to throw the traffic away and remind potential customers that they are sold out of the product. Sorta bizzare at both ends, eh?

Published: November 30, 2006 by Aaron Wall in pay per click search engines

Comments

November 30, 2006 - 10:48pm

Imagine the email list they could create with a newsletter opt-in option along with the priority notification.

November 30, 2006 - 10:50pm

I believe they do that so that people thing that have everything. Or this can be for misleading the people on their site to sell something else. Guess they pay more for visibility then results.

Anyway they will get it one day or the other. They can be only building position on adword. But the quality score they get with their landing page should be really bad.

December 1, 2006 - 3:39am

If you have enough cash, you pay for those spots to cockblock competitors who do have the inventory.

Rett
December 1, 2006 - 6:54pm

I think a lot of it is a function of poor SEM management. Either inhouse employees have too many terms to manage (and poor analytics) or (more likely) these large companies are outsourcing their SEM to agencies that are just trying to drive as much traffic as possible and absorb budgets.

Another reason could be the "any traffic can be converted" mentality. I doubt that ebay does a big business in "belly button lint," but perhaps I just don't know their model well enough.?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Belly+Button+Lint&btnG=Search

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