I’ve run across many a speculation on what levers and dials the folks at Google are pulling behind the AdWords curtain. This is another one, and begs the question: can we have a bit more transparency?
One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.
But one can never make enough money, it seems, so this reader decided to do some research to see if he could improve his results by modifying this and that. He decided that the best way to conduct this research was not by altering variables on his existing, very profitable web site, but by creating a separate site purely to be used for these tests.
Clearly ,this is a behavior that the big brains of Google did not expect.