Meet Your USA Adwords Competition: All 1,500,000 of them.

Google ads used by 1.5M US marketers, websites.
Google's Internet advertising network attracts more than 1.5 million US marketers, websites.  

Associated Press, Tuesday May 25, 2010 

So, now you know. A lot of people are using Adwords in the USA for lead generation, sales and branding. And many of them want the same search terms you want.

With Adwords and other paid search tools like BING, your real competition isn't just your real direct and indirect competitors for goods and services in your markets. Not at all. When it comes to paid search, especially Adwords, your ads appear and compete in a vast, virtual universe where competition for your search terms and keywords can be intense and costly.

Companies in entirely different markets with completely different target audiences can target the same keywords you want. For example, the search term "Lab" can mean many different things - - R&D laboratory, clinical laboratory, math class, puppy dog, etc.? Very broad terms, if used, mean that you'll compete against many others and attract many clicks from casual or confused visitors who will not be your customers.

This ad 'clutter' and 'noise' can frustrate your efforts to reach your audience, unless you take intelligent steps to focus on your market niches and filter out the rest. There are many resources to help you acheive this and reduce or even eliminate competition for money-making search terms. These include using negative search terms, long-tail search phrases, avoiding search terms that are too broad, use of technical vocabulary, selective ad showing by schedule, location and language, analytics and more.

BING still Bungling Duplicate Search Results

Bing has still not figured out how to completely filter 'similar results' from organic search. Unlike Google, which has the ability to filter out multiple results from the same company or content, BING appears to be unable to accomplish the same simple but vital filtering process.

What does this mean in real world terms?

The example I used to highlight this problem was the same for when BING first came out this Spring. I used a search for 'laboratory outsourcing'. The BING results are still showing a glaring weakness in BING's ability to filter out similar results. The first few organic results are quite good actually (especially since my webpages dominate at the top), but when you get past the 9th indexed link or so, things get very strange and repetitive, many of the pages are essentially of zero use for an individual looking for new information related to 'laboratory outsourcing'. Why? Because one company has identical or similar content present on different national domain websites. BING does not yet understand that these pages all belong to one company, or indeed that the content is similar or identical, so all these pages are listed, page after page after page after page.

I'll give BING some credit, the results are not as bad as 3 months ago... but they have more work to do. BING is very interesting, as a heavy user of Adwords campaigns I need to have a viable alternative to Google. I don't have one yet. And the new Google interface is rather 'interesting', to say the least. BING may be useful yet, if my B-to-B technical services clients start using it.