Posted on March 27, 2007
MFA's and Does Costa Rica Suck?
BY BEN CASTELLI
Brad Geddes recently posted a great article over on Search Engine Land about search arbitrage in PPC marketing and provides some interesting arguments for and against this practice. Sometimes called MFA’s (made for Adsense), these sites use some trickery in their ads to send an unsuspecting searcher to a site loaded with Adsense ads. When the searcher then clicks on one of those ads the arbitrager gets paid. “The arbitrager pockets the difference between what they paid per click and what they get paid per click.” Here is a great example of one I ran into the other day in Google: I searched for “costa rica + surf lodge” and this is the ad that came up:
Now that is some powerful ad text so naturally I was compelled to click on the ad and read the report, well this was the resulting page:
Yup, nothing but a bunch of Adsense and no information on why Costa Rica sucks. As an advertiser I may not mind my ads being shown on the above page because the search arbitrager is likely bidding on keywords that I am not and it presents another chance for a searcher to see my ad and visit my site. It all comes back to ROI and whether or not visitors from the arbitrage sites are converting well.
However, as a searcher I was annoyed that the original “Costa Rica Sucks” ad did not deliver the content it promised in the ad text and the ads being displayed on the subsequent page were only semi-relevant to my initial search of “costa rica + surf camp”. And that is the biggest argument against search arbitrage, poor relevance and a negative user experience. Since Google’s bread and butter is high relevance and user experience I expect them to continue to crack down on the practice.
Haha. I saw this same thing in my city. It's just a bunch of scraped content from wikitravel for each city at the bottom of the page with 2 adsense blocks above.
The shocking ad probably has good CTR. I looked into it a bit more because I thought they were broad-matching the city, but it didn't come up for certain stuff - so I wonder what keywords and what type of matches they are using for the ads.