Brand Arbitrage is Back

After looking at my rather battered blackberry, I just did a search for ‘vodafone‘ to find www.offers-compared.com sitting in the paid number two position.

After the recent change by Google on the Brandname Guidelines I’m hoping this arbitrage page is a short term problem that will be ironed out in the coming weeks as its certainly against what Google are trying to achieve in terms of user experience.

Arbitrage, a method of mass advertising on Google works by paying a small CPC with Google Adwords and earning a higher rate revenue share from an alternative search engine or CPA source. In this case the search engine ASK. Naturally you have to factor in the click through rate of your landing page into the equation, but by looking at the volume of branded terms utilising such arbitrage pages just now, its appears to be a worthwhile short term opportunity. Just make sure you don’t use your main Adwords account or it will most likely get penalised!