Google Acquires Sprinks

By Special Guest Writer Ilana Grunberg

A few weeks ago, pay per click (PPC) giant, Google, purchased Sprinks. Sprinks advertisements, which were distributed over the About.com media network, will be now be replaced by Google Adwords advertisements within the next month.

If you do not have a Google Adwords account, and would still like to have your site seen where Sprinks was showing before, then you will need to open a Google Adwords account.

Let's take a look at Sprinks, the advantages of Google Adwords, discuss what will happen to your Sprinks account, and what this means for you.

What is Sprinks?

Sprinks is owned by Primedia (About.com) and has agreements with companies such as Metacrawler.com, Mamma.com and more.

It has content-targeted distribution, as well as the opportunity to purchase premier PPC listings.

A great tool that Sprinks has is the Character Count tool, which helps you know when your titles or descriptions are too long. Within Sprinks, every change that you do to your account, needs to be reviewed (may have 3 day review process).

Although Sprinks is easy to manage, Google has an even easier and more advanced management tool.

Advantages of Google Adwords

Google has become one of the major players in the PPC world (Google Adwords and Overture have 90% of the PPC market).

Google Adwords advertisements appear on the right side of the page when you do a search on Google. Google Adwords is the PPC tool of Google, whilst the main results, the organic SE, appear on the left side of the page. Google Adwords has many advantages including:

Cost Control– daily budget according to your spending needs

• Accessibility – 24/7 online management, which means that there is no 'pre' editorial process. Edit your keywords, ads and pricing online and see the changes within a few minutes (at times may be instant).
• Network Distribution – ads shown on network of Google sites increasing your ad exposure in AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, AT&T Worldnet, EarthLink and Excite, and more have joined the Google network, and they get approximately 45% of the PPC market share traffic.
• Country/Language/Region Targeting – target specific languages and countries, as well as U.S. states. This NEW tool is very powerful as it means easier geo-targeting, with specific languages, all in one management panel.
• CPC and Positioning Formula – in Google, if you bid the highest you still may not be in number 1 position. Google Adwords has an algorithm that takes into consideration the CTR (click-through-rate), as well as the CPC. This means that if you have a high CTR, your position may improve.
• Personalized reports - with statistics and graphs which may be helpful to agencies running many campaigns
• Conversion Tracking – track your conversions by inserting Google's conversion tracking system into your code (we suggest using 3^rd party tools rather than this tool so one can control ALL PPC conversions under one management tool)

What will happen to my Sprinks Account?

Please note that you may still access your Sprinks account and adjust bids until funds end (or until Nov. 28^th 2003). From November 29^th 2003, please note that Sprinks will discontinue its service, which means that your advertisements will stop being distributed. You will also not have any access to the system.

Sprinks has also informed it's customers that as of October 27^th, you will not be able to:

• Create a new account
• Manually add funds
• Automatically add funds with the Auto replenish feature
• Edit existing listings
• Add new listings

I already have a Google Adwords account. What do I do?

Adwords will soon include many of the same advertising sites that Sprinks used to distribute so in order to cover the additional audience, just increase your daily budget.

If you had keywords that you were using in Sprinks, and not in Google Adwords, then add them to your Google Adwords account.

If you used Sprinks ContentSprinks service, and want to continue showing ads on relevant content pages, select "Content-Targeted Advertising" when setting up your network distribution for your Adwords account.

I had a Sprinks account but I don't have an Adwords account?

Open a Google Adwords account, and start writing your advertisements. We suggest not waiting until the end of November, and then opening an account, as your transition to this PPC tool might take you some time (especially if you want to learn how Google Adwords works), and you don't want to lose traffic. Open an account as soon as possible.

It is also important to remember that Sprinks will no longer be around at the end of November, so make sure that you have spent all your money in Sprinks this month.

Google Adwords is a user-friendly tool to help you market your site. Sprinks only covered a small % of the PPC market whilst Google is one of the main PPC giants, and it's growing at a rapid pace.

Google's purchase means that your site will now be more widely distributed than it did in Sprinks, so take advantage of Google Adwords and benefit from this PPC tool.

Ilana Grunberg is an search engine marketing consultant at Compucall Search Marketing Ltd. a leading search engine marketing company in Israel. Mrs. Grunberg is responsible for the executive account management of strategic customers of Compucall, featuring NASDAQ companies such as NDS, Audiocodes, Nur Macroprinters and more.

More search engine news...