Pay-per-Click Observer

Can’t believe it’s been months since my last entry. Busy, busy, busy…

I wanted to mention how important it is to keep a vigilant eye on your accounts at all time. We had a recent experience where a team member goofed a bid. Big goof. Overnight, we blew through thousands of dollars. Poof.

Protect yourself. Set daily spend limits. Get a regular review cycle set up so that the inevitable screw-up is caught sooner rather than later. No amount of automation can prevent the introduction of human error. The best thing you can do is use automation to hedge your exposure and develop a process to ensure that it’s all working the way it’s supposed to.

Now, we did those things, but clearly, we didn’t do it well enough.  Spend limits (which we only use for this purpose) were too loose.  Our process had holes in it.  We’re going to call this an expensive lesson in refining those things.

My advice is to do some scenarios in your head.  What ifs.  What if someone forgot a decimal point?  What if your security was intentionally breached?  What if a test ad went live?  How would you catch those things?  If you’re a serious operator, any one of those could be potentially disastrous.

Today, I received, in a completely wasteful plastic wrapper, a “magazine” from a company that claims to determine the top SEOs. (Yes, it’s TopSEOs.com, aka eVentures, LLC)

You, too, can be chosen by this arbiter of professional ability for the simple sum of $5000. Well, that’ll get you in the running for their “annual SEO & PPC competition.” You might not get chosen. I suspect I won’t.

I can understand the desire of our clients to have ready access to recommendations for SEO/PPC providers. It can be a scummy business filled with fly-by-night know-nothings. It’s expensive and confusing. It would be nice if you could just go to the Consumer Reports of SEOs and ask their opinion.

Unfortunately, you can’t. These guys take money– a lot of it– from the companies listed with them. They are just another advertising channel. All you know when someone is listed with them is that they charged their clients sufficiently exorbitant fees to be able to pay these people to say that they’re good.

If you want to know if I do a good job, I’m afraid you need to call me and ask me questions. Then, you’re going to want to call my clients and ask them questions. It’s not easy. However, my feeling is that the last thing you want to do is search through a list of really expensive listings to find someone to charge you a fair fee for good work. If they were that good, they wouldn’t need to do that. I don’t and won’t.

P.S., TopSEOs, please stop sending me the glossy paper wrapped in plastic.

The reaction to my first report after launching a new PPC campaign, particularly one intended to drive sales, is often… anger. How could we have spent thousands of dollars and not produced anything in the way of sales? I thought PPC was supposed to pay itself. Do I even know what I’m doing? What am I doing wrong?

The answer is ‘nothing.’ It might best be explained in the form of an analogy.

Say that you’re an investor, and you’ve hooked up with someone who’s been successfully mining gold for years. Let’s call him Old Riri. You approach this crusty prospector and ask him to go out and find a deposit for you to mine, and you give him a bunch of mules, some picks, whatever it is you give gold prospectors (OK, in my mind, this is the Old West, and the prospector has tobacco stains in his beard.)

A month later, Old Riri comes back and wants more mules (Mules are money in this story, in case that wasn’t obvious.)

• “What?! I gave you 20 mules! Where’s my gold?!”
• “Partner, when I’ve found it, you’ll be the first to know.”
• “I thought gold mining meant taking gold out of a mine!”
• “It does, if you’re lucky. It also means first digging a lot of holes and finding nothing but dirt.”

Such is the business of utilizing PPC for selling your wares on the Web. Sometimes, you fall into a hole and the walls are glowing metallic yellow. Sometimes, you dig and dig and find out that there’s no gold for miles or that someone else beat you to it, and they’ve got the area locked up. There are no guarantees.

What that means, if we can knock off the gold mining thing, is that you’d better be prepared to spend some money and time with a new campaign. You might find that no one’s interested in your offering. You might find that it sells itself. Worst case, you might find that lots of people are interested in looking, but no one buys anything. That’s pure expense, and no one likes that.

Still, to really know what kind of situation you’re in, you need to run the campaign for a while. A few dozen, or even hundred, clicks don’t tell you much. Then, you need to change some things and run it for a while again. All the while, the money is going out.

If you get it right, you strike it rich. Your campaign not only pays for itself, it generates on ongoing revenue stream with an expected lifetime value of many times your initial investment.

If you get it wrong, and everyone does sometimes, you cut your losses and regroup. That’s not failure; that’s business. The best you can do is prepare yourself, think about your plan, and keep trying. You’ve learned something about what works and what doesn’t. Next time, you’ll do a better job, and you’ll have that much more of a chance of success.

Up until just a few minutes ago, I ran AdSense ads on my blog. I had visions of making millions simply by virtue of the quality of my blinding insights. Well, that didn’t really work out. But this put me over the edge. This ad showed up on my site:

OK, firstly, what’s a Jeese? What do I ask this Jeese? Is an Ask Jeese valuable? I can only assume that they meant “Ask Jeeves,” although that makes no more sense than this. Who does this? How much money are they spending on it every day?

How about “Want Ricky Martin Ringtone?” What language is that? Why on earth would an ad for a Ricky Martin(!) ringtone show up on my blog about the PPC industry (or anywhere)? Because it’s the worst possible use thereof?  Trouble-free?!  WHAT’S TROUBLE-FREE?!  THE RINGTONE?!

Is it just me? This is bad, right? Right? How does this happen? Doesn’t anyone care?

OK, sorry, I’m ranting. Let’s make lemonade from these lemons. Firstly, I need to get AdSense off my site. Secondly, if you ever think to yourself “What’s the worst thing that could happen if I outsource this PPC stuff to this guy who just cold-called me?” look at the examples above.

It’s roughly equivalent to running a TV ad narrated by Frankenstein with the graphics drawn in crayon. And your name is spelled wrong.

A follow up to my earlier post on customer satisfaction surveys. I mentioned that I was cynical about the MSN customer satisfaction survey I’d filled out. It was one in a long line, typically with the same result: nothing.

This time, though, I actually got a call from a person. Wow. Very confidently, his message said “we saw that you have some concerns about how your account is performing with MSN, and I’d like to talk to you so we can fix those.” OK, now we’re talking. Someone actually looked at my survey and wants to know more about why I’d sound like I should be calling a crisis hotline rather than filling out their survey.

So, I called him back, and we talked for a good long time. I mentioned their capricious editorial policies, their almost unusable interface, and my experience in trying to get invoicing set up for a very major client and being told that the committee that decides such things wasn’t meeting right now. He was aghast. Clearly, just knowing who the client was should have pushed us to the front of the line. There’s a group for handling such cases. He’d never heard of this committee (I had, many times).

In any case, he’d be putting this on the desk of the people who could make at least the account management and billing issues go away.

He’d call me back.

Or he said he would.

But didn’t.

So, many days later, I called him. He’d pushed it upstairs and assumed that someone had done something with it, but since that hadn’t happened, he’d follow up and make sure that it got taken care of.

He’d call me back.

Or said he would.

But didn’t.

So I did again. He was… well, less aghast. He seemed mostly to be tired of hearing from me.

He’d call me back.

In the end, all that happened was that I learned that either some of them are terribly misinformed or others of them lie to the their customers. Nothing was fixed. I wasted, probably, a couple of hours all told pursuing this brief moment of hope. A couple of days later, I received a bulk email from their VP of sales thanking us for our participation and telling us that they were looking forward to doing another survey next year.

Yeah, me too. Can’t wait.

Imagine you’re trying to sell something that people can get for free. For instance, you’ve got a copy of the Constitution. It’s not THE Constitution. It’s a copy. You can get them for free just about anywhere (maybe the President should check that out?). Anyway, the copy that you have is printed on paper made exactly the same way as the original. It’s also hand-written by scholars of the period. Finally, it’s framed in UV-filtering glass and sealed inside argon gas to prevent oxidation.

Now, you’ve got to sell that via PPC.

The Constitution
Order a really nice copy
of our founding document!
www.url.com

You get the idea. Eesh. You need to let people know that you’re offering something for the discerning buyer. Still, you don’t have that much real estate. We’re constantly challenged with the art of the haiku. Let’s say you somehow pull that off…

Constitution Heirlooms
Keepsake quality copies
framed and sealed in glass
www.url.com

Still, the fact is that you haven’t (and couldn’t have) presented all the features and benefits of your product that differentiate it from the free/low-cost crowd. That has to happen on your site.

That’s why a good PPC consultant never stops at the AdWords interface. I can lead a horse to water, but the real goal is to make that horse order bottled artesian spring water for monthly overnight delivery.

PPC, like any other facet of marketing, has to take place in the context of the funnel. You need to know what you want to have happen and treat the PPC like one touch in a long series. It’s not unlike a restaurant in that the food can be delicious, but if the wine’s too cold, or the table cloth made of cheap material, the patron is likely to get turned off to the whole experience at some point.

And then you’ve lost them.

On the Internet, you’ve got far less wiggle room. The back button is right up there. There’s a line of people competing to offer alternatives to what you offer.

My advice is to either monitor closely and control what your PPC manager is doing for you with your own clear understanding of the overall process or be willing to listen to what she has to say about more than keywords and creatives. You’ll find that a good PPC consultant is really a good marketer who’s really just specialized in a particular channel. They should understand the whole marketing and sales process with a focus on how that integrates with the currently high-potential market that is pay-per-click.

If we’re any good, we’ll be just as good, in a couple of years, at the new new thing. It’ll be all the same issues wrapped by a specialized knowledge of surgically implanted nano-banners. Or something.

I know, everyone says that. I mean it a little differently.

One of my clients is switching from one analytics package to another. The process of doing so requires that we retag every one of the many thousands of keywords that we maintain for them. This would be impossible by hand, of course, and so we utilize technology– usually Ruby in our case– to do the grunt work.

Unfortunately, we’re a little fringe in our application, and so there’s really no such thing as a support process for people like us. You do searches, call this person, they talk to that guy, and he emails this other woman. Hopefully, we patch up the thing to work enough to accomplish our goal. It’s not going to get shrink-wrapped. It just needs to work.

So, today, I found myself banging my head against the Google AdWords API. It’s great. I love it. It doesn’t always work the way you think it will. Case in point, updating keywords with a new destinationUrl.

Turns out that if I included an ampersand in that URL, my code would, properly, encode it into ‘& amp;’. Then, when I called updateCriteria, which updates the keywords, with that my keywords would all get updated with that ‘& amp;’ in the URL– not reconstituted into a ‘&’. Google said “you don’t have to encode that” when I asked about it.

OK, so I patch soap4r to just ignore that entity. It submits the request with the ‘&’ in its original form. Error– you have to encode those. Actually, that’s the right answer in this case.

Anyway, I decide to explain this situation to the client. Empathetically, she listens and asks me the simple question “Those are so common; don’t you use those in other campaigns?”

D’oh! I do. How come they work, and this doesn’t? It’s because in those cases, I tend to drop everything and replace it to avoid synchronization problems. In this case, I was trying to “update” the keywords in place. Sure enough, replacing them works; updating them doesn’t.

So, I learned two things: one is some geeky tidbit about the AdWords API and the other is a valuable lesson about listening to my clients. Instead of pretending that everything was fine, I explained exactly the problem we were facing. My client used her fresh, but informed, perspective and broke the dam.

The older I get, the more I learn that, if you really want to do a good job, you need to able to admit that you don’t know everything. I’m not saying you need to admit that you don’t know anything. There’s a big difference.

This has nothing to do with PPC.  Let’s say it does in that lawyers suck.  And… they use PPC sometimes.

I was just included, by no action on my part, in a class action lawsuit against Equifax.  We won!  Yippee!

So, what does he win, Chuck?  Well, Rian gets at least three months of FREE credit reports!  That’s right!  No need to buy anything to see his own credit information for three whole months!  Take that, Equifax!  Oh, but that’s not all.

What do the lead plaintiffs get?  They were the ones who were wronged sufficiently to feel the need to file a lawsuit.  They must really get something great.  They do.  $7500!  Don’t spend it all in one place, ladies!

Well that doesn’t seem like it’s going to make Equifax very sad.  After all, they manage to make a fortune off of selling people’s personal information back to them.  They produce seemingly arbitrary scores that they won’t explain in detail but that have huge impact on the financial lives of millions of people.  Surely, if our legislators won’t do anything to reign in this abuse of the citizens, the legal system will do so via punitive damages.  Never fear…

THE LAWYERS!  They get $4,000,000!!!

How much will even that upset Equifax?  Well, consider that it’s just slightly more than they paid just their CEO last year in salary and that they made somewhere north of $900 million last year in PROFIT (on $1.6 BILLION in revenue).

That should teach them a lesson they won’t soon… hang on, I’m receiving word that they have, in fact, already forgotten that this ever happened.

God bless America.

Say you’re called into a big marketing meeting to talk about why things aren’t going well. The real answer is “we’re not doing a very good job of providing a compelling choice to our customers.” You can’t say that, though. That implies a lot of hard work to determine what it is your customers want and how you might apply your resources to provide that value better than your competition.

No, what you need is a strawman. You need something that no one can really argue with– but it doesn’t really require you to do much. Something that implies that you’re GOING to do something… later…

Enter the satisfaction survey.

They’re perfect. There’s a whole bunch of companies who will even do the work on that for you. All you have to do is go back to your desk and hire someone. Then go to lunch.

I’ve filled out several in the last couple of days. I’m honestly not sure why I bother. Two of those were for Yahoo’s and MSN’s PPC advertising. Do I have an opinion on those? Why, yes. Yes, I do. So, given the opportunity, I feel like it’s at least worth a few minutes of my time to answer. I think Yahoo paid me $25 to boot.

Generally speaking, I’m one of those people who won’t answer 1 or 5 on these things. I figure it could be worse, and there’s always room for improvement. Not so with MSN. They’re doing it so badly that I felt justified in liberally applying the 1’s. As I have ranted before, Google gets 5s. I’m no Google fanboy, but with a few exceptions, they do a very good job in separating me from my client’s money.

MSN and Yahoo both had the gumption to ask me how I felt about their editorial process. I wonder if they’re aware of the irony of that. Many, many times I have called to ask such questions as “how can ‘Kentucky Derby’ not be relevant to a section of the site about the KENTUCKY DERBY?!” ‘Rosa Parks’ was denied for Rosa Parks’ obituary. Not relevant.

How about service? Let’s compare. Google calls me and asks how my account is going. What are my plans? Do I have any problems? Here’s a few people to call if something comes up.

MSN? I’ve tried to arrange invoicing on one major account with them for years. Literally, years. They have a committee to decide if they’ll let you do that. They’re not meeting now because they’re too busy. I’m not making this up.

To give some credit, Yahoo has improved somewhat. They’re going to be getting some 3s from me. The new software is better than before. Yet, my inquiries into their API went into the blackhole of general email addresses without names. Their editorial process remains capricious. I have no clue who my rep is there. Is it because we only spend thousands of dollars every month?

So, you can imagine why, when I get their “we strive to exceed our advertisers’ expectations” surveys, I’m cynical. It’s like their house is on fire, and they’re going around asking the neighbors if they think the place needs any improvement.

You know what’s wrong. Everyone does. Put the fire out.

This isn’t really related directly to PPC, but it is related to running a small business and more generally to our government’s creeping incursions into the privacy of its citizens.

I applied for a line of credit with the SBA for reasons that escape me at the moment. I think I thought it’d be good to have the credit history at some point since I reorganized my company when I moved from California. Anyway, the SBA provides a relatively cheap way to get a credit line established with a minimum of fuss.

Now, for this story to work, you need to know that I’ve been married twice. The first one… was a bad move on my part and didn’t last very long. It ended about 12 years ago. Also, I have several brothers, and I’ve volunteered my time for several charities in the past.

I would have thought that learning all that about me would require that I tell you or that you hire a private investigator. I wouldn’t have guessed in either case that you’d learn my ex-wife’s parents’ address.

OK, so, the bank calls and says: “For your security, we need to ask you some personal questions, and they could go back 30 years(!).” These are multiple choice questions. That is, they know the answers.

- When is your ex-wife’s birthday? (They used her name.)
- What county is your ex-wife’s parents’ house in? (They knew the street address.)
- What state does your next older brother live in? (By name.)
- What age range does your oldest brother fall in? (Also by name and birthdays.)
- Have you ever been affiliated with this charity? (By name.)

I don’t remember the rest, but you get the idea. They know everything about me going back at least 15 years. Why do they need to know that? My mother’s maiden name and my social security number don’t cut it? They have to keep tabs on me like some terrorist sleeper cell member? I’m a native-born citizen. I’m not a felon. I’m a business person and employer. I vote. I pay (great loads of) taxes. I don’t want that information being handed around from bureaucrat to bureaucrat. Clearly, it’s not anything I’m hiding. It’s just not anyone’s business.

I think I have to agree with whoever said that the only thing that’s keeping the United States from slipping completely into fascism is sheer incompetence.

Heckuva job, Brownie!