Pay-per-Click Observer

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 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!

I’m Rian Schmidt, and this is my work blog.  I’ve been in internet marketing, interactive marketing, search engine marketing, whatever-you-want-to-call-it for more than a decade doing tasks that ranged from writing code to implement these cool new “image maps” in 1994… to managing multi-million dollar PPC campaigns today.

Pay-per-Click Observer is a place for me to make note of all those brilliant ideas that I have in the course of doing my job.  Sometimes I’m just going to rant about how little sense the whole pay-per-click field makes.  Sometimes I’m going to feel more constructive and try to pass along some tips on how to optimize your pages for the search engines or manage your own pay-per-click campaign.

Mostly, I’m going to use it as the counterpart to my personal blogs so that I can watch my thoughts evolve over time.  I have about 10 notebooks with two pages of journal entries each.  I tend to keep my blogs a little more up-to-date.