Accounting for Adwords
September 26th, 2006
Most people that have experimented with Online Marketing have, at some time or another put some money into Google AdWords. On the face of things, it sounds like an amazing proposition, delivering targeted traffic to specific pages and only paying when you get the clicks. So what happens if it goes wrong?
The first question I would ask is, how do you define “wrong”? Run of the mill e-commerce platform PPC campaigns are aimed solely at one thing: Return On Investment. Once you delve deep, AdWords is an incredibly detailed science, a science that can change on a daily basis. Even with the best research on offer, a lot of people fail to get a positive return on investment when they start with AdWords. Is this failure? In a lot of cases, no it’s not!
One of the great benefits of marketing on the Internet is the accountability, you can tell who clicked where, what they clicked on, when they did, how they did it – which only really leaves you with the “why?”. As useful as it is, this accountability can work against you. If for instance you start a campaign and within 1 month you have a 95% ROI, so you are losing 5% of what you put in, is this a disaster? Numbers don’t lie, but do you have all of them? Can your company specifically give you the ROI that last year’s 4 week billboard run gave you? How many people saw the board? Did it interest them? Did it motivate them to interact with your brand? A lot of this information is very clouded, if you manage to obtain it in the first place.
It can take a while to get your cost per click down and your click through ratios up. Don’t overlook the value of your brand being visible, not everybody is at the “buying stage” when they land on your website, no matter how hard you try to convert them. If you can get these peoples’ interest while they are conducting their research you may well net them on their return visit (just try and get them to come in organically or directly to save you some money!). Don’t be scared off by the numbers, work with them and understand them.
Pay Per Click purely for brand exposure of course, is a whole different post…
Google Bites Belgium Bullet
September 25th, 2006
After some recent trouble in Belguim courts Google has been ordered to stop reproducing snippets from French-language newspapers or face a fine of €1,000,000 per day. “We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorization to use our content … Google sells advertising and makes money on our content,” Boribon told Reuters. Unfortunately, he seems to be missing the bigger picture that, yes Google uses content but also directs huge amounts of traffic to their sources.
In response, Google has removed the links to resources and banned them from their index. It is important for businesses to see that being listed in Google is a privilege, not a right as some people think. Unfortunately for Google, the Belgium court ordered that the ruling must be display in full, on their homepage - or face more fines. Google lost its appeal against this ruling.
This is the state the www.google.be homepage was left in..
1..2..3..Search!
September 20th, 2006
When talking about search behaviour I think people really need to stop talking about “keywords”. They don’t exist anymore. No, really, they don’t. If you’re targeting paid search or SEO you need to be looking at key phrases.
Here is a bit of research from April 2006, questioning 205 web users who have >3 years web experience.
Source: HarvestDigital
As you can see, more experienced web users tend to use slightly more advanced queries, knowing this will yield higher quality search results. The searching and indexing of Internet data is maturing everyday along with user behaviour, I would expect these trends to continue and a move away from raw one word searches.
Analytics Expansion
September 19th, 2006
For those of you using Google Analytics they have expanded the usable profiles to 50. Nice work, Google!
Adsense Team - Flipping Coins?
September 18th, 2006
Okay, I promise this is the last post about a couple of domains being suspended from AdSense. However, I just wanted to tell the story of two Google Adsense Team Members, Blaithin and Sandor.
When my account was suspended, I no longer had access to the e-mail associated with my Google Adsense account. I had tried to change it, but unfortunately you can’t use an e-mail address with Adsense that is connected to a regular Google account. It seems just about every e-mail address I have access to is connected with Google in some way or another. At a dead end, I just had to send a general e-mail to the Adsense team enquiring as to why my Adsense was suspended.
I recieved an e-mail back next day (which I was impressed with) from Blaithin saying “I have reviewed your account information and as your site was found to be in violation of our programme policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in the AdSense programme.”
Now the problem that was stated with the adverts is that they were “too close” to the main menu, even though one was labelled “Ads by Google” and was in a different font size. I’m not going to complain about this, it is obviously my fault, I should have been more careful to draw a distinction between the navigation and adverts. I immediately e-mailed Blaithin back, having updated the site and responded to the violation report. I gave him a summary of changes and asked it was possible to have my account reactivated.
After sending this e-mail I managed to access my old e-mail account that was associated with my Google Adsense. Sure enough I found the e-mail from Google informing me that my Adsense serving on the domain had been “suspended”. Thinking “suspended” was different to “terminated” I also e-mailed back the list of changes I made. The point of contact here was, Sandor.
The next day (impressed again) I received an e-mail back from Sandor sending me a detailed list of a few changes that he think would improve my site and bring me well inside the Adsense TOS, all looking good then. Once I had completed the changes, he instructed me to “e-mail him back if I wish to have the domain re-reviewed for inclusion”. Excellent, so I spent an hour or so making the changes. While I was making these changes I received another message from Blaithin saying (in bold letters) that the domain had been instructed by Google servers not to serve Google adverts and that my site was no longer eligible for the Google Adsense scheme, no matter what I did.
As I compared the two e-mails side by side, I realised there was obviously some kind of breakdown in either communication or policy at Google HQ. Since honesty is the best policy, I decided to e-mail Blaithin with a CC of Sandor’s e-mail and explain the situation to see if he could shed more light on the subject. I was e-mailed back again next day (impressed again, but again in bold) saying that this was incorrect and because the Google servers have been instructed not to serve ads on my site, this would not be changed.
While this was going on, I had a heck of a lot of trouble with my web hosting (no names mentioned here, but my site seemed to be down every 5 minutes). Eventually, my websites were all transferred onto a new server. While I was testing them I found that low and behold, my Google Adsense was being served again! The strange thing was, my inbox was empty. I guess the Google Adsense block is related to the location of the server, not just the domain name.
Since honesty is the best policy (don’t make me stop believing that, Google), I decided to e-mail Blaithin and explain if there were a few dozen impressions on my Google Adsense account this is due to my site inadvertently bypassing the block the Google servers had put on it, however perhaps the account could be left open as the website fully complies with Adsense TOS. Two days later (not quite as impressed) I received an e-mail from Blaithin kindly informing me that he had passed my site onto the Adsense specialists, to block again.
Again, I took this in my stride, after all - policy is policy. Perhaps Sandor was a trainee and made a mistake? I guess if there are such firm rules, everybody must be treated equally.
However, it appears not.
I found a story about a blogger named coolz0r who was in exactly the same situation as me. Due to a minor violation of Adsense TOS he received an e-mail informing him that his adverts had been suspended. However, after making the changes, coolz0r had his advert serving on the affected domain reactivated.
I understand there must be a “case by case” approach to these situations but it would be a giant stretch of the imagination to say I was intentionally violating Adsense TOS. It seems however, your treatment with the Google Adsense team seems to be pot luck, rather than policy. I have addressed a polite e-mail to Blaithin highlighting the situation. So I guess they’ll be at least one more post about my Adsense 
