the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Let’s get ready to rumble! Ladies and gentleman, I honestly can say I thought I’d never see the day this would happen. What on earth would possess Google to allow CPA advertising campaigns? They have ZERO real competition with Adwords and Adsense. They dominate the marketplace. Why would you allow your inventory to be devalued? What are they thinking?

Not to mention the possible fraud. I would like to hear how they are going to guard against that. Maybe I’m missing something here, but if you thought CLICK FRAUD was big, wait until you get ahold of CPA fraud. I come from a CPA background (email and lead gen) and let me tell you, it is one nasty business, full of absolute schiesters.

For a more detailed breakdown of this initial revelation, seekingalpa originally broke the news.

SEOBook also raises an interesting point. He surmises that by gathering data all the way through to the conversion, a la CPA and conversion tracking, they will actually be getting a more complete set of data, and therefore will improve the quality of the search results.

“AdSense made it profitable to create garbage, but at the end of the day it just leads to a web full of garbage. How does Google fix the problem they created?”

That’s what I’d like to know.

If you’re a Pay Per Click Analyst, like myself, this is good news. Just like with the introduction of the quality score, Google has added another layer of complexity to the equation. Is dayparting rocket science? No, of course not. But is it something else to pay attention to? Yes, of course. So in effect, the more complicated the better for the analyst. A sort of built in job security. Dayparting just adds to the amount of work that goes into managing a professionally built PPC campaign. In the words of Larry and Sergey,”Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.”

Businesses that need to use dayparting -

Anyone with a storefront or daytime hours in which no one is available to answer the phone after hours. Duh. Especially with the who knows how long it will last ability to put your phone number in an adwords ad text, this is a key consideration for the small business owner or anyone else who relies on a phone conversation to close the deal. Top of mind companies that should use this:

Mortgage companies
Insurance companies
Big ticket retail
High touch retail and service industries

Being able to synch your ads to the time that you actually have live help available is going to save you a bundle in blown opportunities. For example, last night I am surfing high and low for a merchant account provider. I must have clicked on 15 ads that matched exactly what I was looking for. However, it was 11:30 PM. Maybe half of them had the live help banner on their site, but guess what, none of them was actually staffed by anyone at 11:30. I wanted to talk to someone because I had specific questions. No dice, and a lot of wasted clicks for those advertisers. If not turning your ads off in this scenario, you could at least lower your bids to $.10 or something less impactful.

All in all, more options are a good thing for advertisers. Better control of your spending is never a bad thing, it just means you have to pay more attention. As Kevin Lee of Did-It said recently, “Doing dayparting badly is as bad or worse than not doing it at all.”

As with most professional services organizations, 90% of my profit comes from 10% of my clients. Most of these clients have particularly large campaigns, especially in Adwords. So, when I recently undertook a campaign redesign for my biggest client, I dreaded the day the actual work would begin. A bulk outpost of the campaign before the redesign was around 7 megs. Big.

Weeks were spent building out the campaign architecture into a new and more efficient layout that would make it easier to manage in the future. Obviously, all of that work is done in excel.

Now, one way to approach this would be to format everything into the bulk upload template and be done with it. However, because we were copying and moving keywords and ad copy from several different adgroups and campaigns, I thought it easier to use Google’s new copy and move tools. The one caveat here was that you can’t copy anything to a group that doesn’t exist. So, I had to go through and build each campaign and adgroup to create the shell first, then I could move stuff over.

The other quirk is that to create an adgroup you have to create adcopy and put in keywords. So, the way to get around this is to put in dummy copy and a dummy keyword. Then, when you’re done with everything do a find and delete with the aforementioned tools.

So, this was all done in the live Adwords environment. We all know how slow Adwords can be sometimes, and when you add in your normal daily distractions, phone calls, emails, other clients, etc etc, you’re looking at a long and tedious process.

After about 10 days I was finished. Mind you, this wasn’t 100% my only focus, so that timeframe could be decieving. Nevertheless, a long period that was frustrating to the client. Not only that, but several urls were changed during that period, so when he went to review the new campaign, there were several errors. Ughh.

Now I’m sitting at my computer yesterday thinking of how long it’s going to take me to hand check every url in the campaign and make sure it goes to the correct landing page. We’re talking hundreds, maybe thousands of landing pages. I’m also thinking how annoyed my client is, and how much more annoyed he’ll be in a couple days when I finish. Hmmm.

So, borne of frustration, I suddenly remembered the “Adwords Editor Invitation” in my inbox that morning. I had been procrastinating, and now seemed like the right time to try it out. After a download and 15 minutes of setup, I was ready to give it a whirl.

Let me tell you something, working off of the Adwords client as opposed to the website is absolute bliss.

Like driving a Yugo and then one day someone hands you a Porche. Mind you, it’s not perfect, but I was able to blast through all the changes in 20 minutes. I swear, it would have taken me 2 days otherwise. No waiting for site hangups, just pure, unbroken periods of concentration. Basically, the ability to rifle through all the campaigns and adgroups to view and edit ad text/urls is greatly enhanced. When you’re done, you click “post changes” and that’s it. Done.

I’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details, I think it’s enough just to say that if you manage super size campaigns, you need to give this a shot. It WILL save you time.

While you wouldn’t be able to tell from my recent trips to the links, I was a fairly serious golfer in my younger years. In the summers Mom would drop me off at the course on the way to work at 7am and pick me up on the way home, around 6pm. Every day was the same and let me tell you, I had a great time. There was a community of latch key junior golfers who played 36 holes a day, minimum. In between rounds we gambled on the practice green, as much as 11-12 year olds have to gamble anyway, which is not much.

My game, which was good enough for 2nd rank citywide at one point, was based on 2 things, hit it long and try not to 3-putt. Utterly devoid of caution and course management, I swung as hard as possible every time I stepped up to the ball. Of course, you can’t be a great golfer this way. The guys who won were the guys who played choke down, easy swing, deathly boring golf, shot after shot after shot. I hated that mentality and I hated those guys. It was a philisophical thing for me, as ill advised as it was at the time. I chalk it up to being young. I had fun at the time, but a part of me wished I would have realized sooner that you have to play high percentage golf, at least some of the time, to be successful. Thankfully as I’ve gotten older I realize the value of patience and planning, although I still wouldn’t call myself especially prudent.
So fast forward to this past weekend. My brother gives me a copy of John Daly, My Life In and Out of the Rough. I like John Daly as much as the next guy. How can you not feel for someone who has shown as much humanity as he has. He saves us from a world dominated by boring, efficient, and robotic golf pros. As I’m reading this book, I keep coming back to 2 things.

No.1 - John Daly makes a hell of a lot of excuses for his unbelievable mistakes he has made in his life. It’s always something or someone who has caused a particular event. Like, “She made me mad so I got drunk and smashed up my house”, or “I went back to drinking because the prozac made me feel like shit”.

No.2 - John Daly never gets down on himself too long. Most people who have gone through what he has gone through, especially as self induced as it was, would move to southwestern Guadalajara and wear sunglasses to hide their face. No matter what mistakes he has made, Daly has a way of putting them in the past and moving on. In his case, stepping back into the tee box.

So, my takeaway from this book, and what I think applies to what I do everyday, is not to be too hard on yourself. If you built a campaign that doesn’t perform perfectly, put up a website that isn’t converting like you want, or buy advertising that doesn’t pan out, there are people out there who’ve done 1000x worse. So put your hat back on and get back out there.

As it relates to client management, I tend to take the success or failure of my client campaigns very personally. When my clients do well I am happy, and when they don’t, I try and try to figure it out, and if it doesn’t work I get very frustrated. Most of the time, a campaign not doing well is directly correlated to the quality of the offer or the website, not the campaign that is built, but that doesn’t change the fact I want my clients to do well. At the end of the day, I think I could use a little of the Daly attitude to keep coming back and not beat myself up over the little things. In other words, grip it and rip it.