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

This is being covered to death already, so I will make it short and sweet. Yahoo just woke up, read the news about Google’s $500 share price, and realized that the key to search engine profitability is:

NON - TRANSPARENCY

Uh, really?

Here’s the lowdown on the email everyone got this morning:

Before = Transparency:

After = Mystery Clicks

I just want you all to know that I could bid jam with the best of them. Those fun days will be over too soon.

*sob

Here’s something funny I found today. What word do you think is most closely associated with the following word:

LIST

Thinking?

OK, take your time…

What’s your guess?

Was it:

Check “list” …..no
Short “list” …..no
Waiting “list” …..no

The winner?

DL

As in, DISABLED LIST…how funny is that?

For those who don’t know what a DL list is.

Technically, DL could be referring to a number of other things, but my guess is all fantasy football fans out there are searching for roster info.

Here, see what else you can find:

Dependency Based Word Similarity

Chicago is, my kind of town, Chicago is….

Who’s going to be in town for SES Chicago next week? If you are, drop me a line, and let me know which parties you will be attending. While I have an 8 mo. old at home, I have remained steadfastly committed to making time for some quality drinking with industry friends networking next week at SES…

He won’t mind, he promised me…

If you’ve never been here, I can recommend a few places….

Weiner Circle for a hot dog
Blues, for blues
Green Mill, for you cool jazz types
Pequods, for the best pizza on earth
Carols, for country music and weird people (my favorite combination)

And, of course, the home of the not best ever baseball team, the Cubs. My boy Oscar doesn’t mind that they’re a little inconsistent

More pics of the Cubs and a little bit of Chicago…

OK, my mind is on turkey now almost 100% of the time, but….

2 important pieces of information I wanted to make light of.

1. Bad Brad Geddes posted his pubcon presentation on the Quality Score. You should read it.

Highlight: At the bottom of slide 4, “There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved.” – Google Engineer.

2. A member of Digital Point claims to have been invited to beta test a Quality Score Display in Adgroups. I’ll try to speak with some of my sources to verify that this is indeed upcoming, and I’ll do my damndest to get an invite as well.

OK, that’s the last post before Thanksgiving Day. Have a great holiday everyone.

Yesterday the Google Adwords team posted a mea culpa to advertisers regarding the latest quality score adjustment.

You say, “Jeff I don’t have time to read that stuff, tell me what they said”. And I say, Grasshopper, the whole thing boils down to one sentance:

“the Quality Score doesn’t incorporate any conversion information”

Hmmmm…….

I’m thinking maybe conversion is a good indicator of quality, no? Other folks have shown hard data that clearly illustrates there is a problem with their algorithm.

The tone of this post kind of reminds me of George Bush talking about Iraq. He can say whatever he wants but intelligent people all over the world know it’s seriously fubar. My message to Adwords? Your intentions may be good (maybe), but you are driving people away in droves. And not neccessarily the kind of people you want to drive away. I’ve seen far too many real campaigns from real advertisers get smoked with the new LPQS changes.

Anyhow, I won’t complain, I’ve always said we need at least 3 major, competitive, PPC platforms. Right now we have approximately 1.5. The more Adwords tries to make sweeping overhauls with poor execution, the more opportunity for someone else to step in and take that business. Anyone? Buhler? Anyone?

Attention: This is a sponsored post. Any money I am paid for this post donated to chucho.org

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ReviewMe is the latest in a short line of pay for review, or pay for blog marketplaces (payperpost.com is another). This is very controversial practice that is starting to attract as much attention as it is scorn. Admittedly, the part of me who believed in the utopian “do no evil” internet (that guy died when my options vested underwater in 2000) cringes when I see this sort of commercialization. However, when you take a step back and look at the big picture, you see that this is really just an evolutionary process in making the internet a more mature and commercially viable playing field. If there’s anyone still around who is harping on how the internet should be a purely benevolent all-knowing resource that is free for everyone, I say, go to your local library, if it’s still open. We had a company who tried that benevolent angle, they were called Google. They just scanned the entire library system into their database and slapped Adsense on it.

Anyway, enough with the dennis miller rant. Here, with reviewme, we have an example of an innovative idea combined with good execution and timing. The previous attempts at this market were executed with mediocre skill and an “i need to wash my hands now” dirty feeling when I logged in. Their failure is an opportunity for Reviewme.com.

Here is why this site will work and thrive in the long run:

1. Transparency - For this type of service transparency is a must in order for it to survive the inevitable scrutiny. The bottom line is I am being paid for a review, but it’s just a review, I don’t have to advocate the service. My strength is in my readership, not my advertising. I am economically incentivized to write for my readership, not the advertiser. Therefore, in theory, I am a neutral and honest reviewer, which benefits everyone in the long run.

2. Execution - Clean 2.0 design, fast site, great navigation. The registration process took me 30 seconds and everything is laid out intuitively. I have absolutely zero questions about how this process works.

3. Leadership team - The guys running this site are experienced and have demonstrated the capability to execute successfully in this marketplace on multiple occaisions.

I like this site and I think it will work in the long run. I am going to place an order in the next week and will report back with the details.

Would you use this service? Do you think it’s ethical?

In another move to shake the pesky affiliates from their saddle, the Adwords team announced this week that they will require you to take a lie detector test as part of the account sign up process.

Wait, that’s the news form 2009. In the present day, Adwords did announce some changes coming soon regarding their calculation of landing page quality. Most conspicuously, these changes will effect the content network ads:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network.

This makes sense to me and really is no big suprise, but what is more vague and won’t be measured to any extent for weeks and months to come is this comment:

Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

Obviously, this will make things more difficult, and not easier, for both middlemen affiliates and everyday advertisers. Google is currently in a position in which they can afford to approach the market from a position of strength, exerting their utopian advertising dreams upon everyone at will. In Larry and Sergey’s perfect world, every advertiser will be like wikipedia.com and there will be nary a call to action anywhere on your site. If you think I’m joking you don’t know Google very well.

You won’t find me complaining, though, as moves like this make professional grade PPC management a necessity, not an option. Even better if your PPC analyst has figured out the adwords algorithm;)

First things first: The image verification is gone.

Please excuse me while I get up and do a little Ocho Cinco merengue around my cube.

I’m just starting to get into the account and play around with the interface. It doesn’t look like Adwords and it doesn’t look like Adcenter. It has it’s own look and feel, and is somewhat confusing at first glance but as you spend time with it, there are some interesting features.

First impressions?

Logging into the main dashboard I’m presented with the following modules: Alerts, Performance/Account Summary, and a list of the top campaigns. The design is bland, so from a GUI perspective, functional but underwhelming. I’ll give them a pass on this for now. I’m more interested in what’s under the hood.

If I select one of my campaigns from the dashboard I’m taken to the campaign overview page. From here I can do everything I need to, which is quickly generate graphs that show my clicks, impressions, and cost over the last 7 days. I can edit the campaign settings, or create an adgroup. Or, I can drill down into an existing adgroup. All basic functions, easily accessible, it just takes the eyes a few minutes to adjust to the ‘different’ layout. The campaign settings button is a drop down that offers:

Tactic Settings - choose content match, sponsored search, and match type
GeoTargeting - choose geo targeting, or specific region (city targeting or state/province). there are some adwordesque features here with maps and such, but I couldn’t get them to work at the time of this review.
Delete

At the adgroup level Panama starts to get a little more interesting. At the top you see your ad creative with a quick overview of it’s performance.

Display Rate (%): 100.0 CTR (%): 5.32 Clicks: 8 Quality Index: (*bar*)

We also have the defacto keyword list with the current bids and status and performance numbers you would expect to see. Continue drilling down to the keyword level and what do we have?

Slider bars!

I’m a fool for fancy graphics with slider bars. I can move the slider across the graph and it immediately displays the:

estimated monthly clicks
estimated average position
estimated share of available clicks —Pay attention to this

What will be interesting to see is how accurate these estimates are. We know how challenged Adwords has been with this regard. My first instinct is that this may be too much information to share with advertisers. As much as we curse google for not sharing the secret recipe behind everything, there’s a purpose to it. We’ll see if this feature stays for the long term, and I’ll use the hell out of it while it’s here.

Overall, I’m intrigued with the updates and I look forward to getting to know the system better than I do now. I see potential, and think Yahoo, at the very minimum, has gone a long ways towards getting back in the game.

I’ll try to look into the features with more detail, including reporting, in the coming weeks.