The macroeconomic slump has finally broken through and touched the impenetrable wall of The Google. While I’m not a financial analyst, I know that share price often has little to do with anything other than the psychology of outsiders. Nor am I worried that the world of search marketing is just around the corner from impending doom.

HOWEVER – there are a few tidbits that give me pause. If only because of the wee little fact that almost every single dollar in my bank account is generated from the existence of, and my salable skills using, Adwords and other search marketing vehicles.

Here are those tidbits:

the number of clicks on ads next to Google’s search results fell by 7% between December and January. Google’s ad click performance was also down 0.3% on January last year, according to comScore.

Does this represent a slowdown? Or are we just seeing a reflection of ‘shopping’ in general. Who buys anything in January?

So much for that thought…

Google had seen the same 7% decline between November and December. ComScore’s data also showed that Yahoo saw a 1% month-on-month fall in paid search ad clicks in January, but Microsoft saw a 4% rise.

OK, this is worrisome, 7% drop 2 months in a row? During the holiday season? What’s going on? Did the clickable area decision come back to bite them?

The speculation will continue, and smarter folks than I will debate the topic.

Let’s not get crazy though. Some facts to calm us all down:

$16.6bn revenues from search advertising

$8bn in cash and the liquidity of its shares

Analysts at Citigroup also said that Google’s efforts to improve the quality of leads for its advertisers, by trying to reduce accidental clicks, may have impacted the volume of search clicks as well as the wider macro-economic climate.

Moving towards quality is always a good thing. Google is fine, thank goodness, but as we’re seeing, nothing is immune to a really bad economic slowdown.

Darn.

So my original question – what would you do if this niche went away? Personally, being in this business since the mid 90′s, I’ve moved from web development, to email/permission marketing, to coreg, to search. I suppose I would just adjust and move to another area of online. Mobile marketing maybe? Or maybe I’d sell trailers. Something different.

What about you?

Case in point…

I have been wearing contacts for 20 years. They are expceptionally fussy when I sit in front of the monitor 14 hours a day. They get dry, sticky. In short, it’s a pain in the **. My wife is always encouraging me to get Lasik surgery. She thinks I’m a wuss for being afraid to cut my eye with a laser, that it’s a routine procedure with virtually no risk. I disagree. So, I go out today on the World Wide Interweb to get some stats, and make myself a little more comfortable about getting the procedure.

My first query at the Google web: lasik problems

Obviously, I’m afraid of lasik. My query tells you that. If you are a smart advertiser, wouldn’t you take advantage of this? Speak to my question. My question is: Is Lasik safe? Are there potential problems with Lasik? Etc Etc.

What do I find for paid search ads?

Free LASIK Program -Mich
Wavefront and Bladeless intra-Lasik upgrade.
Hurry reserve your spot.
www.yaldoeyecenter.com

Um, I don’t live in Michigan and cost is not my concern, thanks though.

Top 10 Lasik Surgery
Lasik Centers Ranked for you. Leading Lasik Centers.
www.aLasik.org

Doesn’t address my concern

Marina Del Rey Lasik
0% Financing, Free Consultation!
As low as $99 per month.
www.marinaeyecenter.com

Hmm. Chicago must be closer than I thought to Marina Del Rey.

Lasik Problems
Affordable Laser Eye Surgery By The
Top Surgeons. Optimax, Lasik, Lasek
www.bertybuzzard.com

Bad use of Dynamic Insertion

Lasik Problems
All About Lasik Problems
Get Informed Before You Decide.
LaserEyeSurgeryReviews.info

Even though it’s a double dynamic insertion trick, the copy comes out reasonably well. Too bad it’s an MFA arbitrage site. Bummer.

Lasik Problems
Lasik Problems. Learn
about costs, risks, and procedures.
www.TheVisionGuide.com

Again, good ad copy, obviously dynamic insertion. Another MFA. They do seem to write the best ads though.

Avoid LASIK Complications
A guide to risks and complications,
and steps to take to avoid them.
AllAboutVision.com

This is a good ad, well crafted, it addresses my query directly without generic dynamic insertion, and the site is actually a good resource for information. Well done!

So, what have we learned? Copywriters need to take the time in the campaign creation stage to carefully craft detailed ad copy that will speak clearly to the query being performed. Don’t rely on dynamic insertion so heavily. It does save time, but in the end, it can produce boilerplate ads that don’t really engage the user.

Take the time at the beginning and it will pay off down the road!

(to the tune of, well…tiny bubbles:)

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
In the wine (in the wine)
Make me happy (make me happy)
Make me feel fine (make me feel fine)

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
Make me warm all over
With a feeling that I’m gonna
Love you till the end of time

So here’s to the golden moon
And here’s to the silver sea
And mostly here’s a toast
To you and me

So here’s to the ginger lei
I give to you today
And here’s a kiss
That will not fade away

words & music by Leon Pober

hype & over valuation by the stock market in general

inability to execute on anything but core competency by google

Pure arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys mass amounts of traffic from various PPC platforms. The traffic is directed to a site that then serves the user a page that contains outbound links that are monetized on a CPC basis. The publisher tracks both the cost of the inbound traffic versus the income from the outbound traffic, and attempts to monetize the ‘spread’ as much as possible. For example, if I bid $.09 for the keyword ‘sears washer dryer model RX21223′, someone clicks on my ad, lands on my page, and sees a link for ‘Buy Sears Washer Dryer – Free Delivery’, which is a link I got through a feed at Yahoo, and that click pays $.25, I just netted $.16. If I can do that on a mass scale, I am running a nice little business.

This technique is different than using PPC to do affiliate arbitrage.

Affiliate arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys very targeted PPC traffic focused around a theme or product. The traffic can be sent directly to an affiliate landing page or to a publisher hosted page that contains one, or several, affiliate offers.

In my particular case, I was trying to figure out how to track conversions back to keywords on an affiliate I was promoting through Commission Junction. It’s a little hard to figure out due to poor documentation on CJ, but I’ll help you get right to the goods.

Basically, CJ uses SID’s, or site ID’s I believe they call them. Normally, people apply these to a site, so you can tell which site is converting for a particular advertiser they are promoting. In this case, we are going to use SID’s to track a PPC campaign at the keyword level.

Let’s say our campaign is for payday loans, and we’ll use 2 keywords as a starting example. My keywords are:

pay check advance
“pay advance”

Notice the second one is phrase match. CJ will give you a long url under “keyword links” that look something like this:

http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

Obviously, the x’s are placeholders. Your affiliate id will be in there. Now, as is, you can’t tell which keyword generates a sale or conversion. Adwords conversion tracking won’t tell you either. We need to use SID’s to track the sales. You can build out a nice Excel formula to do this on a mass scale if you have a lot of keywords, but I’ll show you how to do it first with just a couple.

Take your base url:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

add a question mark

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?

add sid=

http://www.dpbolvsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=

then add the keyword, replacing any spaces with +

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+check+advance

for phrase match keywords, you can do this:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+advance+phrase

That’s it. Just plug those urls into the keyword creative and you’re in business. Now, in your CJ account reporting, you will be able to see which keywords converted by looking at the report details. Viola. You’re a millionaire!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Of course, being a soccer retailer, there is an ad group devoted to player names. Suprisingly, it’s the smallest portion of their campaign in terms of clicks/sales, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless because of the whole sports celebrity thing. I’m not a huge Zinedine Zidane fan, but I am a former soccer player, and he’s one of the best, so I can appreciate watching him play. Now, if you don’t know the story, you’ve obviously been under a rock so stop reading here…
Even though this is a low percentage of the overall campaign in terms of spend, I thought this was an interesting example of things an analyst has to pay attention to while managing a campaign. In particular, an analyst always has to be on the lookout for a star athlete head butting an opponent in the middle of the sport’s final game, and the effect it may have on keyword pricing and conversion.

To illustrate, here are the numbers from Zidane’s keywords broken down into July Overall, July 1-9, and July 10-31. The final game and infamous headbutt occured on the 9th.

July 1-9….

July 10-31…post headbutt…. Notice 3 things:

1. The cost per conversion before and after the incident.

2. The drastic drop in conversion rate.

3. Also notice the average postion rise, as I’m assuming many people stopped competing on his name because they anticipated the drop in conversion.

Anyhow, I just thought this was somewhat amusing. I suppose that’s about what you can expect to happen with your jersey sales when you make a completely foolish decision like that. Anyone out there have any similar examples?

 

 

The one reason I want to highlight this is that it is a real business with a storefront and real human operators. It’s a service oriented company. It’s not arbitrage or affiliate related. They spend more than a couple thousand a month with an IP targeted campaign and conversion tracking. Once the quality score algo changed last week, I noticed a massive drop in traffic. Here’s why. Some of their best keywords had been disabled. In fact, 75% of their keywords were disabled. This is not a junk campaign with one adgroup and 2000 keywords. Each adgroup is carefully crafted with about 20-25 keywords. 7 adgroups. 5 ad copies per. Here’s an example of the performance I was getting and you tell me why it’s shut down. Notice, the CTR is ok, and the conversion rate is good (relative to the call to action)…

Here’s another example…

This isn’t an example from a huge client, and that’s why I chose it. This demonstrates the potential effect to your everyday advertiser who runs a legitimate business, with legitimate ads, who’s trying to use this platform to generate business.

I think, as with so many Google innovations in the last 2 years, that the intention is good, but the execution is extremely poor. The intention here is to devalue sites that don’t offer value to the searching public. They are after arbitrage sites, thin affiliate sites, and MFA’s. What it appears they are catching is some of the baby with the bathwater. The small, medium, and large sized advertisers who are doing things the right way.

This isn’t a disaster by any means. I know exactly what can be done to get this campaign back on track. I believe Google will get better at discerning the MFA’s from the ‘real’ websites, and at the same time, we as marketers have to get better at telling Google what our site is about.

Again, at the end of the day, I see more and more that Pay Per Click and SEO optimzation are becoming one in the same. In order to have a successful Adwords campaign you now have to optimize your site just as you would for SEO.

In addition to implementing this on my sites, I also have a client who needed an analytics solution badly. I got them set up with a Google Analytics account, had them implement conversion tracking from the adwords account, viola, we’re all set.

This client had recently heeded my advice to create 4 different PPC landing pages themed around their major ad groups. In addition to our compulsary conversion tracking, Google analytics gives you the ability to set up ‘goal tracking’, which is essentially conversion tracking, but with the additional capability, through the analytics program, of tracking organic traffic, or email traffic, or any other source as it relates to the goals you set up.
So, in digging around the somewhat complex google analytics navigation, I got frustrated and google’d for a tutorial, or just some sort of clue how to set this up. Here’s what I found:

To implement goal tracking, follow these steps:

To set up your goals, Enter Goal Information:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and click Analytics Settings.
2. Find the profile for which you will be creating goals, and click Edit.
3. Select one of the 4 goal slots available for that profile and click Edit.
4. Enter the Goal URL. Reaching this page marks a successful conversion. For example, a registration confirmation page, a checkout complete page, or a thank you page.
5. Enter the Goal name as it should appear in your Google Analytics account.
6. Turn the goal On or Off. This selection decides whether Google Analytics should track this conversion goal at this time. Generally, you will want to set the Active Goal selection to On.

For further details on setting up funnel tracking, I suggest you go straight to the source and visit the google analytics support site.

If you get through that and you’re feeling really chirpy, you can take things to the next level and start your A/B split testing. These guys lay things out about as well as you’ll find.

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.