the PPC Book|PPC Blog | Querying for Dollars

I’m watching with some bemusement this morning at all the financial news surrounding Google’s ‘deceleration’. This absolutely kills me. Here are some snippets:

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: Meeker writes that she still thinks Google’s fundamental business trends are intact. But she also calculates that if ComScore’s data are accurate, and assuming international paid clicks are growing at a 35% rate, the company would have a blended click rate growth of 19%, or 4% sequentially. That, she says, would imply net revenue of $3.52 billion for Q1, or about $120 million short of the $3.64 billion consensus. Meeker, though, is sticking with her above-consensus estimate of $3.72 billion.

Youssef Squali, Jefferies: “While Google’s actual numbers are likely to be materially better than what’s being reported, ComScore’s less than flattering growth trajectory for GOOG does point to continued decelerating growth, and is likely to keep the stock under pressure short term.”

God forbid - DECELERATING GROWTH - AGHAST…

Did anyone catch the revenue number?

$3.52 billion for Q1

I wish I could decelerate like that.

These analysts treat Google like a manufacturing or retail company. They don’t understand online advertising in the slightest. Apparently everyone is up in arms over the fact that -

“The click-through rate grew 3 percent in February compared with a year earlier, and January saw no increase compared with January 2007. Several months earlier, the rate was growing 25 percent to 40 percent compared with a year earlier. The new data is in line with click-through declines Google reported last quarter.”

This is a situation where Google is not listening to the street at all when making decisions about how they tweak their platform, and it will benefit them in the long run.

I have to say, Adcenter is impressing the hell out of me lately with their support. I’ve had 2 issues recently which were both resolved with 1 day, by actual humans who called me. 2 important points:

They spoke clear english (with a little canadian, ya)

They understood their product quite well

Can’t ask for anything else.

This is an update from March 6th, but an important one, so I’ll link to the post from Adwords.

In the next couple weeks Google will start to measure your landing page load time. I’m actually surprised this wasn’t being done already, so no complaints here.

2 things to keep in mind:

1. Load time ’scores’ will be displayed on your keyword analysis page
2. After the load time scores are displayed, there will be a 1 month review period for you to make adjustments

Yes, it’s another thing to keep an eye on, and Google just keeps raising the bar. For those managing client campaigns this will be a bit more of an issue, as addressing client hosting is a messy proposition. A smart strategy in that case would be to bring it up when you’re in the setup stage of a campaign. Load time is generally ‘visible’. You shouldn’t have to wait for Google to tell you that your page loads slowly.

More information here.

Okay, this is one of those 3-4 day runs where I’m seeing wild conversion rate swings in multiple campaigns. These are campaigns that I know better than my own family.

Mr. Adwords behind the curtain, I know you’re doing something over there with your hog wild broad matching.

Cut it out…

***Update - It appears the Adwords dropped the ball a little bit yesterday, which partially explains what we were all seeing.

Please note that conversion tracking data collected during this brief period may under-report the number of actual conversions achieved.

However, this has been going on longer than 1 day, so I still think there’s something else going on.

Are we all being unwittingly opted into the not-so secret borderline fraudulent unsold inventory firesale Automatic Matching beta?

‘Imagine there’s no Adwords, it’s easy if you try’ - John Lennon

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?

Yahoo announced Friday that they upped the limit from 50 to 250 for excluded, aka, negative keywords:

Excluded keyword limits have increased from 50 to 250 to help relevance

• Go to your Ad Group Settings page.
• Click on “Tactic Settings.”
• On the “Tactic Settings” page the “Excluded Words” feature is displayed.
• Click on “Excluded Words” to open the entry field.
• Add your excluded words but do not to use any commas or semicolons after each word.
• Click “Save Changes,” to process the Excluded Words list.

By all means, take advantage!

One of the things that makes Chicago unique is the importance of corruption influence. Chicago is the city of clout (defined by the icon Mike Royko).

Anyway, I don’t really have any clout because I’m not in realestate or city sanitation, and I don’t even live in Chicago anymore. BUT, I do know some people who are hiring. So I’m playing Chicago Alderman today. I know a guy who knows a guy.

If you live in Chicago or the surrounding burbs and you are an experienced PPC analyst, I know of a couple attractive opportunities. If you are interested send me a note and contact info through my contact page, or send your resume to jeff at theppcbook dot com.

No post from me today - but 2 others I can point you to:

LocalMN - Net Neutrality - Will it Influence Your Vote?

Most of you are probably aware of net neutrality. If not, it’s critical to all of us, so do some research.

Obama: In favor of net neutrality and promises to make it a priority in his first year of office to reinstate net neutrality

McCain: Sen. McCain says we should let the market and technology solve the Net-neutrality issue: “When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.”

TopRank: The Fallacy of SEO Celebrity

Good post by Lee about the odd phenomenon of seo celebrity.

If you’ve been hesitating on experimenting with the Adwords Conversion Optimizer now may be the time to try it. The Adwords blog team is pushing their case and educating everyone on the process and setting expectations. 2 key points I’d like to point out from their post:

# Keep in mind that if you choose a CPA lower than the recommended maximum CPA bid, you are likely to get less traffic than you did with your old CPC bids. It’s a good idea to start with this recommendation and adjust based on the results you observe.

As we all should know what our acceptable CPA range is, you will get a good idea right off the bat if this will work for your campaign or not. If your recommended max CPA bid is out of line with your metrics, you risk losing traffic if your actual max CPA bid is too low.

However, if those 2 are fairly close and you decide to give it a shot, you do have something to fall back on:

If you choose to opt out of the Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will revert to the previous CPC bids you were using. (So, there’s nothing to stop you from giving it a try!)

Even if it didn’t reset itself to your previous bids, you should be backing up your campaigns via Adwords Editor before any major changes, so you could simply override the campaign changes.

So, there’s the case for giving it a shot, as well as 1 item to look for when you’re going through the setup process.

I just quickly want to echo Larry Becker’s thoughts on the designer conundrum. Larry says we should all stop ‘wrestling elephants’ and start focusing on small, nimble web design changes. Constancy, not big overhauls, are the rule of thumb.

I have yet, in the entire time I’ve been working with large ecommerce clients, seen any of them undertake a 6 month + redesign project and actually come out of it with improved ROI, conversions, or sales. Sad but true. Not only are you tying yourself down to 1 idea for the entire time, think of the change that happens in our online environment in 6 months. It’s an eternity. Many large design projects can creep over the 12 month mark. You may start scoping a project now, and actually not finish the design until sometime in 2009. Imagine what will be different then. What will Google be emphasizing in their search algo in 2009? What quality score factors will be in play? Will there even be a quality score? Will there be Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Or will it be Google and Fox?

The single best change I’ve ever had an ecommerce client make was a database/hosting change. It was a big deal to them, but relatively inexpensive (just a hosting adjustment), and had the greatest impact in terms of metrics. They focused on what was ‘under the hood’, not the paint job.

If there’s any advice I can impart to advertisers it would be this:

Remember that a design is just a skin, and skins are cheap and easy to produce. In 1 year, you could test 12 different skins for a relatively small investment.

Think small, it’s the subtle changes that will make the biggest impact. For example, work on your landing page copy relevance. When you’re done with that, work on your pricing, your call to action, your product placement, or improve your product pictures. There’s a million small adjustments you can make before you get into a complete design overhaul.

Most of these changes can be tackled in under a week.

My rule of thumb: If it will take more than a month I don’t want to hear about it.