 |
|
| Recent Articles |
Microsoft Files For Patent For DVR Advertising
Microsoft has filed for a patent involving ads on Digital Video Recorders. Now, don't worry, they won't be inserting ads over your shows; rather, this patent involves ensuring the ads you see are relevant when you see them.The patent applies to shows watched...
PR Spam And The Bad Pitch
It continues to amaze me how many clueless or sloppy PR pitches we get week in and week out. Just last week it ranged from obvious typos/grammatical errors to claims that a story was exclusive and unreleased when a quick check of Google Blog Search showed nothing...
Changes For Yahoo Search Marketing Bidding
This change has been forthcoming for some time now. The new Yahoo Search Marketing platform is available for some who have been chosen for early release, and for the rest, the new year will see the complete rollover into the new system. At the beginning of...
Online PR And Social Media Training
Blogs, RSS and Social Networking can be a minefield for PR practitioners.
The digital PR space is hot right now. You see articles about online PR, blogs and social media in practically every mainstream newspaper and trade magazine. One of the reasons is that it is a fast...
Blogging Matters To Marketers
Six senior US marketers have posted their thoughts and opinions on why they believe blogging matters to marketers:Few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand. So does...
Cool Today, A Joke Tomorrow?
I had the opportunity to sit down and share pizza with a bunch of teenagers this weekend. Naturally, I quizzed them about their media consumption habits. These young folks happened to be passionate about music, so I asked them how they found out about new acts.
Interview - FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo is the co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner. Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Spyonit.com. FeedBurner currently serves over 250,000 publishers. Dick was gracious enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few of our...
Rocketbooming New Monetization Strategies
The most important takeaways from Rocketboom's Andrew Baron's keynote address at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo are that content providers should not only focus on a niche, but should also be audience-centric in their approach to content...
News As A Part Of Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Not only are online news patrons just as desirable from a marketing perspective as their print counterparts, but in many instances, they are even more upscale. Newspapers are successfully extending their...
Brandbuilding With Taglines
When it comes to building your brand, you want to take advantage of every possible shortcut to help your target market know you…and remember you. Taglines provide that path through the woods. A tagline consists of few short words that communicate to your target...
|
|
|
12.28.06
The New AAA Club: Angry AdWords Advertisers
 By Mr. Frog
In May 2005, a CNN article quoted Dana Todd, president of SEMPO as saying: "Google has always been worse than bad [at customer service.]"
That same article presented the results of an independent survey that questioned 200 advertising executives about the performance of 60 web sites in several categories. Google finished 18th in "accessibility and responsiveness." Yahoo finished 7th in the same category. Finally, Tim Armstrong, Google's VP of Sales, is quoted as saying that Google is committed to being a top-notch customer service operation.
But how committed are they? Let's ask the members of the new AAA (Angry AdWords Advertisers ) club. In July of this year, Mark Libbert, an attorney who spends $300K per year on AdWords, composed an open letter to Google regarding the landing page algorithm change. Libbert complained that the representatives were uncooperative and unhelpful. "[Google] employees have been uninformed and left in the dark about these major changes to your program, and perhaps more importantly, your paying customers have been left in the dark as well," he wrote. Libbert's AdWord's campaign boasted high-quality ads, some with clickthrough rates as high as 26%. Yet somehow, Google still gave them a low quality score, and were unavailable to help a frustrated Libbert.
As most advertisers know, there was another landing page algorithm shift in late October. This one sparked a firestorm of criticism from the new AAA club, many of whom accused Google of inventing algorithm shifts as an excuse to drive up CPCs around the holidays. The argument went that Google announced the landing page quality score to scare off click arbitrageurs, then banished well-performing ads with a low CPC to the bottom of the SERP.
These advertisers would therefore need to bid more on their ads, especially around the holidays, which would drive Google's revenues through the roof. Since Google doesn't disclose any details about its algorithm shifts (for fear of allowing search spammers to game the system), they open themselves up for this kind of criticism. They claim that they're working to benefit searchers and reward advertisers for doing things right, and that may very well be true. But without disclosing specifics of what they're doing-without, in other words, good customer service-how can anyone be sure?
Other conspiracy theorists feel that regardless of a promise to do no evil the temptation of manipulating the pricing structure of an opaque auction is too great and has resulted in a little fudging if not outright cheating.
Click fraud is an area that provides numerous examples of advertiser dissatisfaction. Google may be hemorrhaging lower spending clients because they have inadequately addressed this issue. A Business Week article in October of this year chronicled the difficulties of one business owner who felt that he was owed over $100K in fraudulent clicks from Google and Yahoo.
After many emails, some of which garnered anonymous responses from Google, he got back $35K. More recently, a CNet article allows many victims of click-fraud to have their voices heard. It is arguably the largest threat to Google's business, but only forty of the nine thousand Googlers are devoted to it. If there were twice or three times that many, they might be able to listen to these advertisers' concerns and help them solve their problems.
So now that we've met the members of the new AAA club, what do we make of them? Are they kooks-people who just don't know what they're doing? At least one of them claimed to be responsible for some big brands' campaigns, so one would hope that he knows what he's doing.
It will be interesting to see how many angry customers Yahoo generates as it switches to a hybrid auction, and Microsoft generates as its advertiser base grows and its product matures. That will tell us for sure if Google really does have bad customer relations, or if angering customers is an inevitable byproduct of auctioning off keywords. One thing is for sure, if Google applied the same focus that it reserves for technology and analytics to answering customer complaints, the new AAA club would dissolve. Unfortunately, I fear that at this time next year, as PPC grows more competitive, the club will be even bigger regardless of whether it is the fault of Google or simply a byproduct of auctions in an opaque marketplace.
With Yahoo moving to an opaque marketplace and Microsoft's opaque adCenter gaining steam advertisers may have other targets at whom to spread out their exasperation and anger.
About the Author:
Mr. Frog is a leading Search industry visionary. Mr. Frog is a member of the Did-it Search Marketing team which accompanies him to most major
marketing conferences.
|
