Internet Marketing

You know that a company has a corner on the market when people refer to pay per click advertising as Adwords campaigns.

This is a testimony to the Google empire. But make no mistake about it. Google Adwords may be the biggest game in town but they’re not the only game in town. And unless they start easing up on advertisers, there is a good chance that Google may very well be knocked off their thrown.

This article is going to point out the problems with Google Adwords that may very well lead to their downfall.

As what usually happens when a company gets big is that they get too big for their own good and think that they can do and get away with just about anything.

That may hold true for a while, but anybody who thinks that a giant can’t be knocked off its thrown, better take a look at what happened to AT&T and IBM. They are both no longer the monopoly that they once were. And in the case of IBM, they’re not even number 1 anymore.

The first problem with Google pay per click that is really getting advertisers annoyed is their rule that you can no longer send customers to a sales page that isn’t yours. Well, you could, but you won’t get very far. Turns out that they really penalize you heavily if all you’re doing is sending people to a landing page of somebody else’s product as an affiliate.

The reason, they say, is because when they allowed this, customers would click on ads and each one would take them to the same page. This was ticking off customers so Google had to put a clamp on landing pages for affiliate products. This has driven costs for some keywords through the roof.

Another problem with Google is how strictly they hold you to the targeting of keywords and the pages they apply to. It is quite understandable if you are targeting keywords that don’t at all apply to the pages you are sending customers to, but when Google thinks that a keyword maybe only slightly applies, they’re going to hammer you almost as hard as if the keyword didn’t apply at all.

Take a look at some of your campaigns and check out the keywords that you “thought” were perfectly acceptable. Many of them are now costing 10 to 100 times what your other keywords are costing.

And finally, let’s be honest, Google is not all that easy to use and master. That’s the reason why there are so many books written on the subject. It takes an awful lot of study to get Google pay per click to work efficiently.

Many people simply don’t have that kind of time and ultimately give up on their Google campaigns, especially after they’ve been slapped. That’s a term used to apply to the act of turning your keyword costs into yesterday’s filet mignon.

As more and more people get fed up with Google because of high click costs, they will slowly turn to the other engines like Yahoo and MSN. After a while, Google will realize that they’re not the only game in town.

Filed under: Google by Craig

My wife left me–temporarily. She’s going to China for two weeks, along with my mother and my mother-in-law. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn’t it? But it’s true. And my forlorn, lonely, bereftness-osity means: it’s time for webmaster questions again!

Same guidelines apply as last time:

Ask whatever you want. I’ll tackle a few of the questions that are general. Please make sure you read the most recent comment guidelines so you know to avoid “what’s up with my specific site?” or other questions that won’t apply to most people.

Comments that ignore the comment guidelines will be pruned. I’ll add a couple more requests. First, please don’t ask me about legal stuff (”Dammit Jim, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer!”). And once someone has asked, “Dude, what’s up with topic X?” please don’t repeat the question–once is enough. I’ll let questions stream in today and tackle some of them this weekend.

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Alden DeSoto

Okay, in a previous post I told a story about Google’s market share in early days, and mentioned that you have to think about the limitations of any measuring methodology. I briefly touched on sampling bias too. Let’s look consider sampling bias in a different arena: Alexa.

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar. Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa. Let’s take a look at a graph comparing mattcutts.com and ask.com:

For now, let’s concentrate on the green ellipse. This is a graph of reach, which is defined as “out of one million internet users, how many of them went to mattcutts.com vs. Ask each day.” If you look at the green ellipse, it shows that I had a spike in May and Ask had a dip in June. I believe Alexa was reporting that for at least a good day for me and a bad day for Ask, I was reaching more internet users as a percentage than Ask. (Alexa folks, please correct me if I’m mis-speaking or drawing the wrong conclusion.) And I believe that I can safely say that’s not remotely close to true. I have nowhere near the reach that Ask has.

I’m clearly getting some boost from webmaster bias because so many SEOs read my blog. Am I getting a boost from anything else? Well, look at the purple ellipse in the graph above. I got a really huge spike in reach around April 20th. Why? It’s not like I said anything especially insightful that week. I think the answer is that I’m getting a bit of geek boost too.

Others have noticed this impressive jump in late April, and that some non-geek sites remained unaffected. What on earth could account for this huge (but welcome) spike in my reach graph?

Jason Striegel proposed a possible explanation: maybe Digg did it. He suggests that a Digg story about Digg overtaking Slashdot in traffic caused a bunch of Diggers to install the Alexa toolbar–enough to skew Alexa’s stats. Now the Digg story was popular about a month before the Alexa spike–maybe there’s a near-one-month wait on accepting data from new Alexa toolbar installs? It’s hard to say, but that late-April spike is definitely interesting. I haven’t seen too many other theories on that boost for geeky sites. Anyone got other ideas?

Just to be clear: Alexa is wonderful in many ways, and I love Alexa. They provide easy access to nice usage data. You just have to keep in mind possible limitations, e.g. skewing due to sampling bias. And to be fair, I grabbed this Alexa graph a couple weeks ago: I went back today and the two “Matt vs. Ask” spikes don’t cross now. Maybe Alexa did some renormalization. That does raise the issue that any metric is a bit of a black box: you need to know the raw data used compute a metric, and exactly how that metric is computed. If you don’t know that, then there are bounds to how confident you can be in a metric.

So how do you decide how much to trust a metric? One way is to find another similar metric and compare the two. For example, here’s a graph comparing reach for mattcutts.com to zawodny.com:

Ha ha! Looks like I’m trouncing him, eh? Time to do a little Google Dance? Not so fast. Let’s look at a completely different metric which should be comparable: Bloglines subscribers. My RSS feed lists 1,136 subscribers, while Jeremy lists 5,096 subscribers. So by that metric, Jeremy is destroying me. And I suspect that Bloglines subscriptions are more accurate in this case.

Now, are Bloglines subscriptions perfectly accurate? Of course not. People who talk a lot about RSS and APIs probably are more likely to have RSS subscribers, for example. Also, different feed readers will have different audiences and demographics. And I noticed that over my six-week vacation that my Bloglines subscribers numbers didn’t budge. It’s probably true that even when web surfers visit a site less often, RSS subscriber numbers would remain nearly constant, because it’s more trouble to unsubscribe in most feed readers. So drops in popularity are probably more visible from web surfers than from RSS subscribers.

What are the takeaway points so far? You should think about the limitations in any methodology: bear in mind that sampling bias can under (or over!) represent a site, for example. To be completely sure in a metric, you need to know the raw incoming data and how a metric operates on that data to produce a number. And if you want to be more confident, look for similar metrics that should roughly agree. If different metrics agree, that’s a good sign. If they disagree, you should probably be cautious.

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

Joe Morin has posted the official party list for Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2006 in San Jose. That includes Google Dance V at the Googleplex, which all SES attendees are invited to. It’s a great chance to see the Googleplex and enjoy music, food, drinks, and talking with Googlers.

At the conference itself, Danny Sullivan and Google CEO Eric Schmidt will sit down to talk at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, August 9th:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks with Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan about how the search leader is growing and dealing with challenges and issues in search.

Then at 11 a.m. that same day, I’ll be on a “Speaking Unofficially: Search Engine Bloggers” panel. Those are fun because it’s pretty much all Q&A, so I can leave my PowerPoint at the door. I may do some other sessions too, but San Jose is a great time to rotate in new Googlers and let them soak in the experience of chatting with webmasters, advertisers, publishers, and users.

I love the San Jose conference because I can talk to webmasters until late, then drive home and sleep in my own bed. Who here will be at SES San Jose? I’d love to meet a few new folks this year.

Update: This always happens. As I get closer to a conference, I’m like “Oh, I forgot I promised I’d be on that panel.” So I’m planning on being at the Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues session on Tuesday, August 8th, at 11:15 a.m. On the plus side, I’ll just be there for Q&A (no PowerPoint again! woohoo!), and I’ll get to sit next to Tim Converse, the Yahoo! analogue of my webspam self. On the minus side, I won’t get to listen in on the Blog & Feed Search SEO or Search Arbitrage panels.

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

Seems like a good time to remind people of my disclaimer, because this post is purely my opinion.

Normally, reading court documents is nearly the last thing I would want to do on a Saturday. But if you’re a search engine geek like me, you’ll find the PDFs linked from this Google Blog post interesting:

• Google posted their Omnibus Response to Objections (PDF doc).
• An independent expert, (a professor at NYU, Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin) produced a 47-page report (also a PDF doc).

I enjoyed both. The first document discusses the proposed $90 million settlement. One excerpt:

Similarly, the California attorneys’ repeated statements to the media–and to this Court–that the $90 million settlement fund will cover “only 0.5% of the damages” is not only egregiously false, it is absurd. The California attorneys take the position that the “damages” are 200 times $90 million, or $18 billion, which is more revenue than Google has received in its entire existence. There is no conceivable theory under which anything close to all of Google’s revenue–let alone more than all of Google’s total revenue–could be attributed to invalid clicks.

The second document is from an independent expert. Dr. Tuzhilin discusses Google’s detection of invalid clicks:

I have been asked to evaluate Google’s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google’s campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google’s employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google’s invalid click detection system.

For example, page 17 talks about why Google prefers the term invalid clicks to click fraud. I think most search engine optimization (SEO) folks would enjoy reading both documents. Whether to do it on a Saturday or not is your call, of course.

P.S. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions for what people want to hear me talk about in the future. It helps me a lot, and gave me several ideas for future topics to write about.

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

Are you planning on coming to the next Search Engine Strategies conference taking place in San Jose, CA from August 7 to August 10th? It’s a great event for learning how to grow your business through search engine marketing and website optimization — and to network with business owners, web developers, experts, and vendors.

SES runs more than four days, packed with informative seminars on a wide range of topics like “Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic,” “Search APIs,” “Online Video Advertising” and “Local Search Marketing Tactics” led by well-known leaders and authors in web analytics and search engine marketing. Google CEO Eric Schmidt will even be delivering the keynote on Wednesday, August 9, and on August 10, Google Analytics Senior PMM (and Urchin co-founder) Brett Crosby will be on a panel about measuring the success of websites and online marketing generally.

We’re excited to offer a promotional “Priority” code for 20% off when you buy a Conference or day pass to SES San Jose. The Priority code is 20GOO2 (two-zero-gee-oh-oh-two). To redeem the Priority code and purchase a pass to the conference, go here or click the ad below:

We hope to see you there!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Google Analytics Blog

Which would you prefer: more SEO 101-type posts that explain how I would organize and optimize a site that’s just starting out? Or more super-duper power SEO posts that talk about how you can use the translation proxy to check for cloaking, or that talk about the SEO controversy du jour?

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

I was out of town Monday through today for a family reunion in New Jersey. It’ll still take me a day or two to catch up on email; I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport right now. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to see family and get an authentic New Jersey hoagie.

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Matt Cutts

In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, understanding keyword performance is essential. But did you know that you can also use Google Analytics to see how different ad copy affects conversion rates? The cross-segmentation feature (click the red arrow to the left of your results) enables you to see not only how a keyword performed, but also which ad copy was most effective.




For example, go to the “AdWords Analysis” report under “Marketing Optimization/Search Engine Marketing.” Drill down from the Campaign to the Ad Group to the Keyword by clicking on the plus sign. To cross-segment a keyword by ad copy, click on the red “Analysis Options” button to the left of your desired keyword.




Select “Cross Segment Performance” and then the “Content” option. (See screenshot below.) Assuming that you have enabled autotagging on your AdWords account, this will display the first line of ad text in the creative.

You can also look at the overall performance of ad copy by looking in the “Overall Ad A/B Testing” report under “Content Optimization/Ad Version Testing.” This report actually has a column called “Content” that displays the first line of ad text and the visits generated by that ad.





Posted by Aubrey Sabala, Google Analytics team

Filed under: Google, Search Engines by Google Analytics Blog