Oxstones Investment Club™AdWords and Me: Exploring the Mystery
By PAUL DOWNSSo far this year I’ve spent $75,124.77 on my Google AdWords campaign. That’s a little more than $400 a day. So, you can imagine how touched I was recently to find a small brown box from Google in my mailbox.
Picture this: plain brown box, no note, no card attached, just a return address, “Google, Mountain View, CA.” I opened it to find — wait for it — a stainless steel travel mug! With “Google” written on the side! Estimated value? That’s hard to say, but — as I’m sure Google knows — you can get a custom logo mug for less than $2 online. Gee, thanks!
While the surprise gift did not make me feel all that special or appreciated, it did get me wondering what threshold I had crossed to qualify for this, and what was the next level. Spend $1 million and get a case of paper towels for the employee restroom? Spend a $1 billion and get an embroidered baseball cap?
Then Google decided to reinforce the gift with some personalized attention. I received this e-mail:
Hi,
My name is Leah and I’m an AdWords Strategist at Google. I’ve reviewed your AdWords account XXX-XXX-XXXX and I see some interesting opportunities to improve your advertising performance. That’s why I’m delighted to offer you a personal consultation about your AdWords campaigns.
This is a completely free service that we are offering to selected customers for a limited time. Our consultation may include but isn’t limited to:
– an assessment of your advertising goals
– an analysis of your existing campaigns
– help in tracking your return on investment
– advice on making the most of increased traffic during the holidays
I would like to set up a phone call with you over the next week or two. Please reply to this e-mail with your contact information and specify the best days and times (including time zone) at which you can be reached.
I first received one of these e-mails in February 2009, before I launched my Web site devoted solely to conference tables (custom-conference-tables.com). At that time I was using AdWords to drive traffic to my old site (pauldowns.com), spending about $250 a day. I was desperate for business, so I replied and to my surprise — given the robo-script prose in the contact e-mails — I did end up speaking to an actual person.
I don’t remember her name, but she was young and quite green. Her suggestions were read to me in a semi-monotone, and when I asked her for the thinking behind the ideas, she couldn’t answer. But I did try her suggestions, which were mostly to segment and expand my keyword list. To my chagrin, the phone stopped ringing immediately. It stayed silent for three weeks — even as my AdWords costs went up.
Now, maybe this wasn’t all Google’s fault. The pauldowns.com site does have some serious deficiencies. And from Google’s perspective, the suggestions actually worked great. Clicks and the click-through rate both went up (and I ended up spending more money). But I measure my AdWords success by calls, not clicks. I went back to the previous arrangement, and the phone started ringing again. I can’t tell you exactly why this happened. AdWords campaigns are so complex that changes can have unexpected results. Clearly the additional clicks were not coming from likely callers.
It’s also possible that the increased click rate was burning up my budget earlier in the day and that callers are more active toward the end of the work day. I didn’t have the time or money to experiment with changing one variable at a time to isolate the changes. And because I was expecting to introduce my new site at the end of April 2009, I decided to just reinstate the old campaign and keep it going until the new site was ready.
The new site was designed specifically to maximize value from AdWords. It is all about a single product, so that searchers for conference tables are presented with a wide range of choices. The site isn’t cluttered with any products other than conference tables, so I was able to add features — like an instant price-quote wizard — that are optimized for the variations found only within the world of tables. On the budget end, I can buy a large number of tightly targeted keywords at a reasonable price, and I can direct searchers to a table that closely matches their keywords. This approach has worked well. Now, our phone rings six times more often than it did in 2009 — we’ve gone from an average of nine calls per month to more than 50.
Back to my consultation with Leah. I was curious to see what Google’s suggestions would be this time. Leah called me at the exact time I’d requested. She sounded much more natural and unscripted than the first Google person I’d spoken with. One thing I have noticed about Google: anything it does, it improves.
Leah was aware of my previous interaction, and she was aware that I now had two sites. Her first suggestion was that I reactivate all of the campaigns that had supported the old site. I explained to her that my focus was now conference tables and that I only wanted to pay for traffic to the new site. She didn’t push. Nor did she try to get me to increase my daily budget. And she walked me through the ways to find negative keywords, which can actually save me some money.
If you aren’t familiar with them, negative keywords are search terms that you identify as unlikely to lead to good results, so you want to exclude them from your paid clicks. In my case, there is a lot of search traffic around college football and basketball schedules, and people ask for them like this: “Southeast conference tables” or “Big East conference tables.” These searches are not relevant for me. I also exclude searches that include the words “cheap” or “used” because I don’t sell either of these types of tables.
Leah had no other suggestions. I couldn’t resist asking her about the mug, and what I had done to deserve it. She had no idea, and told me that the distribution of swag was handled by an entirely different department at Google. The whole conversation took 15 minutes. It did not seem to be a sales call. Not only did she not try to get me to do things that would increase my spending, she helped me figure out ways to decrease it.
After my phone call with Leah, I took a couple of minutes to search the AdWords Help section of Google for more information on personalized consultations. If there was any mention of them, I couldn’t find it. And yes, I did search on Google. So I sent Leah an e-mail with the following questions:
1) What does an AdWords patron have to do to qualify for individual attention?
2) Are there different levels of interaction driven by a patron’s spending?
3) How often can a patron expect to be contacted by Google?
I got the following reply:
Hello Paul,
Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me yesterday! In answer to your questions, we consider a number of factors, including history, when considering accounts to contact. In these cases, interaction with AdWords advertisers aren’t so much driven by spend but by potential for growth and ways to improve. We review accounts on a regular basis and if we’re able to provide an account with suggestions we are sure to reach out. In this case, there is no real expectation an advertiser should have for when we’ll reach out.
Best,
Leah
As always, Google does what it wants. Do not question the Google. Believe, and the Google will bless you. I’m serious: isn’t Google taking on the trappings of a religion? Just think about search and AdWords.
Search is mysterious. Nobody outside of Google can tell you exactly how it works, but we all use it and rely on it. It has the power to make or break us. We perform rituals to propitiate it: aligning our content with our target keywords, updating frequently, and adorning our sites with links. It seems to have a golden rule — “Thou shalt provide relevant content” — but it cannot be approached directly. It does not reveal itself in full. As often as not, our efforts are useless cries to a silent statue.
AdWords is dogmatic. It provides us with a text to study and rules to follow. These are a tantalizing mix of the accessible (pay money, get position) and the obscure (keyword quality scores). You can be the equivalent of a holiday church attender or a full-time acolyte or anywhere in between. I have yet to meet or hear about anyone who can really say, and prove, that he or she has actually optimized a site — mastering every variation of AdWords and leaving no room for improvement.
Am I blaspheming? Will Google punish me for my presumption? Will my next encounter with Leah or one of her peers be a little less friendly? Maybe I’ll bump my daily budget a few percentage points, just to be safe. Forgive me, Google! I will never question again.
Tags: google ads, marketing