Internet Marketing & Beyond

Google has set a goal to make themselves the official organizer of the world’s information. This they seem to be good at. They are efficient at organizing and cataloging huge amounts of data.

They should stick to what they are good at.

What they are not good at is understanding internet marketing and internet commerce.

Despite the fact that they have some of the most up-to-date technology and programming, they lack severely in the department of knowing what they are doing when it comes to internet commerce and the searches that are related to it.

Here’s why I say this.

Attempting to market anything on Google is a nightmare. Because they don’t understand how people search when they are shopping online, Google forces all internet marketers to jump through these next-to-impossible hoops, in an effort to create a “good user experience”. Their vague definition of a good user experience is “giving the user more information than they initially wanted”, so that the user would have gained some kind of insight or benefit from visiting your site even if you weren’t selling anything.

This is great for people who are just information-hunting. The casual surfer looks for this stuff. The buying surfer doesn’t. The buying surfer knows what they want and doesn’t want to have to wade through pages of extraneous crap to find it. Give them too much info and they’re gone in a matter of seconds. Give them a direct route to what they’re looking for and they’re more than happy to buy.

Google has confused these two types of traffic and has tried to force them all into one funnel, mercilessly beating marketers to death in an effort to get them to conform. Their insistence that every single website have pages and pages of content is overkill and is part of the reason that Google stock has dropped from a high of almost $800 per share down to half o that. Google’s PPC advertising income has dropped and their share holders know it.

Google is in trouble and they know it. So now they’re scrambling to try to fix it, and you and I (the marketers) are taking the heat for their lack of education in the e-commerce world.

Get a clue, Google, and stop cutting your own throat.

I am more and more convinced that Google has no clue what they are doing when it comes to their PPC operations. They are digging their grave and I will be glad to hand them a shovel to do it with.

Because of some tracking problems with one of my PPC campaigns, I paused the campaign on Google for less than 12 hours.

Before pausing this campaign, it had been generating several hundred clicks per day and some adgroups had CTR of up to 12%, with none of them dropping below 1.5%.

Quality scores for all of my keywords were either Good or Great.

After having the campaign paused for several hours, I logged back into Google and turned it back on. No big deal, right?

Wrong. Checking my stats a few minutes ago I noticed that I had ZERO leads from this particular campaign. I knew right away something was wrong, so I went to Google and logged in only to find every single keyword slapped with $10 minimum bids.

What the heck is this? What kind of stupid reasons can they come up with for doing this?

This was not a bridge page or a so-called thin affiliate site. This was a professionally-designed review-style site. It had product comparisons, extra info about the niche, privacy policy, about us, contact us, etc. It had everything Google usually wants. But nothing is good enough for Google anymore, except huge corporate-style sites that are there for no other reason than to create a presence and give people information.

Don’t bother trying to sell anything on Google. You will eventually lose and be out of the game.

Google is clueless.

Google has had a policy in place against so-called affiliate bridge pages for quite a while. Basically, their policy states that you can’t have a page that is there for the sole purpose of taking people from a PPC ad to someone else’s product.

Let me clarify for you. If you are an affiliate for company XYZ, marketing that company’s Red Widget, Google says that you cannot have a single page with the sole purpose of getting people to buy red widgets from you, instead of buying them directly from Company XYZ. It’s OK for Company XYZ to have a single-page site for the sole purpose of selling red widgets, because they own those widgets. You don’t, therefore, you can’t.

With Google, they claim it’s all about a good user experience. What they fail to take into consideration and fail to put into their equation when calculating the quality of a user experience, is that some people are just plain looking for red widgets and don’t care if they buy them from you or from Company XYZ. Google’s logic is seriously flawed, but there’s no changing their minds about any of it. They are Google, which is just another way of spelling “arrogant”. Oh, and you might want to try to fit “stupid” in there too.

If john doe surfer is searching for blue shoes to buy and your ad says that you have blue shoes for sale, then what’s not a good user experience about you selling John blue shoes?

According to Google, you need to give John lots of relevant information about blue shoes. You need to tell John all about the history of blue shoes. You also need to do some market comparisons of different brands of blue shoes. And, while you’re at it, you might as well tell him how to lace up and tie those blue shoes. Then, and only then, will Google begin to think that you’re giving their precious users a good experience.

Here’s how Google defined it to me on the phone and in an email.

A user should want to visit your site even if they are not buying something. If a user visits your site and you give them something of value, such as information, then the user will be happy and Google says that this is a good user experience.

Information is good, but not everyone is looking for information!! HELLO Google…

Have you forgotten that a good number of people today use the web to shop? Or is that not good for their experience.. to buy something without reading through 5 pages of other crap first????

OK.. end of rant (I think).

Like it or not, we have to learn to deal with Google or we will eventually be driven out of marketing on Google. As marketers, we are being forced to build complete, informative sites in order to market as affiliates. It’s sad, but it’s true. The days of one-page sites are coming to a close.

You may have some really nice, really profitable one-page sites out there. Enjoy them while they last, because sooner or later Google will see your page and shut your ads down until you comply with their wishes and build out pages of useless information, which will only serve to lower your conversion rates.

Remember, Google is the search engine god and they like to flaunt that to everyone. Maybe they should flaunt it to their stock holders now that their stock is only worth half what it was a few months ago.

Someday… maybe someday Google will get a glimpse of reality and learn to bend a bit, instead of trying to rule with an iron fist and drive completely legitimate marketers away.

Anyway, go and make some money!

Be blessed,

Curt

p.s. If you have ads or keywords that get rejected by Google, don’t call or email them to ask why. This will only draw their attention to your site and might give them cause to look more closely and then disable your campaign for using a bridge page. Quietly delete the rejected ads or keywords and move on… Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell.