
Ask Google to choose your next domain - bernardjhuang
http://rvmenu.com/ask-google#.Uulj3Z5gnPE.hackernews
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joelrunyon
I spent a lot of money on Google in the RV industry (to the tune of
$500,000/month for a certain fortune 500 company) & there are a lot of issues
with this post:

First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary
by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to
turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate
evenly".

The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but
like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically
allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - which
doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is
tainted from the start.

Also,

> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but
> the differences should be proportional.

Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all.
I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in
directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.

Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how
Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but
there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.

[1] [http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-
adw.html](http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html)

~~~
sillysaurus2
Completely offtopic, but I can't resist:

What's it like being in a position to choose how $500k per month is spent?
Wow. That's equivalent to about forty engineers' salaries per year.

EDIT: I visited your website and am not sure what to think.
[http://joelrunyon.com/](http://joelrunyon.com/) Is it true that those sorts
of marketing tactics will convince people to entrust you with how to spend
$500k/mo? (Personal branding is rather important. I was just a little
surprised that those particular methods would be effective.)

~~~
KnowledgeSponge
Not the parent, but I managed and eventually helped lead the paid search group
at one of the top search agencies. We had clients with 7 figure budgets all
the way up to 9 figure budgets (or essentially unlimited as long as we were
within certain parameters).

It's a bit scary and heart attack inducing if something goes majorly wrong
(like going dark for a day because someone forgot to check the flight dates in
the account after you took it over from the previous agency). But like the OP
said, it just becomes numbers.

The cool thing is you not only get much better support and escalation paths at
Google, but you can test things at a very large scale and get answers VERY
quickly. And little things that might not make a huge difference on smaller
accounts, suddenly equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars
difference in total revenue. But again, all things are relative, so %'s might
not change much.

~~~
joelrunyon
Exactly - the fact that Google actually pays attention to you is a nice plus.
If I had an issue with a campaign, I had a direct phone number for someone who
could fix things.

That said, at that point, support had already started to go downhill & we
found the "reps" usually knew very little / less than us about campaigns.
Interestingly enough, we found that BING reps were much more helpful as they
were eagerly trying to make up market share.

[EDIT]: You also get access to betas & other google "tests" they're running
with adwords that most normal advertisers don't. Most of them are designed to
make Google more money, but every once in a while they'd come up with some
cool stuff that'd be really helpful.

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sp332
_The ads started on January 2 and took 6 days to hit 98% statistical
confidence._

No! You have to pick the time first, wait that amount of time, and later
analyze how much confidence you achieved. With random variations, you could
have a run of any size of positive or negative results, and you could just
wait until you get the result you want. Sorry but tons of people make this
mistake with A/B tests.

~~~
204NoContent
Weird... I always thought that if you are running a split test in parallel
(all at the same time), then you can figure out the number of samples needed
to compare the branches with statistical confidence. I mean it makes sense to
me. As the number of samples increases for each split test the distribution
shifts from a binomial distribution to a gaussian distribution by the central
limit theorem, and that happens around 1000 samples with a reasonable
conversion rate. Then you're just comparing Gaussians, centered around the
mean conversion value, with a width proportional to the number of samples.
Taking the difference between two gaussians will give you the "chance to be
different". Standard practice is to wait until one branch has a 95% chance to
be better and then declare it the winner. This will test for false positives,
which is usually what you are concerned about. False negatives don't matter
that much when it comes to things like picking a name.

~~~
sp332
Here's a good explanation: [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-
test.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html)

~~~
204NoContent
Thanks for the link to the blog post. It raised an important point worthy of
inspection. I ran some numbers and "peeking" after the first 1000 trials does
change the outcome. The chance that the outcome will reverse from declaring
branch A the winner with 95% confidence to declaring branch B the winner with
95% confidence is rather small, less than 10%. However, if you lower your
requirements to 80% confidence then the chance of the winner swapping
increases to over 50%! For reference, I used the Wilson approximation for
binomial distributions. I'm sure the Wald approximation fares worse.

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elchief
Protip: Google "buy domain name", look for ads from godaddy or other
registrars. Can usually get domains for a buck instead of ten bucks.

~~~
flavor8
I just turned off adblock on google to try your tip. Agh my eyes.

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jgmmo
'RV Menu' is a RV recipe/food keyword, not a rental-related keyword.

~~~
darrennix
My office mate said the same thing. :)

The numbers were crystal clear though: bounce rate was the same for all the
domains indicating that users were getting what they expected after clicking
through.

~~~
joelrunyon
Depending on your keywords you targeted in the initial campaign, you may run
into some issues scaling out your campaigns into phrase + BMM match keywords
as "rv recipes" & rv menu creation seem to be something people are looking for
quite a bit.

Also, conversion rate is a better overall metric than bounce rate (harder to
test that from the start though).

[1] [http://imgur.com/85u1grB](http://imgur.com/85u1grB)

~~~
darrennix
I agree that conversion rate is the best metric.

I'm going to restart the tests using three domains and let them run over an
extended period so that I can see whether I am, in fact, getting users who're
searching for meals vs rentals.

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togedoge
Why is there no mention of Average Position of each ad? That impacts CTR
wildly! I can't take this post seriously without seeing more data.

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caseyf7
Why wouldn't you get the domain with the most impressions and then work to
improve the click-thru rate? (other than Joel's great point about Google
controlling impressions)

~~~
joelrunyon
Because you have no reason to assume that the one with the most impressions is
the top performing ads.

Because of the way impression share is distributed (and because we don't know
what ad rotation setting OP had on), the top impression ad might only have the
most impressions because Google decided to show it more rather than it
actually being superior on any actual performance metric.

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User8712
So, were these ads actually appearing evening across the same sites or search
results, and in the same locations? If rvmenu.com appeared more frequently in
one location than the others, that would skew the entire results.

I'm not convinced with the data you posted. The sample is small, and there's a
lot of unknowns in the testing parameters. I wouldn't advise anyone to take
this approach when selecting a domain.

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pbhjpbhj
Perhaps ... "rv menu" appears to perform well because those looking for food
menus for when they are off in their RV are interested in just _looking_ at
RVs? Did they mainly click the expensive ones? [That's what I'd do, like "ooh,
fancy; I'd like one of those"]

Interest, indeed clicks, don't mean revenue will follow unless they were
actual sales actions.

Now, it could also be that you can sell RV hire to people researching for an
RV trip using "RV menu" ...

