

My $1/day Adwords Account - profquail
http://agtb.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/my-1day-adwords-account/

======
patio11
If Google wants its employees to experience the point of view of its
customers, it should stake them with meaningful amounts of Google monopoly
money, have them actually attempt to achieve business goals with it, and put
half of their salary on the line based on their CPC performance.

Every so often, something should go wrong -- subtly or otherwise -- and then
the employee should have to go through seven redirects on the AdWords
interface to locate the form to send a message to a representative. The
message should, with 30% probability, never be read by anyone. If it is read,
it will be read by someone in a call center in India, who does not know the
customer is a Google employee, and has only a cursory knowledge of Google's
own policies and none of the algorithms. Escalation should be nearly
impossible to achieve, but if it happens, it should go to someone in Mountain
View who is as unhelpful as possible to avoid giving the customer any
incentive to ever call back.

For the fully authentic experience, if the employee doesn't like this state of
affairs, they should be encouraged to either a) blog about it and pray that it
ends up in Matt Cutt's feedreader or b) make a lateral move to Microsoft, for
an instantaneous 90% reduction in salary.

Google employees who did this for a few weeks would have a much better sense
of where AdWords advertisers are coming from than somebody who is playing with
a toy account. (The Google employee experiences < 1% CTR and one click a day?
Good, you may succeed in identifying where the buttons are in the AdWords
interface. You have _no idea_ what the actual use of the platform is like.)

~~~
netcan
This is not an exaggeration (even though it's funny).

I have had Google reps literally run out on me. IE, stop answering emails,
supplying phone numbers that go nowhere etc. When I finally did get someone
back on the phone to talk to, they acknowledged that they had stuffed up with
their suggested "campaign optimisation" & that they must restore the old
campaign. They promised to call back within 20 minutes once a person with more
authority was located. I haven't heard back since, had to try & restore things
myself.

Even with this terrible service, this account still sent almost $1m to Google
this year. In fact, we haven't even been able to get reasonable payment
methods from Google & they still follow their hide, acknowledge then disappear
CRM. This comes up a lot since credit cards don't always work well when you
try to charge $2k every 5 hours. Adwords has all sorts of bugs that appear
when the banks get suspicious about these.

~~~
patio11
A bit of context for folks who don't know the back story: Netcan is (or works
for) a fairly significant AdWords spender. (He has a few comments about
AdWords on HN which are worth reading.) I spent about $6k on them in 2009, and
they're directly responsible for about 40% of my revenue and 1/3 of my
profits.

My comment above which on second reading appears to be sarcastic and
exaggerated is a _literally accurate account_ of what I went through last
August.

See generally <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790800> or
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791003> and the blog post linked from the
second comment.

Full disclosure: I am a case study for how effective AdWords is.
[http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard....](http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard.html)

(And I'll say this: despite having worse customer service than the Japanese
immigration authorities -- whose three part mission statement includes the
words "Forcibly expelling undesirable foreigners from our nation" -- AdWords
was and is the best advertising option that has ever been invented for small
businesses.)

Edit to add: On review of the posts I remembered, I realized that I appear to
have mentally conflated netcan with a HN member named netsp. My apologies for
my memory being dyslexic.

~~~
netcan
Netcan & netsp are the same person (me) so it does apply. (sorry about that, I
updated my profile to show this)

You make an important point. This poor quality of service from Google hasn't
affected their revenue from this advertiser(s) at all. Actually, several times
a year the ads go down for a few hours due to a failed payment, CC issue or
some payment related adwords bug while I drop everything & try to get a rep on
the phone. I suppose that ads up to a few grand per year. But.. these are
highly competitive areas. If we aren't on the page someone else is for a
marginally lower CPC.

BTW, your case study link doesn't work

~~~
patio11
_BTW, your case study link doesn't work_

I fixed it. My apologies for the typo.

~~~
netcan
"We are literally the case study for adwords effectiveness." Awesome.

Does conversion optimizer really work that well for you?

~~~
patio11
_Does conversion optimizer really work that well for you?_

I speak three languages and still don't have words sufficient to praise
Conversion Optimizer. Are you in a mood to tolerate rabid, missionary zeal at
the moment? Because if you are I can talk CO all day.

~~~
pchristensen
Please, please write a big long post on kalzameus for the world to see! Taking
20 min to read one of your articles is better than taking 20 hours scouring
the internet reading conflicting sources none of which I entirely trust.
Please!

------
ShabbyDoo
The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area
Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable
business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide
a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He
ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for
salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business --
$6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value
so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it.

Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide
better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be
provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could
somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion.

I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It
would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of
pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and
net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a
month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in
efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.

~~~
qeorge
_Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords_

This is a brilliant idea, and I would be shocked if Google doesn't have plans
to do so.

~~~
prawn
<http://www.reachlocal.com.au/> use AdWords campaigns and customised phone
numbers to track referrals by phone. Client of mine use them. Not quite as
"all in one" and affordable as AdWords+Voice would be, but the same sort of
thing is being done by a third party.

------
apowell
In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more
expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so
complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their
own campaign without relying on outside consultants.

~~~
qeorge
_it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected
to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants_

Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average
business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without
training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite
learning curve.

~~~
jwesley
That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local
verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website
optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against
them.

------
stuntgoat
Send the google ad link to a page with an alt phone # or alt email. You can
track the calls or emails per impression that way.

( or ask new customers how they found you )

