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354 Winning Results with Google AdWords A Transparent World As the search metaphor bleeds into other realms, particularly into the commercial realm, consumers will grow increasingly impatient with artificial impediments to enlightenment. I used to think it was normal not to know where to find a particular item in a supermarket. Now, it makes me impatient. I think a supermarket should act like a search engine. Before too long, many of them will. Before the last round of the 2005 Masters golf tournament, commentators on the Golf Channel sat around the table responding to a deluge of emails on the subject of why no televised coverage was available of “leftover” Sunday morning play from the rain-delayed third round. These defenders of the status quo sided with the powers that be at CBS, making it clear that “full 18-hole coverage” means coverage of the leaders only, and plenty of gaps in coverage of players a bit farther behind in the pack. Since the leaders had not completed their Saturday round due to poor weather earlier in the tournament, they played as many as nine holes of their third round on Sunday morning before the fourth and final round began. CBS golf analyst Peter Oosterhuis—who, according to his bio, led the 1984 PGA tour in sand saves—told the Golf Channel team that “it’s simply not possible to show every hole of every tournament.” Yet viewers were obviously dismayed by the fact that they didn’t have the chance to view live coverage of Tiger Woods overtaking Chris DiMarco for the Masters lead on Sunday morning. That morning, Woods turned a five-shot deficit into a three-shot lead on the strength of a recordtying charge of seven consecutive birdies. This was hardly “every hole of every tournament.” It was the sort of drama golf fans spend all year waiting for, and years reminiscing about—if they get to watch it live, that is.11 In the short term, it’s no doubt true that neither the Augusta National Golf Club nor a network like CBS (nor cable networks for that matter) will bend over backwards to address logistical problems that result in disappointed viewers. In that sense, it will continue to be “impossible” to watch what they find inconvenient to show us. But to hear that making such adjustments is impossible rings hollow in this day and age. Just a few days before, after all, I’d been able to access a satellite photo of my street using Google Maps, absolutely free of charge. In a context where information and images of all types seem readily available on demand, expectations go up accordingly. Augusta National is a private club, and the networks remain powerful organizations that have every intention of playing by Augusta’s rules. That rules out, say, placing low-cost cameras in various spots around the course, or placing small cameras around the necks of caddies and various patrons so that enthusiasts could access coverage of any shot of any player in the final round of the tournament. But the principle here is that it’s less and less credible to claim that information and digital content are impossible to access. For better or for worse, in a full-disclosure world, you really cannot hide. And you come off looking silly and defensive when you try to.12 More recently, Google teamed with the International Olympic Committee to provide a dedicated channel for coverage of the Beijing Summer Games on YouTube, for countries that don’t have sponsored television broadcasts.13 As usual, Google finds itself in the center of the action. YouTube was allowed to sell ads around the content, but only ads from Olympic sponsors. Ironically, the channel was not viewable in China, underscoring Google’s delicate situation CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future vis-à-vis its Chinese operations, where human rights issues and Internet censorship practices generate still-simmering global debate. With the YouTube Olympics deal, in any case, we see the continuation of a trend towards Google making information available to parts of the world that were previously in the dark. Beyond mere sporting spectacles, wired observers of global happenings are uploading the news in text and video form to any number of blogs and platforms, including YouTube, NowPublic, Blogger, and Twitter. It’s been two generations since a famous photojournalist exposed the reality on the ground in Vietnam. Today, with a billion cellphones in our hands, the crowdsourcing of photojournalism diffuses the risk and increases the immediacy of media, with all of the positives and negatives that may entail. Notable examples include Generacion Y, a blog posted largely by a youthful Cuban blogger disguised as a tourist, from Havana hotels; and the case of James Karl Buck, a UC Berkeley graduate journalism student who may have precipitated his release from Egyptian prison by Twittering “Alive and OK, but still in jail,” following his arrest for photographing a demonstration. His 48 “followers” passed the news onto the U.S. Embassy and press organizations. In keeping with the transparency and immediacy of online search and information sharing, the fields of corporate online reputation monitoring and online public relations have emerged as rapid growth areas. Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible— whether that is accomplished by a single company or by a billion users working on a multitude of platforms—changes the way we live and work. The availability of data takes on truly mind-boggling proportions, providing answers to questions we didn’t even have ten years ago. It’s not only Google that is opening up these new worlds. Real estate search engine Trulia is just one among hundreds of startups that is creating a rich new database of information—backed by existing databases and user input—that didn’t previously exist at all. It is far from out of the question that these trends will deeply alter the way that public policy is made. Today, for example, measures of inflation might be based on an arbitrary governmentled data-gathering process. With enough committed members, a measure of “true” inflation as experienced by peers would not be that difficult to arrive at based on a willing constituency of participants willing to log purchases over the long haul. It’s not a matter of whether such data revolutions are possible—they are, in nearly every field—but more a matter of how they will be implemented, by whom, and how they might be used to help better our lives. The New Geography My maternal grandparents, and their parents before them, lived and worked on a farm near Seaforth, Ontario. In such tight-knit communities, especially for those who were lucky enough to live off the land in a fertile region, life was comfortable. A restricted set of choices was part and parcel of this relative prosperity, though. Banks, suppliers, and distributors could dictate the terms of doing business. Searching for different options meant nothing less than packing up lock, stock, and barrel and moving somewhere else. Business was transacted in places like Wingham, Blyth, Monkton, Goderich, and Mitchell, no more than 20 miles from home. It was an hour’s drive to the largest city in the region, London. They’d get there about once a year. 355 356 Winning Results with Google AdWords Life in farm country has changed fairly dramatically in spite of outward appearances. With the advent of e-commerce and online search, farmers do have the ability to compare banks, insurance companies, and other financial services. There is growing use of computer technology to monitor crops and animals. Families can investigate options for their children’s postsecondary education years in advance. The small, cash-based craft businesses or bed-and-breakfast operations that many rural residents run on the side, or as retirement projects, can be widely publicized online at low cost. Some will dabble in eBay transactions, making a few dollars here or there. Others will hit a rich vein of market demand and find themselves facing the challenge of running a growing business. My parents and I have lived in a variety of urban and suburban settings, much different from life on the farm. Even though we’re only 24 years apart in age, my work habits—and, perhaps, whole concept of professional geographic reach—are already considerably different from my dad’s. For a significant proportion of his life, he was fortunate enough to walk to his office only a few blocks away. His bailiwick, Burlington, Ontario, was local by definition. (Since my father is an urban planner by profession, though, it would be bad news if I were to write here that he didn’t have an advanced grasp of shifting concepts of work and geography!) He had the opportunity to travel to professional conferences in various North American cities, but it was nothing like the frequent airline travel of today’s business road warriors. From 1999–2004, after a long stint in graduate school got me used to the habit, I worked solely from home, while reaching a global audience of clients and professional contacts. (This flowed nicely from the precedent set in universities, where professors and graduate students were some of the first people to use email to communicate systematically and cheaply, and sometimes eloquently, with global colleagues. The main reason for this is that until the early 1990s, few outside of government, military, and university circles had free access to email.) Now, I divide time between home and a downtown office. In addition, a considerable amount of work gets done on airplanes and in hotels, or in the homes of family members I may be visiting for days at a stretch. Office space is used in increasingly flexible ways, and is more and more cost-effective for companies. In some companies, employees need only come in two days a week, and don’t even have regular desks (a practice known as “hoteling”). Wireless Internet connections, cheaper hosting, and increasingly flexible telecommunications technology are among the many shifts that allow companies to base office space decisions more around image and lifestyle concerns than around the old imperatives of productivity in a single place. Larger companies can get even more creative. Senior engineers for one technology company I know had their time earmarked for an 18-month project of immense importance, but they didn’t want to relocate to the new campus location near Los Angeles. They “commuted” by airplane for long one-day sessions on-site, once or twice a week. They worked remotely from their homes for another two or three days a week, hundreds of miles away. Unlike my grandparents’ farm (or my other grandfather’s machine shop), the business we do could theoretically be transacted anywhere, but it isn’t quite that simple. It feels like we have a choice as to the most advantageous way to “set up shop.” But these trends don’t diminish the importance of face-to-face contact. We are, in fact, face to face with more and more business CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future associates all the time, both online (virtual but increasingly lifelike social networks) and offline (face-to-face for real). And as Professor Richard Florida has shown, “creative clusters” in cities do matter, and there are greater challenges to remotely working in a Tofflerian “wired cottage” than many realize. The logic shouldn’t be too hard to follow. That hip plumber with the Blackberry still has to unclog your drain. And when that semiretired consultant calls me in the middle of the week from his second home near the lake (that has now become his primary address), let’s just say I’d feel a little more comfortable if he pretended to also have an office in a big city. The choices people have mean that talent does seem to gravitate towards certain kinds of cities today. In the old days, factories and buildings seemed to hire people. Today, a lot more workers choose a lifestyle, then find a job. That has translated into growth for wired fresh-air locales such as Bend, Oregon, and Victoria, British Columbia. It’s also meant a concentration of high-tech talent in places that have the best restaurants, neighborhoods, and culture: the usual suspects such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Toronto.14 Another habit I’ve picked up is that I work late. Not as bad as some hackers and scribblers who still can’t kick the 4 A.M. habit, but pretty different from my ancestors who had to get up to milk the cows. It’s anyone’s guess how rampant the practice of working odd hours is, but gauging from the habits of clients and colleagues, it’s not easy to pin down when someone is available. And more often than not, it’s important to get to know someone well enough to understand when they’ll be groggy and out-of-sorts on the phone, and when they’ll be primed for a productive meeting. For those uncomfortable with 9–5, the flexibility of working life today offers a variety of devices and excuses for behavior that might have been written off as bizarre 20 years ago. But by adjusting to different work styles, progressive companies might well be fostering a significant increase in productivity. All in all, businesspeople today need to take a flexible approach to their concept of geography. When one’s geographic focus broadens, one also becomes accustomed to a shifting concept of time, yet another development that presents both an opportunity and a burden to knowledge workers. I’m not here to argue that no one relies on local communities anymore or that no one punches a clock; in many cases, the ability to dominate a local market is a great advantage, and work schedules are more flexible for skilled freelancers and those in senior positions. But growth companies today will do well to re-evaluate preconceived notions of where or how employees should work, or where their best customers and best suppliers are likely to be located. Business Is Global Google is a great example of a company that operates globally and that facilitates the efforts of customers who want to operate globally. It’s perhaps trite to say it, but your company is going to find it imperative to explore international opportunities in the coming years. From the standpoint of AdWords, targeting searchers anywhere in the world is relatively easy. The flip side of that growth potential is that many businesses are not ready for it. A sales presentation for an Asian audience might require more than just verbal translation, for example. It might require credible imagery of local customers and other relevant cultural references. 357 358 Winning Results with Google AdWords Business Is Local Meanwhile, millions of businesses just want to operate in a single locale, or in a few cities. If you were to travel ahead five years, I think you’d be amazed at how many new ways you’d have to access information about local businesses. People’s habits will change, gradually at first, but eventually radically. The supposed decline of flesh-and-blood interaction is the supposed drawback of online culture. That myth will be turned upside down. Store clerks who mumble and condescend will be treated with increasing degrees of contempt from devicewielding information junkies. The visitor to Ikea will be able to access all sorts of comparative information while right in the store, including user reviews of the products. On the way to some of this advanced functionality, niche players who find a middle ground, providing relatively uncomplicated means of connecting customers with vendors, will thrive. Craigslist today is a simple, friendly online classifieds site that has enough following in several cities that users feel a sense of community and see enough listings that they keep coming back. Want a funky office space to sublet? Need a ride? That’s the type of thing you can get on Craigslist. This should probably be called Local Commerce 1.0. By the time we hit 3.0, we’ll wonder what we did without it. Whatever 3.0 means! For now, the crown for best local search site in the Web 2.0 era surely goes to Yelp, a startup that seems to get it. Considerable wealth has been amassed by the publishers of modest offline classified publications such as Auto Trader and The Buy and Sell Newspaper. When similar principles are applied more widely by more online entrepreneurs, the increase in economic productivity will be significant, and that next generation of “classifieds entrepreneurs” stands to become an order of magnitude or two wealthier than the previous generation. Work Is Decentralized Work-wise, we don’t live in a small town any more. I don’t see any particular evidence of a true loss of intimacy in people’s personal relationships, but what has been widely documented is the younger generation’s growing comfort level with weak ties to an ever-expanding social network. Online relationships, in particular, make it possible to have shallow relationships with a broad range of folks, while deepening and reinvigorating relationships with old friends and like-minded enthusiasts of one sort or another. Remote working relationships are, by now, commonplace, and the strange question of whether you really “know” someone you haven’t met face-to-face (or don’t see often) should be treated as something of a curiosity. Still, the pendulum definitely seems like it can overswing in some people’s work habits. There is a strange wisdom lurking in the methodologies of those of us who take extra trouble to pick up the phone and talk to someone, or to seek out face-to-face contact. I don’t see the rise of weak ties or the increase in dispersed project teams—and other contemporary habits—as mutually exclusive to the wisdom of focusing appropriately on “real” personalized attention. CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future Discussion Groups for AdWords Addicts You may find the following communities useful for discussion and networking on the topic of Google AdWords and related areas. The terrain shifts often, so there may be others worth a mention that don’t appear here. URLs also change too frequently to publish. ■ SEM 2.0, a not-for-profit discussion group for search engine marketers that I created and currently co-moderate, with Adam Audette, on the Google Groups platform ■ WebmasterWorld, privately owned by Brett Tabke ■ Search Engine Watch Forums, privately owned by Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC Communications + Mobility + Interoperability + Community = Productivity The Internet itself offered a common platform that could be used from virtually anywhere to contact like-minded individuals to collaborate or bond. The original discussion groups and text email messages had all of these characteristics. The explosion of those principles into all walks of life didn’t take place overnight. What has happened has been a recurrence of increasingly complex and powerful forms of collaboration, impossible to sum up in a catchphrase (“global brain” might sound trendy, but it might also miss the mark). No one format or channel reigns supreme, but the principles that make new formats and channels particularly powerful keep recurring. To this day, “letters to the editor” writers of the old-school variety fail to grasp these drivers of economic productivity. Well-intentioned critics mistakenly harp on the supposed “mania” to “make workers more productive.” This isn’t what it’s about. Rather, it’s about harnessing friction-reducing, iterative, learning systems that achieve goals faster. It’s also about the rise of “post-material” values even amidst much material global deprivation.15 In relatively wealthy societies, people have a strong compulsion towards choice and self-expression. This is unlikely to change; indeed, even relatively poor societies have adopted such values. In a subtle way not always communicated to the outside world, people who work in Silicon Valley at companies like Google believe that by constructing powerful engines of economic productivity, they can sweep away outmoded methodologies that have kept much of the planet impoverished, much as advances in agriculture led to giant leaps in the standards of living in societies that enjoyed them. Investment in information technology over the past 30 years has reduced the costs of doing business, sometimes dramatically. As forms of information retrieval and communication (like search and email) get cheaper and cheaper to operate, the cost to start up a new business falls. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a noted advocate of this overall environment of lower-cost, ondemand web-based IT services, which he refers to as “cloud computing.”) The cost to find and 359 360 Winning Results with Google AdWords retain customers, the cost of searching for employees, the cost of running a wireless network, the cost of hosting a website, the low cost of creating custom programming with the LAMP Stack16 and beyond; these trends seem to offer a great deal of flexibility for new businesses to grow at much lower cost than previously. One outcome, for example, is that innovation and change are emphasized over continuity for its own sake. When it is much less expensive to shut down a mediocre business in favor of a new initiative, businesses won’t cling as long to unproductive units. As this occurs, the balance of power shifts. Many traditional monopolists lose their hold over entrepreneurs. But new power brokers will emerge. Google is one of those power brokers. You don’t really get to choose how history unfolds. Which types of companies become powerful (new media companies, say) and which lose their power (downtown office tower developers and local phone service providers, for example) is completely out of your hands and mine. But it can be fun to watch some traditional monopolies topple. Even more fun can be attempting to benefit from the new environment by exploiting new niches quickly and avoiding the same old ruts that used to force businesses to devote outsized amounts of their capital to basic infrastructure. Conclusion: What about Peanut Butter? At age four, I began a love affair with peanut butter that carries on to this day. Fairly early on, I discovered that I liked crunchy better than smooth. I also found that adding processed cheese slices to my peanut butter on toast horrified adults and tasted pretty good to boot. I credit the constant flow of protein with helping me get decent grades in high school while coming at least third in several regional cross-country ski races. (Unfortunately, I also liked potato chips, which, along with too much joke telling and book reading, got me bounced from the team.) I later upped the ante by adding dill pickles to the peanut-butter-and-cheese recipe. But there’s more to the story, much more. What kind of relationship do you have with peanut butter? If you’re young or relatively affluent, chances are you know a bit about what’s “good” for you and what’s “bad.” Growing up, we didn’t know anything. Peanut butter came with hydrogenated vegetable oil and plenty of salt and sugar, and that was that. Weird professors’ children ate that natural stuff and drank skim milk from powder. We just assumed it was because they were poor. I consumed brands like Kraft and Squirrel, and some store brands. In the 1980s, I was introduced to Skippy. “Super Chunk” was surely sublime. It was also loaded with the same old hydrogenated vegetable oil. And icing sugar. Icing sugar! For the past ten years or so, I’ve been on relatively high moral and nutritional ground... or so I thought. I’ve been eating nothing but store-label “natural” peanut butter. Because I thought this was healthy (no hydrogenated oil, no sugar), I ate a lot of it... until I began to hear rumors that peanuts are loaded with pesticides. I began paying far too much for tiny jars of organic peanut butter, until further Internet research convinced me that regular natural peanut butter is perfectly fine and subject to regular government testing. You see a lot of rumors flying around and little in the way of solid facts. Sites like peanutbutterlovers.com are actually run by peanut farmers’ marketing boards. The state of CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future information on peanut butter does seem to be relatively undeveloped. It has been a long time since anyone as great as George Washington Carver has turned his attention to the peanut. What we have here, I believe, is merely one example of an emerging market demand: a demand for better, healthier, more interesting peanut butter, and preferably not in a tiny overpriced jar.17 It’s a relative micromarket for now, but it could be a lucrative one. (Think pinot noir, zinfandel, syrah, or some other once-obscure wine variety.) It’s a demand, moreover, that some large companies have had an interest in resisting. But the tide is turning. As recently as 2004, this peanut butter connoisseur felt himself hitting a wall. Sure, he was a bit more educated about the gooey brown paste than he was a year earlier. But he still didn’t have access to a wide product selection. He didn’t have access to discussions and debates about peanut butter. There were seemingly no clubs. Seemingly no tastings to attend. Few if any awards to be won. No Hollywood blockbusters about yuppies making their way through “peanut country.” The ensuing four-year period in peanut butter history proved Dr. Tomkins’18 point about the explosion of user-generated content just about as well as anything else you can imagine. A vast Long Tail of peanut butter information mushroomed out of nowhere, and coincidentally, I began noticing peanut butter references in a way I hadn’t before. From my vantage point, peanut butter references started popping up everywhere. I realized that the planet wasn’t short on variations on peanut butter, or peanut butter metaphors. By sharp contrast with the exploding, chaotic world of grassroots peanut butter references, corporate and industry sites devoted to peanut butter often seem grotesquely uninformative. Even when they aren’t, they feel like they’re hiding something. And in a way, they are. They wish you didn’t have access to huge amounts of information about their product and their industry. But you do. How are you going to make use of it? Peanut butter, hauntingly, found its way into the daily discourse of the industry press and the search blogosphere. A now-famous memo by Yahoo VP Brad Garlinghouse criticized the company for spreading its efforts too thinly, “like peanut butter.” He also said that he hated peanut butter. I discovered that a search engine optimization expert and author named Aaron Wall was such a lover of this food staple that he has many times referred to himself (not hater Garlinghouse) as “peanut butter man.” For Christmas in 2007, Page Zero staffer Scott Perry was kind enough to send me eight jars of specialty peanut butter from Minnesota-based gourmet peanut butter retailer P.B.Loco. I realized that in my quest for better peanut butter, and for a peanut butter community, I was not alone. But I also realized that my half-hearted quest of 2004 had been—to use T. Boone Pickens’ term—pathetic. Instead of ferreting out all the peanut butter information and community I could find, I just sort of sat back and waited for 2008 to come. I admit it: I’ve been conditioned to accept “reactive” research and community provision as the norm. Bring me the info, and bring me like-minded people, Mr. Internet! I’ll be here, waiting impatiently. Not only is “Google making us stupid,”19 it appears the trajectory of constantly improving information retrieval, and easily accessible community, is getting me connected without me having to lift a finger. Is the social media world also making me socially lazy? Or can I have it both ways? Can I enjoy the benefit of increased information flow while avoiding the atrophy of research and human rapport 361 362 Winning Results with Google AdWords skills that could come with the reduced burden on me? And how will I avoid a descent into trivial pursuits if I let the Long Tail into my formerly truncated worldview? Today (see Figure 12-4), you can perform a search for YouTube videos related to “peanut butter,” right from the Google Search interface if that’s the way you prefer to search. Here, you’ll find around half a million peanut-butter-related videos. Yep, 500,000! If you search the same term from the YouTube interface, the count is only 16,000. Perhaps an issue I’ll have to take up with the Google/YouTube product teams at some point. It appears that not a single person has uploaded a video of themselves rubbing peanut butter on their bald head, as I encouraged in the first edition of the book. One video appears of a woman rubbing peanut butter into her navel. She has a number of fans. (Combined, the terms “navel” and “belly button” account for about 7,000 available videos on YouTube.) Fact: Even natural peanut butter will keep for two to three months without being refrigerated. But it does need to be kept in a relatively cool, dry place. If you put your peanut butter in a wine fridge to ensure that you get the temperature just right, you’re well on your way to yuppie peanut butter connoisseur status. FIGURE 12-4 Searching for “peanut butter” videos archived on YouTube, from the Google Search interface CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future The future of peanut butter—I hope—will be fascinating. Big brands and industry groups will fight the tide of increasingly informed and demanding consumers. Niche brands will rise, and sometimes be acquired by the big guys. Enthusiasts and communities of enthusiasts will be frustrated by the gulf between forms of online gratification and old-school advertising, brand control, and shelf space domination. Speaking of shelf space, old-school ad agencies types have, of late, desperately equated search results pages and other targeted online venues with “shelf space,” counseling their clients that their goal is to “dominate the digital shelf.” While the advice to buy additional exposure in targeted online media is certainly sound, the analogy is misplaced. There is no way to monopolize the search universe, and no way to block out undesirable information. To close on a philosophical note, it may be fair to say that two guiding principles have driven the politics and economics of modernity: respect for persons (Kant), and the elimination, insofar as it is possible, of distorted and manipulated communications (Habermas) on the long road towards an “ideal speech situation.” Fighting those powerful forces can be very costly indeed, especially in an era where you can go from 0 to 500,000 publicly available videos about “peanut butter” in the space of four years. Companies that hope to freeze time and keep consumers in the Mad Men era of Madison Avenue circa 1961 will, to enlightened searchers, possess all the credibility of Burma’s20 generals. For smart companies, the opportunity remains vast. Some marketers may remain liars, but best to pursue that in its most positive, playful connotation. Endnotes 1. Hugh McLeod, “How to Be Creative,” Manifesto at ChangeThis.com, October 19, 2004, at http://www.changethis.com/6.HowToBeCreative. McLeod recommends creative types avoid bohemian ghettos and full-time immersion in their art; in other words, you can still “go for it” while sticking to your day job, or school, thus greatly reducing risk and servitude. 2. For more, see Eric Alterman, “Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper,” The New Yorker, March 31, 2008. 3. Carol H. Weiss, “Knowledge Creep and Decision Accretion,” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 1(3): 381–404. 4. In the words of one copywriter from Turkey: “Google is my best friend! Google is my best friend! Google is my best friend! Google is my best friend! Google is my best friend!” From Kevin Roberts and A. G. Lafley, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands (Powerhouse Books, 2004), 182. 5. For Google’s announcement, see Sundar Pichai, “A fresh take on the browser,” Official Google Blog, September 1, 2008. Archived at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/ fresh-take-on-browser.html. 363 364 Winning Results with Google AdWords 6. Marc Andreessen, “Open Social, a New Universe of Social Applications All Over the Web,” October 31, 2007, http://blog.pmarca.com. 7. I took a slightly different view, asking what the company would be worth if it faced significant litigation and were forced to pull 70% of its content offline. My take was that Google was quietly valuing YouTube at $5 billion or more, while getting a bargain price from the founders using the “potential litigation discount” as a bargaining tactic. See Traffick.com, “Meet Google, World’s Largest VC,” October 9, 2006. 8. Source: comScore. 9. John Heilemann, “Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google,” GQ, March 2005. 10. Source: comScore, Top 50 Web Properties in the U.S., March 2008. 11. Anti-CBS opinion from competing news organizations was easy enough to find with a couple of mouse clicks over to Google News; viz., Kevin Scarbinsky, “CBS Needs More Journalism, Less Genuflecting,” The Birmingham News, April 11, 2005; Bob Harig, “Ratings Soar, Not Coverage,” St. Petersburg Times, April 12, 2005. 12. For a deeper exploration of this theme, see Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business (Free Press, 2003). 13. Loretta Chao and Jessica E. Vascellaro, “YouTube Strikes Online Olympics Deal,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2008. 14. So-called “gay-index” research has discovered that high-tech talent is attracted to cities which, for similar reasons, are home to large gay populations. Richard Florida, formerly a regional economic development professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, discovered that economic development was driven as much by where workers chose to live as it was by where companies decided to locate. He further discovered that indices of high-tech economic development generated a list of cities that looked very similar to the list of cities with large gay populations: San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC. See Bill Catlin, “Gay Index Measures High-Tech Success,” Minnesota Public Radio, June 5, 2001, archived at news.minnesota.publicradio.org. Subsequent to Florida’s early work, he gained prominence as he published books such as The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002), his groundbreaking work highlighting the success of cities ranking high on measures of tolerance, arts and lifestyle, and technology; The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent (Collins, 2005), a thinly veiled indictment of Bush Administration labor market policies, immigration CHAPTER 12: Online Targeting 1995–2015: Fast Start, Exciting Future policies, intolerance, and fiscal policies; and Who’s Your City? (Basic Books, 2008), a reinforcement of the point that where you live matters enormously to your opportunities and personal development. Recently, Prof. Florida has moved to my hometown to take up a position as the head of a newly created research unit at the University of Toronto Joseph P. Rotman School of Management. He is a fan of our city’s funky neighborhoods, such as Kensington Market, and its legendary Manhattan-like diversity. For an antidote to this viewpoint, see the counterintuitive, but no less empirical, perspective on technology entrepreneurs who have escaped the main hubs to work in far-flung, lowercost, tech-friendly havens such as Bend, OR, Albuquerque, NM, Overland Park, KS, and Oklahoma City, OK, in Om Malik, “Escape from Silicon Valley,” Business 2.0, November 10, 2004. The purported advantage these alternative business hubs have—such as cheap or free broadband access—will soon seem trite as this access spreads. Theories that speak to the clustering advantages of some locations seem to be triumphing over reclusive virtuality. 15. See “Does Values Research Explain Where Global Opportunity Lies?” Traffick.com, February 17, 2006. The underlying research on “post-materialism” has been led by Prof. Ronald Inglehart for many years. 16. The LAMP Stack is a web programming term that refers to the concomitant use of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/Python/PHP; respectively, all open-source or open-sourcefriendly server operating system, web hosting environment, web database programming, and custom programming languages. Beyond the LAMP stack lie similar programming languages such as Ruby on Rails that increasingly allow companies to hire programmers to customize applications, but without the licensing costs and restrictiveness associated with traditional proprietary languages and systems (such as Microsoft’s .NET architecture). 17. Micromarkets based around a single fruit, vegetable, or legume seem to be one example of an “enthusiast area” that is currently underserved and perfectly tailored to online marketing. On the weekend of Saturday, August 27, 2005, 25,000 visitors once again descended on Zurich, Ontario, population 860, for the annual bean festival. It should be noted that Zurich is not The White Bean Capital of Canada. That distinction goes to Hensall, a few miles down the road. One of the experts cited in this book (who shall remain nameless) is a regular attendee of the Stockton Asparagus Festival in California. The festival’s website estimates that the festival has a $19 million economic impact on Stockton. 18. Yahoo’s Chief Scientist. Remember? 19. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, 56–63. 20. Myanmar’s, to some. 365 This page intentionally left blank Index References to figures are in italics. A accounts campaigns and ad groups, 102–103 historical performance, 141–142 setup, 103–105 sharing campaign access, 105–106 accuracy, 224 ad groups, 102–103, 116–120, 138 granularity, 121–122 limits on keywords per ad group, 120–121 multiple managers, 122 naming, 125 organization and bottom-line performance, 123 overlapping keywords in different ad groups, 124–125 post-click tracking, 123 reevaluating structure, 125–126 ad networks, 14–15 ad placement, 215–216 ad position, 99, 203–205 ad rotation optimizer, 108–109 ad scheduling, 210 ad space, 216 ad tone, 216–221 Adapt, 205 AdGooroo, 188–189 Adhere, 12 AdRank, 133 ads, writing, 126–127 AdsBot, 148–149 AdSense, 21 non-disclosure of details, 62 advertiser needs, vs. user needs, 52–53 advertising history of advertising on the Internet, 7–8 limits, 6 traditional vs. nontraditional media, 10–11 AdWords, 20–21 Application Program Interface (API), 65 early version challenges, 50–52 ranking formulas in previous versions, 138–139 start of, 33–37 AdWords Editor, 208–209 AdWords Select, 52 affiliate marketing, 159–160 algorithmic changes, 22–25 Allen, Ray, 89 AltaVisa, 19, 40–41, 45, 82 Amazon, 348–350 American Blind v. Google, 259 Analytics. See Google Analytics Andreessen, Marc, 342 AOL, 350 AOL Search, 46 appropriateness, 229 aQuantive, 64 arbitrage, 144–145, 164 367 368 Winning Results with Google AdWords Ask.com, 15 Atlas Search, 205 auctions, on keywords and phrases in real time, 93–94 August National Golf Club, 354 authenticity, 8 average ad position, 94 awards, 13–14 B B2B campaigns, 160 B2C campaigns, 161 Ballmer, Steve, 12 Balogh, Ari, 351 banned items, 57–58 See also editorial policies banner blindness, 80 banners, clickthrough rates (CTRs), 79 Beckwith, Harry, 328 bid discounters, 96 bid management tools, goal-based, 205–207 bidding at the keyword level, 207–208 bidding strategy, 205 bidding wars, 99–100 bid-for-placement advertising, 46 bids, upping, 253–254 The Big Red Fez (Godin), 90, 298 billing, 94 Blekko, 42 Blink (Gladwell), 144–145 The Boston Globe, 12 bounce rates, 273, 274 brand impact, testing, 238–239 brand lift, 13 Braverman, Jeff, 328–330 Brewer, Eric, 41 Brin, Sergey, 9, 24, 44 broad matching, 125, 183–184 one-word broad matching and negative keywords, 249–250 two-word, 248 See also expanded broad matching; matching options Buck, James Karl, 355 budget, daily budget setting, 106–108 Budget Optimizer, 157 business type, 286–287 business-to-business campaigns, 160 business-to-consumer campaigns, 161 buy-words, 96 C Calacanis, Jason, 17 calls to action, 231–232 testing, 235 Campaign Summary, 98 campaigns, 102–103 Ad Scheduling and Serving, 108–109 business-to-business (B2B), 160 business-to-consumer (B2C), 161 content targeting, 110–114 country and language, 114 daily budget setting, 106–108 Edit Campaign Settings screen, 106, 107 information publishing, 163–165 local, 162–163 naming, 125 professional services, 161–162 search network partners, 109–110 sharing access, 105–106 case studies, 143–145 Brian’s Buzz, 169–171 FourOxen Corp., 172–173 HomeStars, 147–150 media company, 145–147 category pages, vs. single-product pages, 321–324 Chrome, 340–341 Churchill, Christine, 189 clarity, 216 classified advertising, spending, 11–12 click auction, 47 click volume, 173–175 Clickable, 205, 206 clicks, 95 Index clickthrough rates (CTRs), 56, 95, 140–141 balancing with ROI, 221 banners, 79 for content targeting, 111 forecasting, 175 Clif Bar, 8 cloud computing, 359 Comedy Central, 258–259 competition, 210–211 competitive intelligence, 188–189 comScore, 16, 84 Confessions of an Advertising Man (Ogilvy), 217, 218 consumers, 4–5 content bidding, 113 content targeting, 110–114 ads appearing near content, 254–258 current affairs, 258–259 contextual advertising. See content targeting ContextWeb, 261 conversion, barriers to, 299–300 conversion environment, 328 Conversion Optimizer, 208, 274–276 conversion rates, 100–101 forecasting, 175 launching a conversion improvement program, 253 typical, 320–321 conversion scientists, 283 copywriting, 301–303 See also writing ads cost per acquisition. See CPA cost per action. See CPA cost per click (CPC), 95, 278–279 on different matching options, 185 forecasting, 173–175 cost per order, 270 country, 114 CPA, 88, 170, 270 CPC. See cost per click (CPC) CPM, 87–88 crawlers, 39–41 credibility, 220 CTRs. See clickthrough rates (CTRs) customer relationship strategies, 168–169 D The Daily Show, 258–259 dayparting, 209–210 design cues, 303–304 differentiation, 237 direct mail, 90 direct marketing, spending, 11–12 disapproved keywords, 203 discussion groups, 359 dmoz.org, 41–42 double serving, 124–125, 130–131 DoubleClick, 14–15 Douglas, Diana, 163 E eBay, 348–350 economists, 297 editorial policies, 34–35, 57–58 See also privacy policies editorial review, 127 automated vs. human, 130 delays and special rules, 129–131 double serving, 130–131 network partners, 130 ramp-up timelines, 130 responding to disapprovals, 127–128 tips, 128–129 Eisenberg, Bryan, 286, 287, 297, 298, 299 emerging trends, 339–340 enhanced smart pricing, 112–113 exact matching, 183 See also matching options Excite, 40, 81 expanded broad matching, 56–57, 200, 248 See also broad matching eye-tracking studies, 79–80, 203 369 370 Winning Results with Google AdWords F Fathom Online, 95 feed management, 19, 47 feedback, 35–37 cycles, 86–87 filtering, 229–231 FindWhat, 49 first-page bids, 152 Fishkin, Rand, 18 fixed minimum bids, 150–151, 152 flair, 232 vs. flat, 237–238 Fogg, B.J., 325–326 forecasting alternative to, 175–176 clickthrough rates and conversion rates, 175 cost per click and click volume, 173–175 FourOxen Corp., 252 Fox, Nick, 23–24, 60–61 Free Prize Inside! (Godin), 85, 156, 263 futurism, 335 G Gauthier, Paul, 41 GEICO v. Google, 259 geotargeting, 77 Gladwell, Malcolm, 144–145 Gmail, 258 goals, 165–169 Godin, Seth, 7–8, 17, 84, 87, 90, 156, 238, 263, 298 Goldman, Eric, 259 Golf Channel, 354 Google competitors, 345–347 current competition, 50 dominance in the marketplace, 81–83 and DoubleClick, 14–15 editorial policies, 34–35 future of, 64–65 history of, 9–10 mission statement, 56 responsiveness of, 35–37 service revolution, 62–64 share of advertising online, 9 Google Ad Planner, 261–263 Google Advertising Professionals (GAP), 63 Google AdWords keyword tool, 185–187 Google Analytics, 61, 92 core metrics, 273–274 goals, 272–273 testing sophisticated theories with, 276–277 vs. Urchin, 271 See also web analytics Google Base, 54–55 Google Book Search, 348–349 Google Checkout, 341 Google Chrome, 340–341 Google Conversion Tracker, 256, 274 Google Labs, 343–345 Google Maps, 343, 345 Google Print, 348 Google Product Search, 341 Google Search, 43 Google Suggest, 344 Google Universal Search, 54 Google Website Optimizer, 61, 90, 311, 313 planning and executing a multivarate test with, 313–319 See also multivarate testing Googlebot, 43 Googleplex, 24 GoTo.com, 46–47 Guerrilla Marketing (Levinson), 76 GWO. See Google Website Optimizer H high-class arbitrage, 144 Hilburger, Jimmy, 89 historical performance, 141–142 Hitwise, 17 Index Hitwise Search Intelligence, 189 HomeStars, case study, 147–150, 336 Hopkins, Claude, 227 hot sectors, 327–328 human enforcement, 137 I IAB. See Interactive Advertising Bureau Icahn, Carl, 352 idealogues, 297 imagining the perfect ad, 213–214 impressions, 94–95 inbound links, 26–27 index spammers, 22–23 information flow, control of, 60–62 information publishing, 163–165 information scent, 287–289 Infoseek, 40 Inktomi, 18–19, 41, 47 Interactive Advertising Bureau, 155 Internet advertising, history of, 7–8 Internet neutrality, 49 interruption marketing, 7 See also surplus interruption intrusive advertising, 91–92 J Jaffe, Joseph, 3 Jaffray, Piper, 20 Jarboe, Greg, 18 K Kaushik, Avinash, 270–271, 308 Keane, Patrick, 11 keyword arbitrage, 144–145, 164 keyword brainstorming, 195–196 going narrow, 201–202 solving your target market’s problems, 196–199 variations, 199–201 keyword groups. See ad groups keyword inventory, 55–56 examples of unsold keyword inventory, 191–193 keyword research, 189–191 competitive intelligence, 188–189 experimentation, 192 generating a keyword list, 191 Google AdWords keyword tool, 185–187 KeywordDiscovery, 188 news, 189 software, 93 tools, 115–116 TV, 189 WordTracker, 188 Keyword Spy, 189 keyword stuffing, 23 keyword tracking, 209 keyword variations, 199–201 keyword-based advertising, 19–21 KeywordDiscovery, 188 keywords disapproved, 203 inactive for search, 142, 151 on landing pages, 324 limits on per ad group, 120–121 lowest-quality, 246–248 negative, 249–250 overlapping, 124–125, 130–131 status, 142 trademarks as, 259–260 L Lamberti, James, 84 landing pages, 122, 142–143, 289–294 design, 321–324 keywords on, 324 testing, 287 language, 114 LARABAR, 8 Levinson, Jay Conrad, 76 371 372 Winning Results with Google AdWords limits on advertising, 6 link farms, 23 linking campaigns, 18, 26–27 Live Search. See Microsoft Live Search Livingston, Brian, 83 local campaigns, 162–163 Long and Winding Road Study, 155–156 Long Tail, 192–193 See also tail look and feel, 328–330 LookSmart, 48–49, 261 M Marchex, 12, 261 Marckini, Frederick, 39 marketer mistakes, 279–281 MarketingSherpa, 17, 156, 163 matching options, 181–185 CPCs, 185 maximum bids, 96–97 McDonald’s, 223 media, traditional vs. nontraditional, 10–11 media buying, 353 media type, 215–216 Metacrawler, 45 Microsoft Live Search, 19, 38, 74 Miller, Scott, 307 Mills, Lee, 306 mindshare, 222 Miva, 15, 49, 261 multimedia ads, 13–14 multivarate testing, 226–227, 312–320 N naming campaigns and ad groups, 125 natural search results. See web index results negative keywords, 249–250 Net Words (Usborne), 227 network partners, 130 networks. See ad networks Nielsen, Jakob, 53, 80, 85, 286, 287 Norvig, Peter, 23, 75 Notess, Greg, 39 O Obama, Barack, 222 Obama Girl, 222 Occam’s Razor, 270–271 ODP. See Open Directory Project offers, testing, 235 offline marketing, 263–264 Ogilvy, David, 217, 218 online advertising size of the market, 12–13 types of online ad formats, 13 online control panels, 12 online conversion science, 283–284, 285–286 errors, 289–296 principles, 296–304 ontology, 117 Open Directory Project, 41–42 Open Text, 45 optimizers, 22 organic index listings, 20 organic results. See web index results organic searches, vs. paid searches, 27 Orkut, 341–342 overlapping keywords, 124–125, 130–131 Overstock.com, 297 Overture, 33–34, 38, 46–47, 56, 116 ranking formula, 138 P Page, Larry, 9, 44 PageRank, 23, 42–43, 73 pages viewed, 273 paid inclusion, 18–19, 47 in directories, 48–49 reasons for, 22–27 See also Inktomi Index paid search control over message, navigation, timing and exposure, 25–26 predecessors in, 44–50 ranking formulas, 137–139 paid searches, vs. organic searches, 27 Panama, 138–139, 260 pay as you go advertising, 89 PayPal, 348 pay-per-click model, 55 pricing, 87–88 permission marketing, 7, 84–85 Permission Marketing (Godin), 7, 84 persuaders, 297–299 persuasion, 300–301 copywriting, 301–303 design cues, 303–304 stereotypes, 303 Persuasion Architecture, 297, 298 phrase matching, 125, 184, 184–185 See also matching options Pickens, T. Boone, 352 placement targeting, 114 plumbers, 297–299 policies editorial, 34–35, 57–58 enforcement, 59–60 privacy, 58–59 See also editorial review pop-up ads, 58 portal suppliers, 41 portals, 15, 38, 81, 350–352 post-click tracking, 123 PowerBar, 8 powerposting, 118, 207–208 predecessors in paid search, 44–50 in search, 37–44 preferred bids, 97 pricing model in early version of AdWords, 51–52 pay-per-click model, 87–88 priorities, multiple, 221–224 privacy policies, 58–59 See also editorial policies professional services, 161–162 profit motive, 55 proxy metrics, 320 pure click arbitrage, 144 Purple Cow (Godin), 7, 27, 263 Q Quality Score, 56, 59–60, 134, 135 for ad ranking, 140–142 avoiding low initial scores, 202 details, 152 historical data, 136 and low CTRs on content placements, 258 opinion and arbitrary determinations, 137 predictive data, 136–137 as a statistic, 277 Quality-Based Bidding formula, 57, 135, 138, 150–153, 202 and instability, 276 R Ramstad, Bob, 89 rank-checking tools, 39 ranking formulas, 137–139 CTRs, 140–141 goal of, 139–140 historical performance, 141–142 landing pages and website quality, 142–143 ranking methodology, 22–25 Rashtchy, Safa, 20 reach, 16, 49 Real Media, 15 real-time auctions on keywords and phrases, 93–94 relevance, 22 request marketing, 84–85 return on ad spend. See ROAS 373 374 Winning Results with Google AdWords return on investment. See ROI revenue maximization, 56 revenue per click, 270 reverse bidding wars, 99 See also bidding wars ROAS, 269–270 ROI, 101, 269–270 balancing with CTR, 221 ROI marketing, 85–86 Rubel, Steve, 169 S sales-generation machine, 90–91 Sandberg, Sheryl, 53, 128 scheduling, 210 Schmidt, Eric, 44, 65, 351, 359 Scientific Advertising (Hopkins), 227 Scoble, Robert, 50, 169 screen real estate, 22 search, predecessors in, 37–44 search engine marketing affiliate marketing, 159–160 strategies for small vs. large companies, 157–159 value of, 155–157 search engine optimization, 17–18 search engine results pages (SERPs), 55 Search Engine Visibility (Thurow), 18 search engines, user growth, 16–17 search marketing, 10 ad networks, 14–15 multimedia ads, 13–14 search engine user growth, 16–17 size of the advertising market, 10–12 size of the online advertising market, 12–13 types of, 17–21 types of online ad formats, 13 search penetration, 16 search quality, 23 search results, 72, 76 separating from sponsored listings, 44 See also web index results SearchMonkey, 19 search-to-purchase scenarios, 72–78 seasonality, 327 segmentation, 277–278 Self-Counsel Press, 163 self-learning, 89 self-serve advertising, 89 Selling the Invisible (Beckwith), 328 SEM. See search engine marketing SEMPO, 155 SEO. See search engine optimization SES Awards, 14 share of searches, 16 Sherman, Chris, 39 Sherpa. See MarketingSherpa single-product pages, vs. category pages, 321–324 Site Match, 19 site search, 326–327 Skrenta, Rich, 42 Skype, 308–309, 348 Slegg, Jennifer, 21 social graph, 342 soft events, 312 sole advertiser, 193–195 spending classified advertising and direct marketing, 11–12 large companies, 10–11 split-testing, 233 sponsored links, 75 sponsored listings, 19–21 separating from search results from, 44 Spool, Jared, 287 Spyfu, 189 Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 325–326 statistical validity, 310–311 stereotypes, 303 Sterne, Jim, 270 Stevens, Mark, 85 Stockman, Marc, 284 story-telling, testing, 238–239 success, building on, 252–253 Index Sullivan, Danny, 17, 39 surplus interruption vs. user targeting, 4–6 See also interruption marketing Survival Is Not Enough (Godin), 87, 227 T Taguchi testing, 226 tail, 250–252 See also Long Tail targeted advertising, vs. surplus interruption, 4–6 testing, 126, 214–215, 232, 233 A/B or A/B/C, 306–312 brand impact and story-telling, 238–239 on calls to action and offers, 235 differentiation, 237 differentiation of ad copy from other ads on the page, 236–237 display URL, 239–240 flair vs. flat, 237–238 landing pages, 287 multivarate, 226–227, 312–320 protocols, 304–306 selling solutions, 237 split-testing, 233 statistical significance in, 241–242 syntax variations, 236 Taguchi, 226 tracking results, 240 variables to test, 233–235 word choice, 240 testing budget, 175–176 TheStreet.com, 284 thin-slicing, 145 third-party tools, assessing need for, 92–93 Thurow, Shari, 18 Tiger Direct, 156 time spent, 273 titles, matching to searched keywords, 228 Tolles, Chris, 42 Tomkins, Andrew, 337 tone, 216–221 Topiz.net, 42 total cost, 97 tracking, 240 how it works, 268–269 imperfections of, 269 metrics to consider, 269–270 post-click, 123 See also web analytics trademarks, as keywords, 259–260 Trader Corporation, 11 Traffic Estimator, 174 Tragedy of the Commons, 91 trends, 339–340 Twitter, 351 two-word broad matching, 248 Tyler, Nate, 23 U Under Armour, 8–9 Universal Search, 133 upping your bids, 253–254 Urchin, 272 Google Analytics vs., 271 Usborne, Nick, 227 user feedback, 35–37 fast feedback cycles, 86–87 user intent, 83–84 user needs addressing, 54–55 vs. advertiser needs, 52–53 user targeting, vs. surplus interruption, 4–6 user-generated content (UGC), 337 users, 4–5 catering to, 214–215 V ValueClick, 15 vanity searching, 100 Vertster Clickthrough Rate Validity Checker, 310–311 visibility, 203–205 375 376 Winning Results with Google AdWords W Ward, Eric, 18 web analytics explosion of the industry, 270–271 See also Google Analytics; tracking Web Analytics (Kaushik), 271 web credibility, 325–327 web index results, 72–73 See also search results web properties, 16 website quality, 142–143 WordTracker, 188 writing ads, 126–127 accuracy, 224 ad space, 216 ad tone, 216–221 balancing clickthrough rates with ROI, 221 clarity, 216 credibility, 220 imagining the perfect ad, 213–214 media type and location, 215–216 multiple priorities, 221–224 multivarate testing, 226–227 refining ads, 225–227 resources on copywriting, 227 six rules for better copy, 228–232 Taguchi testing, 226 testing, 214–215 tone, 216–221 See also copywriting Y Yahoo, 21, 48, 350 Yahoo Directory, 37–38 Yahoo Search Marketing, 38, 260–261 Yang, Jerry, 351 Your Marketing Sucks (Stevens), 85 YouTube, 342–343 more downloads: www.GFX.0fees.net