Intelius, Not So Intelligent

Type in virtually any first and last name into Google and you’ll almost certainly see an AdWords placement from Intelius with the alluring headline “We found [David Rodnitzky].” You are then sent to page where you can pay money to get information about this person, though I’m not entirely sure how accurate this info is, since this is clearly an auto-generated ad.

Today, however, I saw an Intelius ad that didn’t quite hit the mark, though it did hit the “Mac.” See below:

 

Google: Much Better at Helping You Spend Money than Saving It

Over the last few months, Google has released a series of enhancements to AdWords that have enabled advertisers to see the full value of their AdWords spend. In particular, there are two improvements to the AdWords user interface of note:

• “Many per click conversions” – you can now see if a user has purchased more than once from your site during the AdWords cookie window;
• “View through conversions” – when someone sees a banner ad on the Google Content Network, but doesn’t click, and then later converts on your Web site.

These are useful metrics, don’t get me wrong. The more I can see the true number of conversions that resulted from a click, the more I can bid on that keyword and thus capture more market-share. And of course that’s great for Google too, as they give advertisers more reason to spend more with Google.

Interestingly, however, when it comes to metrics and tools that would help advertisers save money, Google has been slow to implement needed improvements. Here are a few examples:

• The current keyword research tool has a drop down box that enables you automatically add negative keywords to your campaign or ad group – the new version of the keyword tool no longer offers negative keyword addition;
• Despite the fact that Google Analytics easily integrates with Google AdWords, there’s been no effort to provide “multi-channel attribution” – that is, to only give partial credit to Google when a sale has resulted from other Web sites, like YSM, a comparison shopping engine, or a banner campaign.
• The new (and useful) “see search terms” functionality in the AdWords UI auto-defaults new negative keywords to “exact match” and auto-defaults new keywords to “broad match.”
• The geographic performance report in AdWords reporting only allows you to look at data on a “daily” basis, which makes it virtually impossible to draw conclusions if you don’t have an Excel macro or pivot table to roll data into a summary level.
• Any AdWords report that includes conversion data will not give hour of day information, making day-parting impossible without log files or other external data.

In other words, Google gives you lots of reasons to increase bids, but does an average to poor job of showing you reasons to cut back on CPCs. The problem I have with this situation, is that it ends up giving advertisers a false sense of success. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

Let’s say that you spend $100 and Google shows that you have five “multi-conversions per click” and three “view through conversions” for a total of eight conversions. So that’s a $12.50 CPA. But now let’s add a few more metrics currently not available from Google. First, let’s say that an analysis of multi-channel attribution shows that four of the conversions also visited YSM and two of the conversions visited Shopping.com. If we give 50% attribution to Google and the other converting Web site, six of Google’s conversions should really only be counted as three conversions, bringing the number of conversions from 8 to 5 and the CPA from $12.50 to $20.

Next, if we had readily digestible geographic data, we could have discovered that 20% of our cost came from states where we have never received a conversion in the last six months, and if we had accurate hour-of-day conversion data, we could have excluded 10% of clicks. Combined that’s a 28% savings on spend, so our five conversions should have only cost us $72.

The end result: the advertiser should be paying $72, and counting five conversions, but instead pays $100 and thinks that he has received eight conversions. It’s a win-win for Google (more spend and more conversion credit).

I don’t want Google to get rid of their tools and reports that help us see more data, I just want them to work equally hard to deliver information that may not always improve their bottom line. Giving people the good news without the bad news is OK in, say, North Korea, but I think its fair to expect a little more from Google!

 

Get Rich Quick – By Working for GM?

It’s a common technique for flogs (fake blogs) to use photoshopped pictures to misrepresent their product or business. I’ve shown examples of this in the past with the “American Anti-Aging Association” and their ever changing headquarters building.

Recently I’ve been getting a pop-up of a Google Cash scam with a hilarious photoshop. The company is called “Internet Payday” and their headquarters building is quite impressive. As you can see from the screenshot, they’ve got “Internet Payday” on the entry way at the bottom of the page and then at the top of the building they’ve got their logo:

What’s interesting about their building, however, is that it bears a striking resemblance to the GM headquarters, so striking in fact, that I have to conclude that either a) the architect who built the GM building used the same design for Internet Payday or b) this is a poor choice for a building to photoshop.

By the way, if you want to enjoy the whole site in all its glory, here’s the link to the page, and I’m giving them some free inbound linking: Google Cash Scam.

 

Where Can You Find America’s Best SEMs? Right Next to America’s Best Steakhouses, Of Course!

I love those ads in in-flight magazines purportedly ranking the top steakhouses, seafood, Italian, or brewpub eateries in the US. The concept behind these ads is simple: get 10 restaurants to pay you to rank them in the top ten, then pay about 50% of what they pay you to the airlines – you make money, the airlines make money, and the restaurants get people coming through the doors. So what if the ad obscures the fact that this isn’t an actual ranking of quality, but rather a ranking of who pays the most to get in the ad, right?

This “fake ranking” concept has now come to the SEM/SEO space. A company called “Top SEOs” is advertising on SearchEngineLand encouraging users to visit the site and see their rankings of the top SEOs, SEMs, local search, social media, and other experts. Of course, as the founder of an SEM agency, I was curious to see if somehow Top SEOs had included me in their rankings, but alas I wasn’t there.

Moreover, the rankings start to smell suspicious immediately. Many of the top pay per click management companies were totally new to me, and the data being reported was outright strange. For example, coming in at #17 was Efficient Frontier, with revenue of between $3-$5M a year and over 100 employees. I think that might be their monthly revenue (oh, and they listed the CEO from two years ago).

I then went to the advertising information page and found the answer I thought I would find: to be ranked, you need to buy a “membership” with Top SEOs – the minimum cost for a ranking for a year is $30,000! That’s a lot of payola, but I guess if hapless potential clients don’t know this is a paid ranking, it might also end up being a good investment.

It’s always difficult to choose service providers and companies like Yelp and ChoiceVendor – both of whom rely on unsolicited reviews from actual consumers and businesses – are a good albeit still imperfect way to discern differences. TopSEOs, on the other hand, is no different than the flogs promoting Acai berry diets, or any fake news show/infomercial you see on late night television. The objective is not to be objective, and that’s something that the SEM industry should object to!

 

Once Again, I am Not the Biggest Search Geek

Looks like for the second year in a row I am not going to win the Biggest Search Geek contest. I got 68% right, so a D-!

 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Apps

For years now, I’ve said that successful Web sites must have one or more of the following attributes:

1. Lower prices that offline competitors;
2. Greater selection than offline competitors;
3. Better ease of use than offline alternatives;
4. Offers a product that is embarrassing to use or purchase offline.

These all sound like easy things to achieve, but it’s actually a lot harder than it first seems. You can’t just magically make prices lower – you need to build operational efficiency; nor can you easily create online products that are easier to use than traditional offline products.

With that in mind, I would now like to take a moment to sing the praises of a few of my favorite online applications that solve attribute #3 – better than offline. As an aside, I am also going to give some free link juice to one of my clients, EchoSign, an electronic signature service, so let the FTC officially be on notice!

1. EchoSign – Sign Contracts Online! OK, I know I already mentioned that I’m biased here as EchoSign is a client, but honestly, electronic signatures save me a ton of time. I hate scanning documents, I hate faxing even more, and most of all I hate mailing things. With EchoSign, I upload a document (word, PDF, whatever), add someone’s email address, and then click “sign” and I’m done. Honestly this saves me at least five hours a month and the cost is like $20/month – totally worth it.
2. OpenTable – Reserve Restaurants Online! Who wants to call around to dozens of restaurants? I don’t. I love the user interface (keeps getting better) and I’ve gotten to the point that I rarely go to a restaurant unless I can make a reservation on OpenTable. Aside from the fact that the OpenTable CEO stood me up for a lunch meeting, I have nothing but love for OpenTable!
3. FreshBooks – Invoicing Online. Invoicing is another one of those necessary but evil parts of running a business. And since I hate mailing things, online invoicing is a must. FreshBooks is super-simple to use and I am waiting for the day that they expand beyond invoicing to actually take over the entirety of accounting, because QuickBooks is way beyond me.
4. Napster – I think we take music streaming for granted. Napster has millions of songs and it costs $5 a month – that’s just insane. No more sifting through used records stores for me – if I want that obscure 1969 Genesis album, I can get it in seconds.
5. CrossLoop – I stupidly installed the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta on my computer last week and when it didn’t work I couldn’t get in uninstalled. I went to CrossLoop and found a computer tech online who remotely fixed my computer for me in under an hour, for $40. The whole process from me breaking my computer to getting it fixed was about 90 minutes. Incredible.
6. Knewton and EDUFire. Want to study for the LSAT or GMAT from the comfort of your home, and get “adaptive learning” technology to boot (the teaching changes based on how you perform on test questions)? Knewton does that! And EDUFire offers live one-on-one or classroom teaching, so you can literally learn French from a guy in France if you want to.

So there you have it. What have I missed?

As an aside, the title of this post is an homage to a great book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, check it out!