Archive for the ‘pay per click’ Category


Easily Approachable and Quite Deep

Posted by pj on July 10th, 2009

Seth Godin writes

“There are very few products, services or organizations that are simultaneously easily approachable and quite deep. That’s an opportunity for you if you can figure out how to be both, but choosing just one is a more likely scenario. So, which are you?”

It’s a good question, here’s how I would answer:

The web seems really complicated but not to me. I just see it as a series of decisions that require particular expertise to do correctly. The best decision is the one that makes the next one seem more apparent. There is never going to be one person who is right about everything all the time. What’s important in doing a web site, or marketing strategy, or making any series of decisions is to make each one as close to right as you can so the next one is clearer.

We do that by first and foremost attracting the top talent in the region. Then we challenge them to do more, to understand the implications of these important decisions. Then we provide what we hope to be the top level of customer service for our clients.

The results are clear to me, some are big and some are small. I take a small amount of pride in knowing that we are growing while other web companies are going out of business or shrinking. But what I take the most pride above all is the relationships that I have built with those in the box with me, and the way we extend it to our clients. Of the huge number of sites we have helped produce, 99% of them are still online exactly as we launched them.

Key to our growth is the way we have extended our services beyond designing and programming websites. It is a complete array of services our clients need, and some they don’t. That’s the real Small Box difference right there, whatever people think they know about us, there is more.

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Posted in Everything Else, content management systems, culture, design, indianapolis, marketing, pay per click, search engine optimization, sem, seo, smallbox, technology, usability, web design, web development | 1 Comment »

Why does Google think web design means car insurance?

Posted by ben on June 25th, 2008
Why does Google think “web design” means “car insurance”? You might not believe they do which is why I took this screen shot to prove it:

Why would Google place Pay Per Click (PPC) text ads for Geico next to organic listings of my two favorite web design companies in Indianapolis (Small Box Web Design and Slingshot SEO)?

Google does pride itself on their “separation of church and state” i.e. their religious segregation of the non-paid, organic search departments from the paid advertising departments. Both paid and organic search use separate algorithms and Google has a strict policy of keeping the two branches incommunicado. Their professed goal is to keep the organic results “pure” and untainted by commercial interests. Are they trying to prove a point that organic listings really are separate from paid listings?

Or maybe the paid search algorithm blew a fuse? Or maybe it was part of a calculated strategy to increase ad revenue?

In my opinion it’s most likely the latter. But before I get into that, let me describe how it happened:

Screen 1:
Earlier today I Googled “car insurance” because it’s a very expensive click with fierce competition and I was curious to see who was organically number one and who was paying for the ad space to be alongside them. There was nothing too surprising: a bunch of organic listings for car insurance along side paid text ads for the same thing.

Screen 2:
Then out of vanity I googled “indianapolis web design company” to see Small Box at the top and also to see who was paying for the neighboring text ad real estate. Image my surprise when I found that Geico and Allstate were paying for that space!

Screen 3:
I thought, “Maybe Google’s PPC algorithm is broken and is just showing the text ads late.” So, I searched for “group health insurance” to see if local web design companies were listed next to insurance brokers. But there were no text ads for web design companies in Indianapolis.

You can see the sequence of search engine results pages (SERPs) in the three screen shots below:

What was going on?

After some searching I found a few blog posts addressing this strange Ad Words phenomenon. Turns out that for roughly a year Google’s been using cookies to track the search history of users even when they’re not logged into their Google account.

They then use this search history to create custom text ad listings that blend the previous queries. See this blog post to see how previous searches for “weather forcast” and “holiday to spain” listed text ads for Spanish weather forecasts. You can see this same sort of blending of searches in the last screen shot above. The searches “indianapolis web design companies” and “group health insurance” generated text ad #5 for a web design company targeting insurance agents and agencies that need a website.

In this article from last summer Google confirmed that they were tailoring text ad listings based on previous queries and the author is more than a little critical of Google’s lack of transparency in how they do it. It even looks like this prior search “feature” is coming to organic listings too.

But none of this fully explained or described what I experienced. The text ads alongside the listings of Small Box and Slingshot SEO were not a blend of “car insurance” and “web design”. You might think it’s a blend of “indianapolis” and “car insurance”, but Ad Words has been serving up geographically targeted ads based on our IP addresses for ages (to see an example of this look at the #4 text ad in the first screen when I queried “car insurance”). Instead the “car insurance” text ads completely trumped the “web design” text ads. Why?

I can’t prove it and haven’t done any testing that could even be remotely described as “scientific”, but I have a hunch that Google is doing this to squeeze as much money out of advertising as they possibly can.

On average, a text ad’s click following a query for “car insurance” can cost as much as $26, but a click for “web design companies” brings Google less than $5 – and a click for “indianapolis web design companies” will cost less than half that. So, if you were Google and had the choice of selling a click for $25 or for $2.50, which would you pick?

The cost per click for text ads displayed following a search for “group health insurance” is roughly $10. This probably explains why I didn’t see any text ads for web design companies alongside the organic results for insurance carriers and brokers.

This is clearly a nice feature if you’re an owner of Google stock and depending on the circumstances it could be a nice feature if you’re a search engine user (especially when the previous queries blend appropriately to deliver targeted results). But is it a feature you want as an advertiser?

If you’re Geico, do you want to be paying $25 for clicks that come from ads displayed alongside web design companies?

If you’re one of our unfortunate competitors that has to pay to get on page one, are you happy that your ads for a highly targeted search got trumped by ads for more expensive search terms?

Posted in google, internet marketing, pay per click, search engine optimization, sem, seo | 14 Comments »

ROI Comparison- Yellow Pages vs. Google (PPC and SEO)

Posted by jeb on November 29th, 2006

We sometimes encounter businesses who have a little sticker shock when we present them with a proposal in the thousands for their new website. They know they need a website but they don’t understand how it could possibly cost more than a few hundred dollars. Although they don’t have an issue with spending thousands on a Yellow Pages ad they aren’t convinced that they could see a similar or greater return with a website optimized for search engines. So, in this blog I compare ROI (Return On Investment) for the Yellow Pages versus Search Engines.

The Kelsey Group’s recent (03/06) study of how people look for needed services shows that Yellow Pages still has a strong grip on the market.

  • All consumers surveyed – print Yellow Pages, 61%; search engines, 12%; directory assistance, 12%; online Yellow Pages, 7%
  • Annual income over $75,000 – print Yellow Pages, 51%; search engines, 27%; online Yellow Pages, 14%; directory assistance, 6%
  • Teens – search engines, 47%; print Yellow Pages, 28%; directory assistance, 13%; online Yellow Pages, 9%

http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr060320.asp

But what you also see here is that those with a higher income are using search engines 27% of the time compared to 51% for the Yellow Pages. Teens, who are more comfortable with the web having grown up with it, are preferring search engines to the Yellow Pages 2 to 1. I think it’s a safe bet to assume that this trend will continue until the Yellow Pages’ market share is considerably reduced.

So if a company is investing $2000 a year we recommend that they look at what they will pay the Yellow Pages over 3-5 years and then re-allocate 25-50% of those funds to the web in the form of improvements to their website including SEO work (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click advertising). So in our sample case the company is spending $6-10,000 and should reallocate about $2-5,000 to the web depending on your client base. Also, it’s important to remember that a new website is a one-time cost and a quality site should last 3-5 years.

We would be happy to sit down with you to examine how you can more effectively spend your advertising dollars to reap the best possible ROI.

Posted in google, pay per click, seo | No Comments »