Google’s Right Hand, Meet Your Left Hand - AdWords Gmail Spam
AdWords for Dummies April 4th, 2008I use a lot of Google tools. Google Docs. Gmail. Google Calendar. Google Earth. Picasa. Google EarWax Remover. (OK, I made that one up.)
And of course AdWords.
So don’t get me wrong - I think Google makes some of the best stuff on the Internet. And most of it’s free (actually, subsidized by AdWords). So I’m sharing the screenshot below in amused fondness.
Get it? Google email service, Gmail, decided that the official Google AdWords Blog email, to which I subscribe, is SPAM!
That’s pretty hilarious, for my money.
The moral, if there is one: don’t feel too bad when your business does stupid things. You have good company. It’s more important to be personable than perfect. It’s more important to connect with your customers on an emotional level than to execute flawlessly.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:57 am
That is genuinely funny!
ADG
May 6th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I haven’t seen you address this little “gem”: Google apparently can’t count positions.
When having the keyword tool predict a position, it comes out way too optimistic. It says 4-6, I get more like 46 … and the keyword quality in the campaign is reported as “Great”. Well, charge that to Google’s marketing if you want.
Next, take a look at, say, the keyword report for a campaign. For four of the keywords in my campaign, the reports says the average positions were 6.9, 7.4, 12.0 and 10.0. Using the preview in the Ad Diagnostic Tool, I find positions 4 (or 6), 21, 27 and not displayed in that same order. (The “or 6″ means there are two sponsored links above the search results in addition to the 8 on the right.) In all cases, there are 40+ ads total.
Now it is okay and to be expected that the average position and the current position are somewhat different, but not by that much. I’ve repeated that exercise a number of times, and the results are much more stable than would be needed to allow for the difference. The report numbers should be correct because they should be derived from the real data collected over time. With a basis of only 13 impressions, 6 of which are for the best positioned first keyword, I should not be seeing 3 highly unlikely upward excursions of my ad from the twenties and worse to above or around 10.
Well, at least that keyword with the position 46 that I mentioned above is indeed reported somewhere in the 30s-40s.
Have you had any similar experiences?
Cheers, Jochen