Blogation

Once again, the Facebook ad team seems to be letting some, um, questionable ads through the approval process. Here’s one that I saw today. First, the ad itself – do you think this could be intended to confuse users as to whether this is a lead gen company or the government?

OK, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the headline writer was just a bit over-zealous. Let’s move on to the landing page here:

So the URL is “CriminalJusticeDepartment.org.” Um, yeah, there’s definitely some misrepresentation going on here. Of course, not surprisingly, after filling out all of your personal information you get to the inevitable list of for-profit schools from which you can get criminal justice degrees (which is tangential at best to joining the CIA).

But lest we just conclude that this is simply false advertising to the nth degree, our friends at the CIA/Criminal Justice Department have one more surprise in store for us – that’s right, malware!

So let’s recap – representing themselves as both the CIA and the Criminal Justice Department *and* throwing some malware on users’ computers. Paging the Google Quality Score department – Facebook is now hiring!

Google’s investment in Trada, a company that uses crowdsourcing to manage SEM accounts, raised some eyebrows in the SEM community this week. Is this part of a grand conspiracy to crush 3rd party SEM agencies? Is this an acknowledgement of Google’s failings internally at providing quality advice to clients?

My sense, simply put, is that it is not the former, and probably not the latter either. Let’s start with the first theory: Google wants technology/outsourcing companies to replace agencies. This is the classic “man versus machine” debate that has occurred since the dawn of the industrial revolution. What we’ve seen over time is that machine beats man when it comes to rote processes and man beats machine when it comes to ingenuity and thinking. The Model T production line replaced hand-building cars, but strategic consulting firms like McKinsey and high powered law firms and lobbyists continue to thrive despite great technical innovations.

Crowdsourcing may well be a way for top consulting firms to improve efficiency by outsourcing some menial tasks to the masses, but crowdsourcing cannot replace good strategic thinking and advice. Just as black box bid management algorithms cannot operate independent from a smart operator, crowdsourcing of keyword creation, bidding, and the like will always be beaten by crowdsourcing combined with smart management.

OK, theory #2: Google thinks crowdsourcing can outperform their internal teams. I doubt this one as well, mainly because I don’t think Google has enough self-awareness to realize that a large part of their AdWords support organization is largely useless to SEM experts. If they did, they would lay off about 90% of their staff in this department and use Trada to help clients, or just come up with more instructional videos.

My theory on the Trada investment revolves around the myriad of ‘local’ SEM companies out there – companies like ReachLocal, Yodle, and Orange Soda. These companies emphasize “quantity over quality”, meaning that they do an average job for thousands of clients, rather than a great job for dozens of clients. Inevitably this means that many clients end up pretty disappointed. Disappointed clients – especially SMBs just dipping their feet into SEM – may decide that the problem was not with their local agency, but rather with the very concept of SEM. As a result, they may decide to not only fire their agency, but give up on SEM entirely.

That’s a big problem for Google, since SMBs collectively can drive huge revenue and are still largely untapped. Moreover, Google definitely does not want to serve these companies through their AdWords support team, as this would not be cost-effective. The answer may well be a company like Trada, which can displace the poor service of local agencies without breaking Google’s support infrastructure. That’s a win-win for Google.

Saw this ad on my homepage when I logged into FB:

Offensive as this is, it gets worse because it takes you to this horribly crappy site:

Allegedly this is a charity, until you scroll down further:

It appears to actually be an MLM/Get Rich Quick/Work from Home Scam.

This was approved on Facebook? For sham, I mean, shame!

“Example” toolbar? Try “Fantasy” toolbar.

I got six emails from AdWords today inviting me to participate in a survey about AdWords. Three of the messages offer me a free Google mug or gym bag and three offered me a free copy of the book Web Analytics 2.0. Hmm, mug, bag, or book. Which do you think I should take?

Note: If you didn’t watch Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains, this post won’t make much sense . . .

Reality TV is usually quite removed from actual reality, but there are occasional glimmers of relevance. Such is the case with the most recent season of Survivor, Heroes vs. Villains. I came away with two distinct business lessons, which I impart to you now . . .

1. You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Russell, the ultimate Survivor villain, made it to the finals of the show in two consecutive seasons, and in each case, overwhelmingly lost in the final vote. In each case, he was adamant that he “deserved” to win because he had played the best game. He even argued that the rules of the game were flawed and that they should be changed to be more fair (e.g. to reward the ‘best’ player).

Russell apparently is a successful businessman so he should know better – you don’t get what you “deserve”, you get what you negotiate. His pompous attitude, relentless deception, and lack of a final game plan may have made him feel like he was the “best”, but he ended up winning the battle and losing the war.

2. Your Title Defines You. The concept of this season’s Survivor was to split past season’s “heroes” (people who acted nobly) with “villains” (people who were deceptive). Personally, I thought that the labels weren’t entirely accurate, in that some of the villains were pretty decent, and some of the heroes were downright jerks. What was interesting, however, about the labels, is that they made the contestants start to act like their categorization. Just like Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, calling someone a villain makes them act evil, and calling someone a hero tends to make them act nicely. The result: first off, the villains repeatedly justified their bad behavior my noting that they were the “villains tribe” and thus bad behavior was expected of them. Second, the heroes were completely manipulated by the villains, resulting in a final three made up solely of villains.

This sort of psychological shift happens in the business world when employees adopt the ‘personality’ of their business. This is known as the “agentic shift” and is why you frequently see perfectly ethical people acting quite badly when they are employed in unethical companies.  It’s no surprise that the same thing happened on a reality show!

I was in a client-pitch meeting yesterday and the potential client brought up the dreaded “performance pricing” question. For those of you who aren’t in the PPC agency space, the conversation goes something like this:

Client: How do you charge for your services?

Me: We charge on a percentage of spend, pretty typical of agencies.

Client: Would you consider a performance pricing plan, where we pay you based on your ability to incrementally grow our [revenue/traffic/profit]?

I’ve got a standard retort for this – one which is not just lip-service but something I actually believe in: I don’t do performance-pricing because it usually ends up being a lose-lose proposition for me. If I don’t hit the metrics, I don’t get paid, or get paid very little; if I blow performance out of the water – and the client suddenly owes me a big check – the client inevitably comes back and says he wants to switch to a percentage of spend pricing plan. I explained this to the client and added “Besides, if I was getting paid on performance, you’d have to make some major commitments to me in terms of landing page testing resources, tracking, and turn-around time.”

About ten seconds after I said this, a shock went through my body (no, the client did not taze me); my comment was the sort of thing that I had always reviled from big agencies. Think about what I had said here: I’ll manage your campaign for a fee that’s based on how much you spend, but if you want to hold me accountable for actual results, then I need guarantees about your commitment to making your site better.

To me, that’s a pathetic statement – the point of an agency is to do everything possible to drive client success, and if an element of success is internal commitment to testing, that should be a requirement to working together regardless of how the agency is paid. In other words, you have to be the client. You have to think of the client’s business as your business. The moment you start thinking about an agency-client relationship as an “us and them” interaction, its inevitable that you’ll make decisions that put the agency first and the client second.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an internal memo to my team about my approach to client relationships. I re-read it again today because I think I needed a refresher course. Here’s some of the highlights from that memo:

1. Be Proactive, Not Reactive: Anticipate problems, suggest initiatives, don’t wait for the client to do so. Once you start reacting to client requests instead of driving the conversation, you are toast.
2. Over-Communicate: Never assume that your clients – or your teammates or supervisors – know what you are doing. Send regular email updates, reiterate accomplishments on phone calls – do what it takes to make 100% certain that everyone knows exactly what you are doing.
3. Everyone is a Client: I am your client, your teammates are clients, and of course your clients are clients. If someone asks you for help, treat them like a client. If someone is upset, treat them like a client. Remember that a happy customer tells three friends, an unhappy customer tells 10.
4. Do More than the Bare Minimum: If a client asks you for 100 keywords, come up with 200. Doing the bare minimum fulfills the client’s explicit request, but implicitly shows that you are lazy.
5. Love the Client, and Demonstrate Your Love: Know your client’s business backwards and forwards. Learn about their business objectives, their competitors, their corporate structure. When you talk to the client, share your knowledge, they will love it!
6. Make Face Time: Make sure to email clients regularly and have regular phone calls. Never assume that clients are happy just because you haven’t heard from them in a while. Frequently the opposite is true.
7. Act Like Its Your Business: Before you recommend a $25,000 test that has little chance of success, ask yourself – if it was my money, would I make that recommendation? On a related note, ask yourself: given the effort and results I am getting for this client, if it was my money, would I keep working with PPC Associates? If not, make changes fast.
8. Be Honest: If you made a mistake, admit it (but also correct it beforehand); if you think a strategic shift is needed, share it. Clients want us to move their business forward, which means sharing both good news and bad news.

What would you add to the list?

Last week I spent two days at Conversion Conference, the first trade show dedicated to landing page optimization and Web usability (it’s about time!). I learned a lot at the show and it was a real treat to attend the closing keynote from Jakob Nielsen, who was introduced by Tim Ash as “The Godfather of web usability.” Indeed, my first exposure to usability came way back in 2002 when I read Nielsen’s then-groundbreaking tome, Homepage Usability.

Nielsen’s speech was pretty good, especially in that he reminded the audience that, while A/B and multivariate testing were great, we should never forget the value of good old qualitative user testing, something that I had, well, forgotten! After he finished, I was shocked to find only one person waiting to ask him a question, so I figured it was a great opportunity to ask him the one question I had always wanted to know the answer to: why is your Web site (UseIt.com) so, um, unusual (read: crappy).

I waited patiently for my turn and by the time the first lady had left, there was a line of ten or so people behind me. So I asked my question: “Why is your Web site so unusual? Have you done a lot of user testing? Would you recommend to others that they copy the look and feel of your site?” The guy in line behind me let out a sarcastic snort and said (loudly, so that Nielsen could hear him): “Oh God, here we go again – another question about your Web site!”

Nielsen is a true gentleman and quickly responded by deflecting the jerk’s outburst. “That’s a great question and a lot of people ask me that. The reason is that I’ve found that the people who I want to contact me will contact me anyways, and if I improved the site, I’d get a lot of contacts from people who would not be serious about hiring me for consulting.” In other words, Nielsen was arguing that he’s purposely made his site unusable to create a barrier to contacting him – only the most patient will manage to make it to the contact form.

I assume that the bozo behind me had heard this retort before, and he probably bought it hook, line and sinker. If I had had more time with Nielsen (I’m a nice guy, I wanted to give the hordes behind me a change to ask their questions too), I would have argued this point with him, because I think his explanation wasn’t really the real reason. What Nielsen was basically saying in my mind was this: I’m so busy, I get so many clients, that my Web site really doesn’t matter. People who want to find me will find me.

Of course, this is a silly argument. There are probably dozens of potentially high-qualified clients who see Nielsen’s Web site and immediately hit the back button. There are also some who probably give up instead of getting to the contact us form. If Nielsen wanted to, he could devote a lot of time to testing out UseIt.com and probably double or triple the number of qualified leads to his business. I suspect, then, that his site is not a clever user-experience designed to funnel only the right people through to the contact us page, but rather just laziness, or not having enough hours in the day to spend on his own site.

It struck me that I am largely in the same position with my SEM agency. Ideally, I should be buying AdWords for my own agency and driving business to my site. I currently don’t because I get enough word-of-mouth to keep my team busy. I suppose I could come up with a clever explanation for my lack of PPC (“I believe that referred clients are so much higher quality than marketing leads, so I choose not to advertise on Google”), but the truth is I just don’t have the time, or I’m lazy, or a little of both. Ironically then, the more successful you become in your field, the less time you have to use your skills on your own business.

It’s a nice position to be in, and I don’t fault Nielsen one bit for spending his time giving keynotes, writing books, and most likely receiving hundreds of unsolicited referrals and leads each month from his less-than-stellar Web site. And to the guy behind me that scoffed at my banal question, take a hint from Nielsen: the most successful folks in your industry are usually the most modest ones!

I had coffee yesterday with my good friend Willem who was taking a break from Facebook’s F8 Developer’s Conference.  What’s the latest Facebook news I asked? Well, it turns out, its the concept of an “open graph.”  Basically, that’s fancy tech language for integrating Facebook into millions of Web sites and vice versa. Here’s how it works, according to an article from eWeek:

Specifically, when a user clicks a Facebook Like button on a Website enabled by the Open Graph Protocol, the publisher will gain a link from the user’s profile, the ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook and analytics.

Facebook partners for the Open Graph that feature the Like buttons will push to Facebook information about items their visitors liked—for example, bands that users liked from Pandora, local businesses such as restaurants from Yelp and movies from IMDB.com. Information about objects users click on will appear in users’ profiles as items they endorse.

OK, cool you say, I can easily let my friends know how much I love a restaurant or a movie via Facebook. Great, but what does that have to do with Google and specifically Google’s AdSense product that basically funds millions of Web sites across the universe?

Well, there are three things that are important here. First, sending info from the Web into Facebook reduces the need to actually leave Facebook and surf the Web, so this accumulation of data could, over time, change user behavior to spending more time on Facebook and less on the rest of the Web. Why go to Yelp if you can see Yelp results on Facebook? Obviously, Yelp believes that there will be return-traffic, or else they wouldn’t agree to integrating so closely with Facebook, but I’m not convinced that this won’t result in a net decrease of traffic to Facebook partners. But let’s not dwell on this point, because it is the least important of the three points I want to make.

Point #2: Facebook’s increasing integration with other Web sites reduces the need to search for information through a search engine like Google. Getting recommendations from peers for restaurants, books, movies, hotels, etc right through Facebook is a more trusted way to ‘research’ a purchase than to simply do a search on Google and hope that either Google’s natural search algorithm or sponsored results will lead you down the right path. This was the concept between the failed launch of Facebook’s Beacon platform, and is basically the concept between Blippy, a “social shopping” site where you can see what your friends are buying. Beacon’s problem was two-fold – there wasn’t a clear opt-in policy and it was too crass of an attempt by Facebook to make money off users’ shopping behavior. This “open graph” however, doesn’t directly monetize users (yet) – it makes money off the advertising that results from increased Facebook page views. Additionally, there is no need for an opt-in because users are voluntarily uploading information to Facebook. Over time, Facebook will capture a large amount of “likes” and positive reviews of many products from your peer-set. This could eventually become a searchable comparison shopping engine of sorts, but rather than results being dictated by advertisers, the results are dictated by the recommendations of your peers. As users share more and more content from across the Web inside Facebook, the value of searching for products and services via search or via comparison shopping engines decreases.

But point #3 is the one that I find most interesting. As Web sites and Facebook become more and more intertwined, this opens the door for Facebook to use users’ behavioral, demographic, and geographic data to serve highly relevant ads to users off Facebook. Right now, the best solution for millions of Web sites is AdSense, which basically looks for semantic relevance within the contents of a Web page to serve up relevant ads (for example, if there’s an article about luggage, AdSense might serve up a Samsonite ad). Semantic relevance works pretty well, but most advertisers would probably pay more for behavioral targeting (BT), or better yet BT combined with semantic targeting. Google has attempted to apply some BT to their AdSense network (remarketing and interest-based advertising being two examples), but as I’ve noted in the past, Facebook is really one of a few places on the Web where users are almost 100% completely honest about themselves. Google doesn’t have this sort of accurate data, so it stands to reason that Facebook’s targeting will out-target any algorithmic results Google can generate.

A columnist in AdAge summed this point up quite nicely:

Imagine visiting Pandora and it already knows how to program your station. Or visiting CNN and having it know what kind of news to display for you. As a consumer, there are potentially many benefits of the initiative, making many experiences you have more and more relevant the more interactions you perform.

In order to make all of this happen, a significant amount of non-personally identifiable data will be collected from consumers and made available to approved developers and publishers (75 at launch). As you might imagine, there will probably be some backlash from people concerned about privacy (heck, people made a fuss over the Census). But the promise here is that your experience on the web will be better thanks to Facebook and its delivery of more customized, relevant content.

. . .

It seems to be an inevitability that all of this intelligence will one day be applied to power a socially targeted ad network as big (or bigger than) Google’s AdSense. It would be a network that would theoretically deliver even better results for advertisers, resulting in higher CPMs/CPCs/CP-whatevers that can deliver higher payouts to publishers, making a choice between the two platforms a not-too-difficult one for those publishers.

Competitors to AdSense have failed miserably in the past, largely because they haven’t been able to create a critical mass of advertisers and publishers to push profits higher for publishers to switch and volume high enough for advertisers to care (the classic chicken and the egg scenario). Facebook has – or will soon have – a critical mass of advertisers on the Facebook advertising platform. Combining this pool of money with better targeting for publishers around the Web may be the magic combination that out-monetizes AdSense. That’s a serious problem for Google.