A Call From Google (Not a Question but the Moderators said to Put this Here)
-
This is not going to be a long post but I wanted to get something out there that a lot of other business owners might not understand. I have several different PPC campaigns that my business partner and I personally run. The campaigns are all doing quite well with a high rate of return.
Never has Google contacted me (other than for surveys, which I did wind up receiving 5 blue gym bags with the Google insignia on them) and never did I think they would. The campaign they called me on wasn’t a particularly large campaign. Right now the PPC spend is around 3000/month. I understand this isn’t a little bit of money, but at the same time it’s not in the millions like most of Google’s top sites.
The thing that concerned me most was the reason for their call. A nice woman introduced herself and said that the campaigns were nicely run except for a few changes. She went on to tell me of a couple of updates in the PPC realm (this happened to me yesterday – Feb 28). She said within the past few months they were rolling out a new way to target their content network and for most people they were able to save 35% (that was a number she mentioned) with the tactics she was going to suggest. My background lies in mathematics and finance (somewhat related) and I tend to know when I am either being sold or being tricked into being sold.
Through the whole list of things she mentioned that would help as she was walking me through she mentioned that it was a good idea to up the bid on the content network. That way we would have more chances of being seen and it would help with out conversions. This by itself seems like decent advice, but our bid for the content network is not cheap. If they are calling every small – medium business and telling them to up their bids, we are going to have a dilemma on our hands. The dilemma being that the AdWords placement is going to cost a heck of a lot more. She said that even if we up our bid, we are not likely to pay the full amount. She wants us to have a repeat conversation on Monday.
One side of me was a little upset after the conversation but all they are doing is simply up-selling. They are raising the rates through what I guess are fair business practices. A lot of business owners might just take the advice of a Google representative and not think twice about it. This means we have thousands to hundreds of thousands of people at this very moment upping the bid on their content network.
If they can even get a small proportion of people to increase their bids - let's say 10% - the other 90% will start getting less shows and eventually increase their bids. Also, the people that have higher bid amounts in but aren't paying the full amount will start getting closer and closer to the amount they put in as their maximum bid.
This wouldn’t be alarming to me but this is the first and only time I have ever heard from a Google representative. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming but at the same time I was definitely taken aback. I am curious to know what the MOZ community has to say.
-
The budget is maxed out for this term - they just wanted us to up the bid (which we are spending .25 of the current bid).
-
We are number 1 btw - that is the average - they just suggested to raise the bids. I should have mentioned that.
-
I have played with it - I know exactly what is going on. That is not the problem. The problem is their suggestions. We spend enough to know about raising budgets. They want us to raise the budget for something specific that is already maxed out - it is set at 500/day and coming in at much less - they didn't even look at it. The problem is they want us to raise the budget as a suggestion without any looking into. This is dangerous.
-
They will keep doing this and eventually it will up the price for all terms (I am sure this has already).
-
cant believe they are still doing this till today.
Thanks for sharing Jacob
-
We have a term that is performing really well and showing to the maximum amount of people on the content network - she wanted us to limit the people it shows to and up the bid.
-
Yeah...seems it's a common problem. There's a Google Partner group Google set up on G+, Lots of complaints and examples of terrible advice.
Good luck!
-
It wasn't great advice and really wasn't applicable. Pretty weird - hopefully it's not driving up the bids which if everyone followed it the advice would.
-
Google AdWords seem to be having a massive push on customer retention at the moment. We've had clients that spend 20-30K and 1K alike per month receiving calls offering "advice" (often VERY bad advice). We (and some other Google Partners) have complained to our account managers at Google and ours in particular mentioned that they have some teams calling advertisers working from prompt sheets (basically offering them all the same advice).
So take it with a pinch of salt, experiment but don't fall into the trap of thinking because it's Google they're 100% correct. Often google uses outside agencies for these types of things - one in the UK is called Capita I believe.
-
I say play with it. If your hunch is true then you'll pay more and get the same results. If your hunch is not then you'll pay the same or slightly more and get better results. PPC campaigns are all about testing, analyzing and improving. Maybe this is one of the ways for that to happen.
-
I have a meeting with our Google Rep weekly. They do enjoy spending your money, however most of the suggestions are worth it in terms of ROI in my experience. Guess it all depends on the size of the marketing campaign. Interesting they are reaching out in this way though.
-
Hi Jacob,
They're definitely upselling, that is just their sales business ;-). I've received a couple of calls over the years as well to incentive me to spend more money with them. I don't have a problem with it personally as any other sales department of any company would do the same probably.
You might want to also have a look at this one: http://webmarketingschool.com/should-you-trust-google/
I must say that she had a point that upping your bid doesn't mean that you will have to fully spend that amount on display advertising. It could also be that she sees that you just have to spend just a bit more to generate more top placements and so on receive more conversions and lower your CPA. But it's a hard guess if that would really be paying off for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's the best call tracking system to use for PPC & subsequent landing pages?
Client has about 30 locations. Not planning to get too fancy (i.e. like putting JS on the page so that a dynamically generated phone is displayed to track keywords). At this point, just we only want to see if PPC is providing telephone conversions. I've used Mongoose Metrics before and it seemed good. However, I don't want to go with something simply because it's what I already know. Would love to know some of your favourites and if there are better options. Also - client is in Canada. Not sure if that makes a difference.
Paid Search Marketing | | woodsy10100 -
Google URL Builder / Campaign Tracking on two Different Domain using the Same Analytics Code
Hey Everyone, I think I know the answer to this but I'd like to get some confirmation. I currently have a landing page at "www.xyz.com", it's a separate domain in which only the landing page exists and not a vanity URL which redirects. However, the navigation and all the links on "www.xyz.com" actually link out to "www.abc.com". The domain / landing page "xyz" has the same analytics tracking code as domain "www.abc.com". My question is this, if I use Google URL builder to create custom URL's to track for each ad that I'm running in Adwords, will this data show up in the analytics of "abc" even though it's a separate domain because it has the same analytics code? In other words, does campaign data show only if the domain and the google analytics code line up, or does the domain not matter and as long as you have the same analytics code (despite two separate domains) that campaign data (built through Google URL builder) will show? My hunch and best guess it that as long as the analytics code is the same (regardless of a separate domain) that the data in campaign will show with the custom URL's I build. I'm aware that I can test this and I will but I'd like to get an idea from the community first to make things easier. Anybody have experience with this? Answers greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | EvansHunt0 -
Why are some restricted items showing up on Google Shopping?
Hi there, We sell tactical gear but only "Google Friendly" items in our Google Shopping Product Listing Ads. We don't include anything that goes on a rifle, including rifle scopes. However, we see that companies like ebay and OpticsPlanet can still sell riflescopes: https://www.google.com/#q=Bushnell+3-12x44+Mil+Dot+Tactical+Riflescope&tbm=shop. There's even an article by SearchEngineLand that points this out, too: http://searchengineland.com/google-weapon-listings-shopping-search-126487. So why is it that they can sell them and we can't? What advantage do they have or what have they done?
Paid Search Marketing | | PatriotOutfitters810 -
Google Analytics and WorldPay - Tracking Sales/Conversions
Hi there, I recently remember reading somewhere that tracking code could be used to monitor sales/conversions of eCommerce payments that went through WorldPay. I've been looking around the web for news stories, forums, discussions, but all seem to be from 2007 - 2011; was just wondering if anyone knew any up-to-date info they could point me towards? Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | bricktech0 -
CPC or CPM for Google Display Network?
HI all I'm setting up my first Remarketing campaign on the display network. I'm targeting those that have visited a specific product page at the moment and therefore there won't be a massive amount of traffic to remarket to - roughly no more than 50 clicks/day. My question is - what is the best bidding option for a campaign like this? Not sure whether to go for CPM or traditional CPC. I have previously found CPM much better for Facebook but obviously thats very different to Google. All help appreciated!
Paid Search Marketing | | SamMaley0 -
Google Analytics Code
I have an ecommerce website and have installed the Google Analytics Code. i am also spending the money for google adwords. i m getting clicks and as well as orders but in google analytics it show that i am getting all the traffic from organic search results whereas my daily budget get exhausted and i do get business for the keywords i bid. i want to ask is there a problem with adwords or anlytics. Or have i placed the wrong code or have placed the code not in a proper format.
Paid Search Marketing | | seosogo0 -
Google Analytics CPC and PPC not Matching
Hi Why do our CPC in Google Analytic not match our PPC in Adword, surely they should be identical? We have Auto-tagging switched on and data in our history is wrong so it is not a timing issue. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Studio330 -
Google PPC Quality Score (adventures in)
We have one keyword that brings our site the most visitors. This keyword is the brand name we carry. We have several years of tracking it in Adwords. For some extended time, this keyword [exact match] has averaged 19 cents per click, 2.7 average position, 4.5% click through, and a quality score of 7/10. We wanted more clicks. We could think of what was needed to increase the quality score. Sure, we could change the meta tag title and the adwords title to be the same as the single word keyword, but this would be less informative. We decided to keep these titles as phrases which include the brand name. First change we made: we increased the bid. After all, it was profitable for the two ads above us, right? We increased our bid from .50 to $1.50. Effect? Average position increased to 2.3 from 2.7. Click through increased from 4.5% to 4.9%. Cost per click went from .19 to .51. The incremental cost for each sale was......well really really high.....this didn't work. (oh, we rank #2 organically. Our organic CTR dropped from 3.2% to 2.9% with this change as well) Reversed back to where we were and decided to focus on the quality score. We realized that the keyword was part of an add group with about 20 other keywords. This word was important.....lets put it in it's own ad group. We then made an "exact" copy of the ad and started up a new ad group. Paused the old keyword. We very quickly realized that the quality score on this "same" keyword was now 4/10. That was odd....lets give it a few days......quality score drops to 3/10 and no longer qualifies for first page. What was different we wondered? AH! We capitalized the first letter of the word. Changing this took the quality score up to 6/10 instantly. hmmm, we thought capitalization didn't matter? Seems it did. We now wait to see where the quality score goes. Saga to continue....
Paid Search Marketing | | EugeneF0