My $1/day Adwords Account | Hacker News Reader

My $1/day Adwords Account

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57 pointsprofquail27 comments

If Google wants its employees to experience the point of view of its customers, it should stake them with meaningful amounts of Google monopoly money, have them actually attempt to achieve business goals with it, and put half of their salary on the line based on their CPC performance.

Every so often, something should go wrong -- subtly or otherwise -- and then the employee should have to go through seven redirects on the AdWords interface to locate the form to send a message to a representative. The message should, with 30% probability, never be read by anyone. If it is read, it will be read by someone in a call center in India, who does not know the customer is a Google employee, and has only a cursory knowledge of Google's own policies and none of the algorithms. Escalation should be nearly impossible to achieve, but if it happens, it should go to someone in Mountain View who is as unhelpful as possible to avoid giving the customer any incentive to ever call back.

For the fully authentic experience, if the employee doesn't like this state of affairs, they should be encouraged to either a) blog about it and pray that it ends up in Matt Cutt's feedreader or b) make a lateral move to Microsoft, for an instantaneous 90% reduction in salary.

Google employees who did this for a few weeks would have a much better sense of where AdWords advertisers are coming from than somebody who is playing with a toy account. (The Google employee experiences < 1% CTR and one click a day? Good, you may succeed in identifying where the buttons are in the AdWords interface. You have no idea what the actual use of the platform is like.)

This is not an exaggeration (even though it's funny).

I have had Google reps literally run out on me. IE, stop answering emails, supplying phone numbers that go nowhere etc. When I finally did get someone back on the phone to talk to, they acknowledged that they had stuffed up with their suggested "campaign optimisation" & that they must restore the old campaign. They promised to call back within 20 minutes once a person with more authority was located. I haven't heard back since, had to try & restore things myself.

Even with this terrible service, this account still sent almost $1m to Google this year. In fact, we haven't even been able to get reasonable payment methods from Google & they still follow their hide, acknowledge then disappear CRM. This comes up a lot since credit cards don't always work well when you try to charge $2k every 5 hours. Adwords has all sorts of bugs that appear when the banks get suspicious about these.

A bit of context for folks who don't know the back story: Netcan is (or works for) a fairly significant AdWords spender. (He has a few comments about AdWords on HN which are worth reading.) I spent about $6k on them in 2009, and they're directly responsible for about 40% of my revenue and 1/3 of my profits.

My comment above which on second reading appears to be sarcastic and exaggerated is a literally accurate account of what I went through last August.

See generally http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790800 or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791003 and the blog post linked from the second comment.

Full disclosure: I am a case study for how effective AdWords is. http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard....

(And I'll say this: despite having worse customer service than the Japanese immigration authorities -- whose three part mission statement includes the words "Forcibly expelling undesirable foreigners from our nation"　-- AdWords was and is the best advertising option that has ever been invented for small businesses.)

Edit to add: On review of the posts I remembered, I realized that I appear to have mentally conflated netcan with a HN member named netsp. My apologies for my memory being dyslexic.

Netcan & netsp are the same person (me) so it does apply. (sorry about that, I updated my profile to show this)

You make an important point. This poor quality of service from Google hasn't affected their revenue from this advertiser(s) at all. Actually, several times a year the ads go down for a few hours due to a failed payment, CC issue or some payment related adwords bug while I drop everything & try to get a rep on the phone. I suppose that ads up to a few grand per year. But.. these are highly competitive areas. If we aren't on the page someone else is for a marginally lower CPC.

BTW, your case study link doesn't work

BTW, your case study link doesn't work

I fixed it. My apologies for the typo.

"We are literally the case study for adwords effectiveness." Awesome.

Does conversion optimizer really work that well for you?

Does conversion optimizer really work that well for you?

I speak three languages and still don't have words sufficient to praise Conversion Optimizer. Are you in a mood to tolerate rabid, missionary zeal at the moment? Because if you are I can talk CO all day.

Please, please write a big long post on kalzameus for the world to see! Taking 20 min to read one of your articles is better than taking 20 hours scouring the internet reading conflicting sources none of which I entirely trust. Please!

I am launching something that may be using Adwords.

So all this info is fantastic. I'm keenly looking at all your posts here, but I don't have any specific questions yet :(

My biggest question: "Is Adwords worth the time" seems to be a resounding Yes from your previous comments

It took me a quick phone call to get monthly net30 paper billing setup with them :/

They send me a bill at the end of each month, and I pay it within 30 days. Quite a lot nicer than credit cards if you have a substantial spend. And better for cashflow.

I guess it's a UK/US thing which is a shame. Maybe you can call the Ireland support?

This is a slight exaggeration (IMHO).

I've had one issue as far as I remember. Once one of my adgroups got suspended since it contained a copyrighted word. I called (Yes called) the support number in Ireland, and spoke to a real Google employee (My account manager), who knew exactly what was going on, and discussed with them. They looked up my account, advised me about options, and why it had been suspended and knew exactly what they were talking about.

Maybe it's different depending on if you're in Europe/US. The Ireland support has been great. The other time I needed to call was when Google accidentally suspended my whole Google account. It took a few days, but they got it sorted eventually.

The example is also a little extreme - I currently pay 5c for a click on average. So if I was that Goog employee, I'd be getting 20 clicks/day - not great, but valid statistically to draw some conclusions. Not everyone is paying 88c/click.

It's really easy to beat up Google and complain. I'm pretty impressed they give their employees anything like this to play with.

>Once one of my adgroups got suspended since it contained a copyrighted word.

I suspect you mean a trademark. You can not [normally #] copyright a word.

# I'd love to hear from anyone who's got evidence of a word being copyrighted. I can imagine that a really long poem length word could be considered to be a work for the purposes of copyright?

Yeah sorry... snow has frozen my brain. Trademark :) thanks.

Extrapolating from 1 click per day is also really funny.

For any kind of statistical relevance there ought to be a substantially larger number of impressions and clicks.

The price per click is interesting information though, now it would be nice to know how much the publisher received of that $.88 (assuming it got paid out at all).

The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business -- $6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it.

Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion.

I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.

Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords

This is a brilliant idea, and I would be shocked if Google doesn't have plans to do so.

http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ use AdWords campaigns and customised phone numbers to track referrals by phone. Client of mine use them. Not quite as "all in one" and affordable as AdWords+Voice would be, but the same sort of thing is being done by a third party.

What you've described is precisely Yext's business.

For the clueless like me:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yex...

Trust me, it's a biggggg market with a lot of room for improvement. Working on it :-)

In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants.

it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants

Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite learning curve.

That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against them.

Incorrect IMHO.

In the last year I've seen both bids, and average per click payouts from adsense drop significantly. Like halved.

The OP is about divorce. Legal, finance, class action lawsuits. They're all crazy click prices because they're potentially very lucrative.

Managing your own campaign is extremely easy. You don't even have to set bid prices any more if you don't want to.

Your experience may be different than mine, but I've been advertising in a couple different verticals (including legal, so I'm familiar with the insanity there) for the past couple years and I've been involved on the Adsense side since early 2004, and I haven't seen click prices drop dramatically.

Here's some data, ending June 2009: http://www.clickz.com/3634374 (Click 'prior month' to get a feel for the trend. A chart would be nice. Some verticals, like mortgages, obviously took a beating.)

Sure, it's easy to set up a campaign and start blindly feeding money in to the Google machine -- but that's a long, long way from effectively managing a campaign.

This is one of my problems. I recommend that a lot of my smaller clients experiment with AdWords as an alternative to Yellow Pages. Try $50/wk and see what happens. Many are eager to continue but don't have the time or understanding of AdWords to do it themselves.

The problem comes when setting up and managing a small weekly account is as much work (billed hourly) as is being spent on the ads. That's a little difficult to justify and never worth my time to handle.

Send the google ad link to a page with an alt phone # or alt email. You can track the calls or emails per impression that way.

( or ask new customers how they found you )

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