Ask Google to choose your next domain
rvmenu.com
rvmenu.com
First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate evenly".
The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - which doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is tainted from the start.
Also,
> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but the differences should be proportional.
Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all. I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.
Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html
What's it like being in a position to choose how $500k per month is spent? Wow. That's equivalent to about forty engineers' salaries per year.
EDIT: I visited your website and am not sure what to think. http://joelrunyon.com/ Is it true that those sorts of marketing tactics will convince people to entrust you with how to spend $500k/mo? (Personal branding is rather important. I was just a little surprised that those particular methods would be effective.)
I handled the account with I was still at a desk in agency-world (I've since ejected).
As for what is was like, when I stepped back to think about it, it was a little surreal. But, after a while, they're all just numbers, except with more digits. If you hit your main KPIs and keep things under control, it's fun to be able to scale things up with a client where you didn't have to necessarily worry about cash flow.
It's a bit scary and heart attack inducing if something goes majorly wrong (like going dark for a day because someone forgot to check the flight dates in the account after you took it over from the previous agency). But like the OP said, it just becomes numbers.
The cool thing is you not only get much better support and escalation paths at Google, but you can test things at a very large scale and get answers VERY quickly. And little things that might not make a huge difference on smaller accounts, suddenly equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars difference in total revenue. But again, all things are relative, so %'s might not change much.
That said, at that point, support had already started to go downhill & we found the "reps" usually knew very little / less than us about campaigns. Interestingly enough, we found that BING reps were much more helpful as they were eagerly trying to make up market share.
[EDIT]: You also get access to betas & other google "tests" they're running with adwords that most normal advertisers don't. Most of them are designed to make Google more money, but every once in a while they'd come up with some cool stuff that'd be really helpful.
They'll do it on such a small sample size that statistical significance is impossible.
Google is more interested in you putting out ads that get more clicks (money for them) than they are about the ROI that you get on those ads.
That's why the default settings for all campaigns now are all settings that benefit Google rather than the advertiser.
No! You have to pick the time first, wait that amount of time, and later analyze how much confidence you achieved. With random variations, you could have a run of any size of positive or negative results, and you could just wait until you get the result you want. Sorry but tons of people make this mistake with A/B tests.
In this alternate reality, I began the experiment on January 2 and ended it on January 8. Would that render the invalid experiment valid?
Methodology here: https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200039895-Chan...
I've often run tests that seem to be in the 90%+ chance to beat baseline, but the graphs just didn't look like they were finished or had enough data, so I'd let it run a bit longer. Sure enough, big changes in percent lift, and also big changes in confidence dropping down below 90% (sometimes MUCH lower), and occasionally coming back up.
The numbers were crystal clear though: bounce rate was the same for all the domains indicating that users were getting what they expected after clicking through.
Also, conversion rate is a better overall metric than bounce rate (harder to test that from the start though).
I'm going to restart the tests using three domains and let them run over an extended period so that I can see whether I am, in fact, getting users who're searching for meals vs rentals.
Because of the way impression share is distributed (and because we don't know what ad rotation setting OP had on), the top impression ad might only have the most impressions because Google decided to show it more rather than it actually being superior on any actual performance metric.
I'm not convinced with the data you posted. The sample is small, and there's a lot of unknowns in the testing parameters. I wouldn't advise anyone to take this approach when selecting a domain.
Interest, indeed clicks, don't mean revenue will follow unless they were actual sales actions.
Now, it could also be that you can sell RV hire to people researching for an RV trip using "RV menu" ...