Does AdWords Starter Edition Define Evil?

Published on September 13th, 2008 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google has a pretty good reputation built on Organic Search results and a well known corporate rule “You Can Make Money Without Doing Evil“. However, Google’s behaviour towards advertisers appears to run from a different rule book, in which that rule is absent. This apparent reduction in ethics now seems to be coming back to damage the Brand, at least for advertisers. For example, the fairly recent complaint brought to US courts questioning Google’s less than transparent behaviour, does raise some questions about how Google treats advertisers.

I’ve been approached on at least three occasions to be a witness in a class action suit against Google, in the US. It’s not something I’m keen to do, because a witness is put in front of a team of lawyers whose entire daily experience is built around undermining the people they are faced with. I have better things to do with my life than fly to another country to go through that experience, with no or little material gain. Frequently Google strikes a fairly good balance and they have, on the whole, been giving more more control and more adequate guidance - almost certainly because of industry pressure. At least, that’s true for the AdWords Standard Edition, used by large and mega-corporations. What about that large mass in the economy? Small businesses? These typically don’t have a strong, unified voice to represent their interests.

Small Businesses and Google

Most readers of this blog are probably using the AdWords Standard Edition. However, Google’s approach to advertisers is perhaps best examined by looking at the assumptions that Google has made on behalf of the less experienced advertisers who use the simplified interface represented in the Starter Edition.

I imagine that the point of the Starter Edition is to introduce inexperienced advertisers to AdWords by handholding them through account setup and their first advertising experience. Presumably the hope is that these new advertisers will eventually become convinced of the value of paid search and AdWords, and will upgrade to the AdWords Standard Edition. You might expect that Google would use their best shot to create an affective advertising system for these users, wouldn’t you?

Instead, I believe that I see a pattern of exploitation of the ignorance of these advertisers. I tend to see the design behind Starter Edition as a warning for Standard Edition users… Google will game the systems, and not to benefit advertisers.

Given that their mission is organising the worlds information, should we be in doubt that Google’s internal systems will be optimised for sharing data inside the business? Outside Google, data is kept in small silos - no single advertiser can hope to assemble a substantial fraction of the information that Google holds. As has been observed by economists for decades, information can be turned to economic advantage and Google’s asymmetric holding of information (in this case, not personal data but about searches, click streams and returning to search again) gives them an economic leg up. In the face of disorganised advertisers, and the competitive pressures that lead advertisers to avoid sharing data, Google has a strong advantage over advertisers. That becomes even more one-sided when facing a small business - how many small businesses can put an economist to work on analysing their relationship with Google’s advertising system?

This wealth of intelligence (both human and online) on Google’s side means that the relatively small advertising agencies running on skinnier profits than Google, are at a competitive disadvantage. Agencies and advertisers tend to avoid sharing information for competition reasons - indeed, some clients deliberately handicap ther agencies from comparison within a sector by demanding exclusivity, preventing agencies from building up experience within the sector. The consequence is that Google controls most of the information, and can exploit advertisers lack of willingness to co-operate.

Back To The Point

Let’s take a look at some of the dubious features of the Starter Edition. Note that I have publicly criticised this system, for years, on Google’s own AdWords Help Forum, for substantially the reasons given here. Being a blog article, on a largely research-oriented blog rather than a newsy blog, I feel I can explore the issues in more depth here than in posting in a text-only discussion forum.

Observation Methodology And Presentation Of Data

This data was screen captured on April 25th 2008 and April 26th 2008, when I set up a new Starter Edition Account, as if for our business. I used standard screen capture tools (Command-Shift-4 on a MacBook Pro 15, using Safari and Firefox browsers) to snare the images used below. Since this account was set up for Merjis, I have not removed keywords or account information, other than to edit away the Account ID, for security reasons. I used Pixelmator to obscure areas that I believe to be sensitive. I have not intentionally altered the screen captures in any other way. Some of the links will show that I have visited them; I did not capture the screen shots in the order presented below - I returned to some screens after seeing the information that was offered elsewhere in the Starter Edition.

Google Describes AdWords

A new advertiser looks at AdWords for the first time. What do they see? A description of how AdWords works? Well, sort of. They see a description of how *part* of AdWords works - Keyword Search advertising. Look at this description, taken from the Google AdWords home page in late April 2008:

If you know what the words mean, then “our advertising network” does mean content match, domain parks and error pages… But if you are a new advertiser, that’s hardly explicit, is it? On the home page, there’s a further explanation of the service:

So this says “your ads appear on Google”. Not AOL. Not SEDOParking, not Southwestern Bell. Just Google. Technically, yes that’s true. When your target audience searches on Google, then they may see adverts that you’ve placed.

However, by default, an audience will also see adverts on miskeyed domain names, social networking sites, pages about war and disaster, and so on. Why is that a problem? Brand reputation and performance. If you are a charity making appeals for victims of war, disease or natural disaster, then those may well be your preferred pages. As a dentist, or a plumber, or realtor, or even a credit card company… is that the most sensitive place to advertise? What does it say about your company when you appear on pages of abusive language? Or even when your advert appears on a video or photo-sharing site - picking whether to appear, and the right advertisment copy should be important, so as to not seem insensitive.

For example, back when there was a massive Pacific Tsunami I stopped client adverts for holidays in those areas. Imagine the news repercussions if you had advert appearing from a global brand advertising holidays in (where ever the next disaster is). Why are small businesses - the primary target for the Starter Edition - exempt from this embarrassment? Their brands are equally damaged by this activity - I suspect that they just don’t have the muscle and the internal advocates at Google, in the form of sales staff for premium accounts, to protect them.

Performance is important. While I do believe that there are Domainers capable of delivering a tuned response to typos and retired domains, Google has not been very selective about the domain parks that it allows to publish adverts. Controlling whether to appear on the domain parks can have a significant effect on ROI.

Going Deeper

Describing disadvantages on the home page isn’t something that most businesses will, or even really should, do. There should, however, be some advice to small businesses as to where substantial fractions of their budgets may go, and the different nature of the advertising needed. Given that some Starter Edition users may see more than half their budget spent on the Content Network, the AdWords Home Page focus on Google-based keyword search is less than explicit.

I set up the account - which is pretty straight forward. I didn’t see any advice when selecting keywords that Campaigns for Content Network usage should have a different keyword buildout strategy - as described by a Google staff contributer, AdWordsPro.Sarah, on the AdWords Help Forum. Nonetheless, on signing up, the Content Network is enabled by default.

Not only was it enabled by default, Google positively acts to persuade users that it shouldn’t be disabled:

Perhaps the most disingenuous part of this page is a vile absurdity.

A click is still a click

My apologies, but I’m about to swear.

A Click Is Not A Frecking Click

This is the most dangerously misleading idea that Google can promote and it is unambiguously wrong. The whole basis of effective search engine marketing is to get focused traffic. If all clicks are equal, then why bother with linking them to search queries?

If a “click is a click”, then it discards all the research into marketing communications, and blows up the entire concept of the buying process.

This statement by Google is clearly absurd - if you know about search marketing. It is appalling that Google would say this to a new advertiser, presumably unaware of how search marketing works.

The effect is disastrous.

Gee, But I Pay Less Than $0.05/Click!

Every so often I’ll get an email or a call from someone needing AdWords rescue, with the “click is a click” problem. Having read this revolting disinformation, a user will go hunting low cost clicks. Given a product such as, oh, kayaking trips, they’ll choose keywords *because the AvCPC is low*. They will selectively find the lowest cost keywords. Flowers, specifically named hotels in other countries, the names of other businesses, everything becomes a target if a “click is a click”.

Guess what?

The conversion rate is appalling. As in more than 1000 clicks per conversion. As in more than 1000 clicks and no conversions.

The Point Is Targeting

Search Engine Marketing can be used for Awareness raising - primarily through the content network. You can target people interested in a topic and get adverts, mostly, in front of them. You won’t properly know the Reach and Frequency (despite the ability to calculate it - it isn’t the same as in a serial medium like Radio and TV), but you can gain some idea about exposure.

You can even, if you have the maths skills, correlate changes in volume of impressions on the content network with changes in searches for the company name and “walkons” (people who perhaps bookmarked the site, or remembered the URL and used it later, or sent it in email without a tagged URL). That’s probably beyond the technology and reasonable expense level for a small business. This is an exercise we do for larger clients, to probe what is working best for the content network - the correlation can exceed 0.8; that is, there’s a strong chance that changes in content network impressions predict changes in walkons and brand name search.

However, those clicks are absolutely not the same as a click from keyword search. If you sell, oh, robot vacuum cleaners online, and you use the keyword “st moritz hotel barbuda” as the keyword, do you really think that you’ll sell as many machines, at the same ROI, as if you advertise against searches for “robot vacuum cleaners”? Because if you *can*, you’ve just destroyed the whole basis of search engine marketing - and Google might as well return random results for all searches.

So, a click is not a click. A click can be a waste of money bringing someone to the site who has no intention of purchasing and who may be starting in the frame of mind that they thought they were looking at your competitor. Bounce rate up, on-page dwell time down. A pointless click - for the advertiser.

Broad Match Only

The next problem is just the same, but in the keyword search section.

Note that the keywords are Broad Match. What does that mean to a new advertiser?

Well, just like Content Match, Broad Match is Google’s opportunity to extract funds when they need them.

What is a Broad Match?

Much too large a topic for this article… But, briefly, Broad Match is a clue to Google that you are interested in search queries that are, or are related to, the words that you used. This can include direct competitors (any established marketeer should be able to tell you that you need special adverts when going directly against a competitor - but Google doesn’t recognise that), and will match search queries for non-specific searches. That is, if you sell “blue widgets”, then Google will glefully attempt to expand to “blue flowers” and “red widgets” (it’s a whole lot more complex than that, but that’s a good start on thinking about Broad Match).

So what is the likely ROI? Will it be higher or lower than if, for example, Phrase Match was the default?

I find that Broad Match is a great way to optimise Google’s revenues, and a poor way to optimise my clients ROI - except as a way to discover specific search queries that might be either good negative keywords or good phrases.

So the default here is again tailored for Google’s best interests.

History

Google remembers your mistakes. When you start, you tend to have low CTR adverts and keywords, and you build up performance with time and learning (or you abandon the system as too complex). However, Google remembers your errors. That low performance is a millstone and can act as a pretty much permanent millstone on the account. There are complex ways in which this affects an account, but the essence is that when you are learning, you’ll make mistakes, and Google will remember and penalise you for them.

Perhaps the best thing about the Starter Edition is that *if* you can make it work, then you will probably want to graduate to the Standard Edition. And you’ll start a new fresh account without the history. Performance will improve, sometimes very markedly.

Summary

Google AdWords Starter Edition is questionable as to whether it fits the Ten Rules.

Some of the embedded advice is definitely contradictory to modern advice from Google’s own staff and clearly contradicts the whole basis of search engine marketing. Is it stupidity, ignorance, malice, oversimplification or some other cause - I can’t tell what the motive is, but the effect on many small businesses is a poor ROI and higher short term revenues for Google.

My advice to Starter Edition users is to migrate to Standard Edition. In most cases that I’ve seen, simply migrating to Standard Edition and taking advantage of the additional controls (at the cost of a high learning curve) can turn unprofitable advertising into profitable. At a time of tightened belts, focusing marketing efforts on the most cost effective profit generation mechanisms has to be important, but the AdWords Starter Edition appears to avoid all the best user-controlled ways of optimising ROI and apparently dissuades users from performance optimisation.