Rare Bird Blog

"I'm Jim, and I hate Google."

Monday, November 19, 2007

Inexplicably, Google is indexing it's own ads on sites in their content network, leading to a whole bevy of related problems, inaccuracies, and heartburn.

"Hi, Jim."

That may be a slight overstatement, but I gotta tell you, at this point I'm dealing with a fairly serious love-hate relationship. The company and their eggheads do so many things so well, that it an be difficult to find fault with them for any reason. So I'm even more surprised that I'm so ticked of about their core business: search.

First, a little background. We recently finished a site for a new product called JoMo Joint Mobility Liquid Glucosamine. (Well, that's the long name, anyway.) Since the liquid glucosamine market is notoriously competitive, we decided to run a small Google AdWords campaign to help gain a little traction. As part of this campaign, we included ads on the "content" network, refers to all of those non-Google sites where you see AdWords appear. (I generally steer pretty clear of these, because I've seen very little indication that they work. In this case, the results were even more negative than "not working.")

What happened next surprised me. Google began indexing sites and including their own ads in their own index. So, now when someone does a search for "The Cartilage Company" (the company making the product, whose name appears in the ads), all of their competitors sites show up, since they were indexed while this ad was active. And this wouldn't even be considered a black hat technique, since it was Google indexing their own ads that caused the problem.

I'll let that sink in while I go kick something.

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-Jim Cota

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E-Commerce, Affiliate Marketing, and Predictive Modeling

The upside is that you can achieve similar results by targeting a much smaller portion of the whole. Pretty cool stuff.

Jim Cota
I had the good fortune of addressing a group of progressive-thinking marketers last week at a Marketing Roundtable held by Strategic Fulfillment Group. The meeting, held in the historic Stockyards of Ft. Worth, Texas, proved to be enjoyable and enlightening. Aside from my presentation about "Perfecting the Online Buying Environment", attendees heard from Ash Ishrak, Strategic Solutions Leader for IBM's West Region; Mike Gunn, president and CEO of Chicago-based Profit Rank; and Jim Tucker, president and CEO of Integrated Marketing Technology in San Francisco.

Some of the most interesting topics from the event dealt with the methods being employed by Tucker's group to provide realistic and accurate predictive modeling. Their analysis applies 138 different criteria to your database records to help you determine which segments would perform the best. The upside is that you can achieve similar results by targeting a much smaller portion of the whole. Pretty cool stuff.

We also spent some time discussing the ins and outs of strategic, triggered email events that can be used to automatically contact customers based on a variety of criteria. You're probably familiar with things like order and shipping confirmation, but this same approach can be used for a whole variety of contacts. Examples include customer service and promotional messages, and almost any kind of targeted communication based on customer order history, preferences, activities, etc. Also pretty cool.

My time was spent highlighting some of the best practices in web design, both at the product and the cart level, with a eye toward helping companies realize the best possible results from their online efforts. I'll get more into some of this later, but here's a hint of one item: too much choice can be a bad thing.

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-Jim Cota

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Everyone's An Expert

Friday, November 16, 2007

The Internet forces experts to engage in a continuous effort to prove that they are, in fact, expert in a given subject.

It seems like everyone is an expert at something. We have automobile experts, stock market experts, antique experts... we even have a client who's a sheep and goat expert. This abundance of experts in all fields butts up against a point of friction with the Internet, where information is clamoring to be free (or pretty cheap) and readily available. This leaves experts in a tough place. It's no longer enough to declare yourself an expert and expect everyone to just accept it. Instead, experts are forced to engage in a continuous effort to prove that they are, in fact, expert in a given subject.

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-Jim Cota

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