A friend of mine who manages a BIG PPC account with Google told me the other day (over a beer) that when he sends an enquiry to Google about some random account management issue, if he telephones, there will be a 30% chance they will actually pick up the phone. It takes on average 5 different conversations to resolve the problem.
So thats about 15 ‘no contact’ calls to fix an issue.
If he emails, he gets a response between 3 and 12 days. These responses are generally generic, so he usually has to email back and query Google’s response between 2 and 4 times, which takes another 3 to 12 days to get a reply on per query.
So thats at least 15 days for a useful answer.
BUT… if Google have an outstanding invoice with my buddy, they chase every day and often twice a day. When he responds to the Googler chasing the money, 4 out of 5 times he doesn’t get a reply from his contact. So the other month, he was put on final reminder!
Conslusion: Google have really bad customer service. But we know that of course.
BTW – Bing do care and believe it or not they do have attentive and helpful customer service staff, I just hope they win more market share!
I’ve been working on a code of practice when it comes to marketing and technology. It’s just a personal thing that ive been thinking about for a while, so I thought it would be helpful (to me at least) to write this out.
The idea is to have a simple charter, so when suppliers offer marketing technology services, the purchaser has a core set of principals to work by.
For instance, if you want to reduce the cost of your IT marketing spend, a good way would be to :
- never be dependent on a any supplier,
- use open source code so you don’t get tied into expensive licensing agreements
- reuse code to reduce the security and cost overhead.
My personal charter for technology in outgoing marketing.
Strategy
- Low coss
- Secure
- Reliable
- Flexible
- Easy for end users to use
Supplier / vendor
- Non dependence on any supplier
- Never be taken advantage over, through licence cost escalation
- Own the source code / have the right to use the code in perpetuity
Characteristics of Software
- 100% open to code level inspection i.e. open source code
- Commonly used
- Secure
- Flexible
- Understood by the business
- Inexpensive to implement
Technical development infrastructure
- Version controlled where possible
- Reusable i.e. build a library of code
- Standardised i.e. work to a set of agreed coding standards
- Interoperable code where possible i.e. coded in a modular way, so chunks of code can be reused
Visuals
- Working to brand guidelines
- Fulfils usability guidelines
Process optimisation
- Multi streaming of projects i.e. High / Med / Low : Security Risk, Complexity, Degree of Integration
Simple!
The clever part is building up a standard framework, so as the diverse parts of a company do their thing, each new piece of technology can then be potentially reused on some other part within marketing.
In practice, this means separating the content management system from the dynamic elements of a site. Making those dynamic parts modular and easily reusable on any part of the content management system so you get the benefit of accumulated libraries of code. The other thing (for most marketing) is that the content management system should not be the expensive bit. Open source CMS’s are getting better and better and cheaper to roll out.
I was riding home tonight on my motorbike thinking of the reality that has struck home. Yes, the era of SEO’ers gaming the system wholesale might just start getting a lot tougher. And today I saw a the most visible sign yet of harder times for this species of online marketeer.
To preface what I am about to explain, its worth understanding a little about how Google think. If you have ever read complexity theory, you will know that within eco systems, there are depths of complexity we will never know about. A good example of a ‘micro eco system’ is a flock of birds flying in an apparently random way, but somehow working cohesively as a ‘mega mind’. It looks impossible, but in fact its all held together by a few simple rules:
- speed of a birds reaction
- external forces in play (wind)
- distance from the next bird
- desire to follow the bird in front
Change any of these variables and the whole character of the flock will change.
Have a look at this video and it will make sense to you:
And so with Google, they think ecosystems. They understand that great complexity is ruled by relatively simple forces.
Now you are thinking in a certain way, let me carry on…
Google have announced they are now beta testing this:
https://google.com
Whats relevant? – it’s the ‘s’, as in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections . They justify the test by saying this:
“A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings.”
That’s good, sort of if you’re a consumer. For marketeers of course is just more stuff to deal with when trying to accurately target customers. (I won’t go there right now)
Google now tell us that we can surf privately. We can avoid being snooped on, so its got to be good for you. In thory – yes, in practice NO. When did you last hear about a user suing because of surfing habits being revealed?
But what this does do, is make google a ton of extra $$$$$$$$$
How?
By switching over to https surfing, off the privacy card, Google will block all referrer data and IMHO they will also block this data in Google analytics. This referrer information will no longer contain keywords users came to the site on and also what they converted on.
If you are a professional SEO’er, you are gaming Google to get your site in places where ‘the money lives’. Every time a user clicks and converts on your SEO driven result, that is money Google could have made from AdWords.
To accurately game Google, you need to know what phrases convert, so you can spend money on linkbuilding for that phrase. Of course you can run an AdWords campaign and it will give you very good keyword intelligence. Now imagine you have this data and you run your expensive SEO programme but you cant track anything from Google natural search. You are getting conversions, but where from? How can you manage spend when you have little idea on what actually converts?
Now you are driving with a fogged up windshield. You will know what your rankings are (probably) But you won’t know be able to attribute ROI to phrases.
That means
>> less resource and accuracy within SEO
>> which in turn means more intensity within AdWords auctions
>> which makes Google loads more $$$$$$$$$
And all because they use a simple lever: imposing secure search.
There are other things going on that will affect their positive revenue uplift:
- More blended search / News search / Real time search / wikipedia pages, pushing out commercial natural results
- Reduction of the long tail. Webmasters are already seeing a drop of between 5% and 15% in long tail search volume, therefore concentrating users around fewer keywords and so making it easier for advertisers to advertise on these results.
- Category wide downward revision of quality score which I have seen recently with brand phrases.
- Bigger emphasis on ranking brand sites, knowing how bad they generally are with converting uses on anything other than dedicated landing pages.
- Attacking any sector where search is a factor: Product search, travel, mortgages
My guess is that this intensifying of AdWords auctions will uplift their revenues by 15% – 20% overall within 12 months.
So what am I doing about this?
Well, I’m going to restructure my sites, so I an run unique ‘join now’ buttons per page and then use tools like SEM rush to work out what pages rank for what and then match this all up to give me a reasonable idea which pages produce the best results and rank for the biggest terms.
It’s all a hack workaround, but its better than no accurate data.
They are not evil as individuals. But as a collective they are great at misdirection, deception and silence. They are moulding the shape of the Internet in a way that makes them more money and sell us the idea that its good for us.
You can say Micro$oft are evil, but I see them as a heavy thug barging smaller people out of its way. At least you know that’s what they are about. Google on the other hand are feeding us with happy pills (gmail / docs / youtube / tricks in the SERPS) and getting us to love them whilst sucking the financial lifeblood out of us until we can pay no more and our ROI goes negative.
I know this sort of behaviour has gone on for generations, and its just what happens when business goes greedy. I only hope Bing comes good and takes Google on.
How about this, a battle between a talk show host and a small group of people he has angered…and the little people start winning!
Were talking about Glenn Beck, who Wikipedia describes as
Beck has become a well-known and polarizing public figure, whose provocative views have afforded him media recognition and popularity, along with controversy and criticism. To his supporters, he is a conservative champion, defending traditional American values from progressivism, while to his detractors he is notorious for conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric.
He airs the Glen Beck show on Fox TV. It’s a commercial channel and it needs advertising to warrant the show to be shown. No advertisers equals no show.
No show means he can’t disseminate his vitriol as effectively.
So this group stopbeck.com have been lobbying advertisers to NOT associate their brand with this guy and its working! As of the last month, no sponsors have been associated with the UK show and if you look at the list of current advertisers versus ones who have walked away, you can see there is a ratio of about 1:2
It tells me that brands are more sensitive than ever before to how easily negative perception can escalate. Once they could have relied in people not talking amongst themselves, but with the Internet that has all changed. This IMHO is a great manifestation of markets becoming conversations
I’m such a fan of WordPress, I’m speaking at the 2010 UK Wordcamp – and I’ve met Matt Mullenweg (founder of wordpress, who I found inspirational). In fact I advocate WP nearly whenever I can for small / medium sites.
The bits where WordPress are great on is flexibility and massive community, so tons of great add-ons.
But where I work, we are obsessed with security and because WordPress is moving so fast, every change on the CMS means a security review and every change on a plugin means another minor review. That’s fine, except it’s lots of reviews and so lots of time spend rubberstamping.
The other BIG issue is the security gap betweenWordPress and MT - the article explains it in more detail. I don’t have up to date info on WordPress and security holes, but I imagine it has improved a lot over the last 2 years.
WordPress V MT security
Another reason I’m not a fan of WordPress for enterprise blog / news publishing is that MT can handle hundreds of users across hundreds of blogs in a single instance of the CMS. Of course you can say that WordPress MU will do it, but from what I can understand, its a whole world of complxity and hacking to make it work well. Forinstance, things like extensive role management are native in MT, in WordPress the role manager is a 3rd party addon.
With Movable Type as you may know, it renders static files with a few dynamic elements. In other words you get a server full of flat HTML files that don’t need a database to render them. Of course WordPress for the most part is dynamically rendered.
This is important because its nearly impossible to do a cross side scripting attack on Movable Type. This is demonstrated by their security record. More secure = happier ‘powers that be’.
WordPress gets upgraded about 3 times more frequently than MT and if you don’t upgrade, you are likely to get hacked. Upgrade = security review because its new. And on it goes.
So there you go…I still love WordPress, but for BIG multi user, multi blog I’m waiting for a little more maturity.
About: I work within a global online marketing team as an SEO manager for Betfair, a large online betting business based in London UK. Any opinions given are my personal views and not those of Betfair (my employer)
