Your PPC Sucks

Looking to see what an average YOU would go for these days?? Well you can find out! List yourself on Amazon.com or see how much stock you’re worth on the open market. Apparently I sell as a beauty product, what will you be?

Suggestions to PPC users, and pay attention:

• Dynamic Keyword Insertion should be used with extreme caution. Especially for beginners.
• Tighten those ad groups ladies!! Hopefully Amazon doesn’t think it can actually sell ANYTHING! “Me” should definitely not be one of their product lines, or I’m in trouble.
• Be careful with acronyms and colloquialisms. “ME” stock doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it means to me. I’m the user, not you.

In the end, you may not have thought anyone would search the term “buy me.” But isn’t that the point? Your PPC ads should only be showing for those keywords that represent your business, that identify and pre-qualify the user, and find the user that is ready to BUY. I’m not looking to buy ME, so don’t let your ad show up when I search it. Your PPC Sucks.

It’s plain and simple. Google obviously must be perceived to have a ‘trusty’ index of information for people to turn to it for all of their needs. Regardless off how legal or screwed up they are, Google returns information all the time. But I can’t quite admit they should advertise on every ad and search, all the time.

So for the search “Kill A Cop” as of 3/30/2009 and where I am in the US ( the ambiguous everywhere….. apparently though, where I am not is fixing Pay Per Click Bloopers) – these are the ads that showed up for such a query:

HAHAHA. “Kill A Cop. – Move your career forward with an accredited online degree!” ?

Assassination school was never so public.  But hey, at least you can advance/move your career even during an economic recession!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE run a ‘keyword query report’ in Adwords reporting services once in a while and see what searches are triggering your advertisements. Dynamic keyword insertion is lazy anyway. The Ad should have problem read “Become A Cop”, right?

NOPE. I can’t get these ads to show up for the searches for “cop” and “a cop”. The only time I can get them to come up is just for the search term exactly “Kill A Cop” !! Holy Crap! Why?

Special thanks to the twitter user @joshtauber for the keyword search submission!

There are two awesome parts to this screwed up advertisement:

#1) They misspelled ‘wrinkle‘ with ‘wrinkl‘ – Granted, mistakes happen, sometimes people even run out of room. Though, there are still two more spaces available still in the title line.

#2) Domain name choice? Seriously? ExposedWrinkleCreams.info was the domain name of choice? Holy Crap: the .com is still available still!  I should get www.yourPPCsucks.info pretty soon – they are hot hot hot!

Thanks to Nathan J, for the submission!

Completely uncalled for YouTube! Shame on you too, shopping.yahoo.com for even creating such an advertisement and thinking ANYONE would ever want to see it.

I don’t ever click on ad’s from a YouTube.Com video anyway. Unless of course I was trying to close the ad and accidentally missed the small little X. Then it just wastes the money of the advertiser and Google makes more bling.  Yahoo.com has just plain embarrassing ppc.

Another prime example of a company with so much money – they can spend half of it on a competitors contextual adveritsing platform and make that same competitor even more money. You are sinking yourself Yahoo.

Are you a lobbyist, activists, and/or someone in the pursuit of buying our new president for personal or financial gain? Our PPC humor blog here on www.yourPPCsucks.com has uncovered a loophole in our democracy You can buy President Obama on NexTag.Com.

We (the aforementioned PPC humor blog) wanted to buy off Obama in the hopes we could get a bill passed that would prevent the abuse of bad and embarrassing advertising on our search engines. (We’re looking at your eBay.com, Amazon.com, Local.com, Shopzilla.com, & Target.com!) Go ahead and toss up NexTag.Com to that list.

*Ad was user submission: Thanks Ben!

We all know you can find just about ANYTHING on the internet. What you may not know, is despite Google’s strict rules prohibiting the sale of illegal drugs via Adwords, eBay.Com and Local.com have found a way to solicit Meth. Crystal.

The hard stuff. Ice. Crank. White Crunch. Crizzy. Devil Dust.

It doesn’t help that eBbay.co.uk’s advertisement says “Feed your passion on eBay.com.uk!”

Utah Meth? Isn’t that the last state you’d think would be advertising Meth? ( Or maybe the conservative religious base is just a cover! )

Assignment America!

Search for “Buy Meth” in your homestate, let’s see who is advertising on it. Send me a screen shot.

Let’s start this post with answering a common question that will come to mind. No, I don’t know why anyone was searching for ‘leg amputees‘ on Google. But, a user gave me a link to the results page and I had to write a post about it.

“So, honey – when does our new leg amputee come in? You know we have to keep up with the Jones’s!”

What I really want to know is, what word was Shopzilla.com bidding on? Leg or Amputees?

Neither. They are actually bidding on the term “Leg Amputees” exactly. Naturally, I HAD to see the landing page so I clicked through. (is that click fraud? . . . sorry)

They did a great job building up my excitement! “You’re about to discover great deals on…. Leg Amputees”. Yes! I can’t wait!

.  .  .  . sad panda. It was disappointing. Nothing. They don’t actually sell any leg amputees.

Screw you Shopzilla!

I am sure you share in my disappointment, and I am sorry you can’t actually buy a leg amputee, but I have good new for those with a very specific kind of fetish: (still using the same search term ‘leg amputees’).

I love the internet, it does so much for all of us.

This has nothing directly to do with PPC but I had to share. While looking for some PPC ad’s to make fun of here on www.yourppcsucks.com, Google made my day and put a smile on my face when they suggested some search terms while I typed “eat a”.

I’ve tried re-creating it, but the suggestions are different for each day I search almost (and depending on which account I am logged into).

I’ve never wanted to eat a midget or catholic person, but if Google suggests it I might. I mean, it is THEIR company motto that says, “Don’t Be Evil”.  If cannibalism isn’t evil, atleast they are suggesting I start with a catholic person or a midget.

BlackHateBook.com? ….. There’s a slight difference between ‘hate’ and ‘hat’. This was from a PPC advertisement inside g-mail from one of our readers who’s e-mail content mentions SEO enough to warrant advertisements about it.

I’ve had it happen a million times. Have a little to drink, find a great domain, be in awe that it’s available and, boom. Buy it.

Only later realizing of course your domain name itself doesn’t promote a book about black hat practices, it appears to promote black hate and you have to live with it. “Meh, whatever.. it’s just a domain, no one cares about those.” (even though blackhatlove.com is available)

Sure enough, www.blackhatebook.com is the REAL domain for these guys. But it is better in their ‘dirty SEO tactics’ hands than as a KKK operated website.

They do rank well for a lot of related terms right now, but we definitely don’t support ‘blackhat seo practices or blackhate’ display url’s. Tip: Pick a non-offensive domain name, one that is easily remembered, and spell it correctly for the word you are trying to use.

Thanks for the user submission for this one!

We had about 4 submissions over the weekend but the contact form, file attachement feature wasn’t working properly. If you sent something in, please resend it.

Just when I finished beating up Yahoo for having a horrible ad serving engine and failure to care about keyword-ad relevancy, they amazed me yet again. I searched for Mickey Mouse, and right in the middle of their ads was this little gem:

I’m no genius, but www.my.tupperware.com isn’t trying sell anything to do with Mickey Mouse in this bad ppc ad. Kids are out searching for mickey mouse all the time, might as well try and get them addicted sucked into the Tupperware parties scheme like a broke soccer mom who thinks their salvation is in a $60, 7 piece ‘heat ‘n serve’ set complete with a ‘no worry automatic valve’.

( … I want that … )

Just in case, I went back to Yahoo and re-performed my search to check out the landing page for that ad.

I mean…. if we are talking about a failure to be relevant to the users search, maybe they had a good landing page.

Nope. A log in page.

No selling of anything. No content of any kind. Nothing to do with Mickey Mouse.

Even IF the keyword and ad’s were 100% about Tupperware, and the searcher really was trying to find a website the sells or has info about it: My.Tupperware.com chose probably the least relevant page on their site.