Your PPC Sucks

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.

I don’t care what the phrase used in the search actually was but a search engine should never return these two advertisements next to each other. This is an epic failure of Yahoo’s Ad-serving engine, as well as those managing these campaigns.

I’ve NEVER liked managing PPC on Yahoo except when using 3rd party platforms, and they’ve never performed (conversion wise) as well as Google.  No wonder though! How impossibly irrelevant can it get?

Wait a minute, I sense YOU are here. That one type of person. The ones that think to themselves “But it’s probably good branding on PPC, targeting market of truck part shoppers and a naughty dating site to those same guys”. Go away.

Quality indexes and Ad serving engines rate the relevancy of the keyword searched, to the text ad that is delivered, to the landing page for a reason. ie: search is: ‘cup’. All ad’s should be about ‘cups’. The landing pages should be about ‘cups’. I don’t want to search for ‘cups’ to find a dating site.

Screw you Yahoo. You make everyone’s PPC suck because you don’t do a better job of preventing this, or because YOU were the one that chose to put them together. I mean, this was YOUR serp, and you are the second advertisement yourselves.

Yes, normally we only point out bad or embarrassing PPC ads. We couldn’t resist re-posting these really good PPC ads. They went around the internet last year, but we wanted to share them again for all those that hadn’t seen them yet. A foreign car rental shop was challenged by their owner to create ads that stand out.

They chose to use ASCII artwork which Google later shutdown.

Your PPC Rocks!

It stands out, is very creative, it compels users to click on the ad, and it would only make Google more money (which I heard somewhere that they are into that). Google should bring it back.

The best part about ASCII: it’s hard to find any grammatical errors and retarded dynamic keyword insertion problems. Stupid people have less of a chance to screw up (but they’ll still probably bid on the word ‘free’ on broadmatch).

I am not even going to get into EVERYTHING that’s wrong with this ad. You don’t even need to know the keyword searched to produce it (…. okay fine… ‘buy children’).

RetailMeNot.Com Sell's Children. At discount even. One heck of a bargain (and convenient too).

I really really really really want to do a search query report to see what search terms trigger ad’s for companies like this, Target.com, eBay, etc.  I hope RetailMeNot.Com isn’t VC funded – this would be baaaaad news to see how crappy their money is being used.

Saks Fifth Avenue PPC Advertisement

Saks….really? I was preparing a post on how much I hate companies who just take a dictionary and post every word on broad match into their PPC campaign and when I searched ’shirts’ & Saks Fifth Avenue shows up near the top. They landed me on their homepage nonetheless!

The only thing you have going for you is some branding. It’s probably about as smart as Bentley bidding on ‘cars’ and Beluga Caviar on ‘food’.

I am sure their market analysis and segmentation indicated that their target consumer is cheap and uneducated who’s idea of online shopping is searching online with the term…. ’shirts’. You know…. the kind of person who’d walk into Walmart and still not know what they want or where to find it – yet – THAT person is probably pretty close to buying some Couture or Dolce & Gabbana online.

It’d be as stupid as Tiffany & Co. bidding on the word ‘ring’ on broad match (I am checking right now).

Damn It……………

How much of the audience searching using only the word ’shirts’ is really ready to buy that expensive of a shirt? Your PPC Sucks Saks Fifth Avenue. You wasted my time and your money (and you couldnt even put me on the page that sells shirts).