Faith Selling

With the launch of our new church goods site, we thought that posting AdWord ads on Google would be a good, quick way to get our name out. We were wrong. The site launched almost a month ago and until last Saturday we were unable to get any ads to run on Google because every landing page we created was labeled as “poor” and every keyword we tried was going to cost us $10 a click!

I spent hours creating new ads and new landing pages, chatting with and emailing tech support and posting on forums. The only reply I kept getting from tech support was information cut-and-pasted from the quality landing page documents. I kept asking the Google techs to point to anything in the these guidelines that we weren’t doing correctly and not once did they ever provide an answer.

I then compared their guidelines to the ads running for the keyword phrase “clergy shirt” and found that more than half of the ads and landing pages were not following the guidelines and not just in little ways. Two of the sites running ads didn’t even sell clergy shirts or mention them anywhere in their ads or website. Three of the sites are comparison shopping sites that just run a search when their ad is clicked and pull up results from people who pay to be in their listings. One of these came up with no results but did display the same clergy shirt ads found on the Google website. Talk about double-dipping. The rest of the sites were basically the same as ours - a list of clergy shirts for sale. However, we had more to offer and actually had partial descriptions of each shirt on the page while others simply had a single link buried in the mass of other links to their clergy shirts.

As a test I copied an article on choosing a chasuble from the new site and dumped it into an item page for the St. Rita DVD on our Aquinas and More site. I tried creating ads for both. The Catholic Church Supply ad was $10 a click and “poor” quality while the ad for the Aquinas and More site was .10 a click and “great” quality, even though the article was on a page that still had information about the St. Rita DVD on it. It was obvious that Google had “slapped” our whole church supply domain as some kind spammy thing and wasn’t going to give us reasonable ad rates no matter what we did.

After two weeks of ranting at Google, our landing pages suddenly became “Great” quality and our click cost dropped to about .20. I also received a note from Google saying “I would like you to know that I re-consulted the issue since my last correspondence with you, and confirmed that your page was not correctly evaluated by our system; since then, we’ve fixed this error.”

Google really needs to own up to its problems and actually explain what it thinks is wrong with a domain instead of hiding behind documentation that actually justifies the advertiser’s outrage. Considering its importance in the online advertising world, it has to be transparent about its calculations in order to maintain its credibility.

Alexa is an Amazon-owned company that ranks websites based on traffic and page views. The quality of these rankings has been greatly debated and the best that can be said about them is that the closer the ranking is to the top, the more accurate it is. (Yahoo, MSN and Google are the top three).

For the past couple of years our Alexa traffic rankings have hovered around 250,000 after being up around 30,000 in 2004. I have never understood this since our traffic and sales have been increasing, not decreasing. This past week our traffic rank skyrocketed up to 80,000. Did we experience a flood of new customers? Did we get linked to by some really big sites? Nope. The only thing we did was move our site to a new server. The site is much faster than before but we did not do anything that should have improved our traffic ranking by a multiple of three. Do I trust Alexa? Nope. Am I glad our “ranking” is improving? Yep. I just wish I could explain why.

Google keyword advertising can be a very cost-effective way to promote your business. I think that in the last year we have only had one week where we lost money ($15).

However, Google has two different types of advertising. First is the keyword advertising that everyone is familiar with - type in a keyword on Google and you get search results as well as ads.

Second is the content network where sites that use Google Adsense display ads related to their site content. We have found that the exposure on the content network is very high but click-through is almost zero. We have also found that there are plenty of Adsense scam sites that look like web site directories but are really just made up of Google ads. Today I asked Google how I could see a list of sites that our ads appear on . They said that to protect the privacy of those who display the ads, they can’t give out a list but that it is possible to exclude up to 500 sites from the places where my ads could appear.

Did you catch that? I can’t know where my ads appear but I can exclude 500 sites that may or may not be displaying my ads. Because of this bizzare logic and poor performance, we turned off our content ads this morning.