The future of those in the web industry

The web world evolves very quickly and those of us within the ‘web’ industry itself may benefit from looking inwards at how things are likely to change in the near future.

There was a time when a one-man-band could say to potential clients that they were experts at website design, programming, SEO (including PPC advertising), and more.   This is actually an impossibility.  They could be ‘ok’ at a mixture of all those and be stronger in some areas but they couldn’t profess to be experts at everything because there’s just so much to stay updated with.

In situations where a web company has a few members of staff and each one has an expertise in a certain area, then such claims of being a ‘one-stop-shop’ for website success could be justified.  But the majority of the web industry are one-man-bands or two to three people working together.

Looking at what makes a website successful, there are, in the Custwin view, a few important factors:

1.    Analysis (including statistical evidence) of how well a website is performing compared to the levels of traffic going to that website.  Recommendations for change would come out of that analysis.

2.    Website design and development expertise that converts recommended changes into results on the live website, or initially creates the best possible website in the first place.

3.    Strong skills in promoting the website through ‘mainstream’ channels (i.e. SEO, including PPC where appropriate), and in analysing the results from that promotion.

4.    Expertise in building on the website strength through blogs, Twitter, and so much more.

When you consider those four factors above, particularly how much expertise is needed for each, then it’s clear that one or two man companies/individuals can’t be at the top of their game in all those skills.

In our view, the future for companies and individuals working within the web industry is simply one of two things:

1.    Success through honesty and complementary relationships

2.    Failure

Failure will come to those companies or individuals who don’t have the required skills to give a client company success from their website, but at the same time, don’t find a way of gaining access to those skills.  The end result will be a company that has a website that generates mediocre results.   A company website with mediocre results will lead to that company being more receptive to good quality advice and the incumbent provider of web services will lose that business in time.   They will also not gain any positive referrals from their ex-client because they will have been seen to have failed through not getting results.

The successful companies or individuals in the future will be those who are fully honest with their clients.  For example, if a company approaches a web developer and says they want a website that’s fantastic, the web developer has two choices:

1.    Go ahead and provide a great website.

2.    Say that they can provide a great website but focus the attention of the potential client on how that website will be promoted and analysed once it’s been created.

Many web developers won’t risk option 2 because they fear that the potential client will go to somewhere/someone that offers all the expertise under one roof.   The savvy web developers though will make it clear to the potential client that they’re really good at what they do, but although they have some knowledge of SEO etc. they would utilise the skills of trusted contacts to ensure the website gets the best possible results.

Turning this round the other way, there are numerous SEO companies or individuals who make great claims about achieving search engine positioning  but they don’t focus on whether the website is strong enough to warrant being promoted in the first place.  The end result there is that a website may well be highly prominent in the search engines but the numbers of people who actually make contact with the client company are relatively small because people just don’t get on with the website itself.   In this situation, the SEO company or individual should have the honesty to say to the potential client that they can definitely help but the client would be better off focusing initially on website strength.   At Custwin we’ve had many situations in which we’ve either passed potential clients onto our own web developer contacts or back to their own web developers, noting that we’d be happy to help promote the website but not until it’s been made stronger.

Companies are getting wise to the pitfalls of websites.  Most have had their fingers burnt and they increasingly have an expectation that whoever they deal with needs to get them strong results from their investment.   For those within the web industry who aren’t prepared to provide a full range of services, even if those services aren’t within their own levels of expertise (and so have to be outsourced to trusted contacts), then there can only be longer term failure ahead.

A day will come when most companies will understand that they have to ask certain questions of those who they choose to get involved in their web presence.  They’ll understand that a website is more than just the physical online presence but is about analysis of visitor patterns, promoting the website effectively, and more.  They’ll also understand that there needs to be an ongoing process of analysis and refinements and that a website is never complete.  The future winners in the web industry will be those who can provide guarantees that the client will benefit substantially from their online presence.   Such guarantees  can be effective by ensuring that a ‘team’ of experts is used, each focusing on their own type of expertise so that the client gets the desired result.  That ‘team’ may be made up of several individuals or companies but ultimately, responsibility would be on the shoulders of the main point of contact that the client company has.

For those in the web industry who don’t encourage potential clients to consider the bigger picture than their individual area of expertise, the future will be bleak.  For those in the industry who understand that nothing matters more than an online presence that gets results, and that tie-ups with complementary skills are vitally important, the future will be strong because the clients will gain the required levels of business, are likely to stay loyal, and are also likely to refer onto potential new clients.

Wasted money on PPC – Easter Peeps at Christmas

If there’s one thing that’s annoying it’s advertisers that are blatantly unaware of wasted money on their PPC advertising in Google.  Today brought yet another example …

Many of you will have heard of Peeps – marshmallow sweets full of sugar and stuff, very popular in the USA.  Some time ago while in the US, some boxes of Peeps found their way back home and were very much appreciated.   Fast forwards to 2009 and an idea pops into the head that it would be good to buy some Peeps because they were so well received before.   So, being in the UK, the natural search phrase to type is:

buy peeps online

The intention is to find a UK company that is importing Peeps and then reselling them.  Even at a premium, it’s not the money that counts, it’s a ‘must have’ buy in this case.

So, looking at the Sponsored Links in Google you see:

Ignoring the top result, the next two are adverts related to Easter.  There are a couple of points to make here:

1. Although Peeps are traditionally all about Easter, they’re actually made available for numerous ‘holiday’ type occasions throughout the year.  This begs the question of “why, when someone types ‘buy peeps online’ is an Easter advert appearing?   We’ll come back to this point.
2. Google is displaying two adverts.  Does anyone want to hazard a wild guess about whether those adverts are from separate companies or just one?  Apparently, according to Google, the PPC system isn’t supposed to allow advertisers to abuse the system and have more than one advert displaying under a single keyword phrase.  On the surface, SupaPrice.co.uk and Hot-Prices.co.uk are separate companies but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that the adverts are very similar and when you click through to those respective websites, the content of them is remarkably similar as well.   This does kind of make a mockery of Google making big claims about ‘quality’ being an inherent part of the PPC system if the system itself is not intelligent enough to identify when two adverts are related to the same company.   This has long been the case and we’ve done it ourselves, very successfully, getting a client listed several times for the same keyword phrase, but getting three adverts visible at a time instead of the one when supposedly the system is intelligent enough to work such things out- fantastic for locking out the competition.  

Anyway, the purpose of this blog isn’t to highlight the significant flaws within Google’s perception of what is ‘quality’ and what isn’t (in Sponsored Links results) but is instead on point 1 above …

If interested in buying Peeps online and seeing an advert about Easter (even though we’re approaching Christmas 2009), there are two knock-on effects for the advertiser who is displaying their adverts:

1. The majority of people who search for such a keyword phrase (or probably many similar) are going to see the advert, think it’s irrelevant, and won’t click.  This has the impact of reducing the click-through-rate (CTR) of the advertiser, which means their advert positioning and cost per click will also be negatively impacted.
2. Those people who decide that they really want to get hold of Peeps (as was the case this time) click through on the advert (actually, both of the adverts) and find that the websites have absolutely no reference to Peeps at all.  Yes, they have references to Easter products but no reference to Peeps (wrong time of the year in this case).   The end result: clicks on both of those sites cost both advertisers click costs and they get nothing from it.

So, the lesson here is that anyone who has either in-house PPC people or is outsourcing their PPC and basically have people running it that are extremely lazy, and frankly, stupid, is losing money and damaging their PPC campaigns in the process.   So what’s the answer for www.supaprice.co.uk and www.hot-prices.co.uk, who would appear to be German owned?    Roll out the firing squad and shoot whoever is responsible for this embarrasment of PPC advertising that contributes to people saying “I never click on the Sponsored Links because they’re often not relevant”, while wasting the budget and success potential of the advertiser.

Video On Websites – From Fun To Business Generators

No, we’re not talking about normal corporate videos here, but something a little bit different.  We’re talking about combining your expertise with humour to generate brand awareness and new business.

In the world of website design, development and online marketing, those of us within the industry often witness very similar words coming out of the mouths of potential clients.  These words tend to be along the lines of “a website isn’t complicated to create, it’ll cost a minimal amount and it’ll look fantastic if you’ve used the logo created by the one-legged daughter of the bosses half-brother”.   That’s why a particular series of videos are particularly amusing to anyone who works within this industry. 

Those videos are all available on YouTube and there are many variations.  The examples below are probably the most perfectly matched to anyone in the web design/development/marketing industry.   Warning: the language is very ‘colourful’!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sU3KaT74JE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCjcwBGQtiw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyTpzgAW5NA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx14XCNNARw&feature=related

But let’s go beyond the fact that those videos will amuse most people working within the web industry and look deeper at what’s being achieved there.   At the end of each video there’s reference to the Xtranormal website, where such videos can be created.  When you go to that website, the best page to view is http://www.xtranormal.com/about_state/, which has a video you can play that explains how the system works and also allows you to download the product for free.

And pause …..

At this stage, the company that’s developed the video creation software has put an advert for their product at the end of each video that people create, which is free advertising.  They’ve also made it free for anyone to create videos of their own and through those people creating such videos and uploading them to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and more, further people are seeing their brand name at the end of each video, and so want to find out how they can use the video creation software themselves.  There becomes an ongoing Xtranormal brand awareness and although most people would just use the free download to create videos, the more people using the system, the more potential there is to get people to buy into the premium edition.  This, of course, is a classic way to build new business – give away something for free and publicise it well, and then make money from premium subscriptions.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective though.  Let’s think about YOUR own business …

What is there that you could portray about your line of business, through the medium of such a video creation system?   Depending on your business sector, humour could be a great angle – even if you may think the nature of your business isn’t that exciting.   In fact, even better if the nature of your business isn’t exciting because if you can make people laugh in a way that’s not detrimental to the ‘real’ side of your business, then that could put you ahead of your competitors.

As an example, someone selling a service could portray that in an amusing way through such videos.   It’s not uncommon for many service type businesses to lose out to competitors purely on price but in reality the lower price services often don’t provide the benefits that the client actually needs.  A video could portray a discussion between a buyer of that service and the cut-price company that is selling the service.  It could be narrated with the buyer asking particular questions about what the service covers and the seller responding with comments about how poor the service actually is, but it’s cheap – to the point of mocking the buyer. However, the buyer doesn’t hear those words because they’re focusing purely on the cost of the service.

Through creating a series of such videos, including reference to your company as being ‘the good guys’ and publicising them effectively, brand awareness can be built and if you’ve made people laugh along the way then even though perhaps only 1 in 100 people will go on to buy from you, that’s still one more than would otherwise have done so.

On the other hand, if you look at those example videos and the Xtranormal software and still don’t see how you could use such systems to capitalise on the combination of fun and video, then feel free to contact us and we’ll give you some free pointers in the right direction.

Keywords Meta Tags RIP

Food that repeats on you for hours.  Re-runs of ‘Back to the future’. Incompetent politicians …

There are some things that never seem to go away.

Another thing that seems to have been lingering forever is the concept that Keywords Meta Tags are of any use at all in SEO.  So, just for the record, and for all those companies that have it in their heads that an important thing to do with SEO is to cram their code full of Keywords Meta Tags, there’s just one message …

The search engines take no notice of them at all.  None of those that are worth using anyway.  No, not even Google.   And if you don’t believe it, here it is from the horses mouth …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&feature=player_embedded

What’s your Jackpot going to be this Friday?

“It could be you” is a familar phrase to those who do the lottery.  That phrase can equally be applied to any company because every company has the same opportunity to succeed, but come the end of each week, which companies are going to be big winners and which will face a jackpot of:

?????

We thought up this lottery analogy earlier this week when we visited a new client.  An established company, they went through a rough patch about 18 months ago which resulted in them needing to shed staff and since then their levels of business had declined further.  They are experts in what they do and had little concept of what could be gained through website enhancements and online advertising.

Their view was that the market was in a downturn (not a bad assumption) and that everyone was suffering the same.  They must have got to the end of each week thinking that their lucky numbers would never come up.  Subjects such as website strategy and online advertising were a mystery to them. 

Luckily (for them) we got involved and within just one short month they had the highest level of enquiries they’d had for at least the past couple of years.  The point of that sentence is not to blow our own trumpet but to note that the client company can now look forward to each Friday with the prospect of enquiry levels and orders being higher than each preceding week.  All from focusing on website strategy and online marketing.

While we’re always happy to see clients gaining plenty of business through what we’ve done, it never ceases to be surprising that so many companies are gradually declining and have nothing to look forward to at the end of each week.  Of course, it’s not necessarily just website strategy and promotion that can work for a company – it can be a multitude of other activities that make a difference.  But the point is that it’s easy to get into the ‘recession’ mentality and not dig deeper into the options available to create that Friday Jackpot feeling.

Or, to put that another way, it’s like knowing the lottery numbers for the upcoming draw but failing to go and buy a ticket.  Is British business suffering?  Certainly!  Is it avoidable?  In most cases, there is tons of business to be readily gained and the buyers are just waiting for potential suppliers to pop into their field of vision and impress them with their websites.

Backlinks to Websites – Bad for Business?

We live in a strange world where search engines such as Google will take into consideration the quality and number of backlinks in order to give a website prominence in the natural results.   While there is much talk about how important it is for companies to build backlinks to their websites, and it is, unfortunately, just one of those things that has to be done, let’s consider for a moment how crazy the situation is …

Let’s take two mythical companies – NoTime Ltd and Time2SEO Ltd.    Both companies sell widgets.   In the ‘real world’, where people have opinions about the quality of products and services provided, if the two companies went head-to-head, the company ‘NoTime Ltd’ would win every time.   They win because their widgets are better, their customer focus is superior, and people just generally love them.   However, they are still a small company that has no time to do anything except to focus on their core business.

On the other hand, Time2SEO Ltd provide a poor service, sub-standard products, and people don’t really like them much.  However, they either have the expertise, or money to spend on others with expertise, and the end result of that is plenty of quality backlinks to their website. 

So then Google comes along and although it will judge both websites in different ways, one of the factors it will consider will be the backlinks.  It sees minimal links into NoTime Ltd and several, seemingly quality, links into Time2SEO Ltd.  The end result:  Time2SEO Ltd getting stronger natural search engine positioning when people are searching online for a company that can supply widgets.

So, Time2SEO Ltd, as a sub-standard company, gain stronger search engine visiblity, pull in more enquiries and business, and continue to disappoint customers.  Meanwhile, NoTime Ltd have a poorer natural search engine visibility and don’t have the opportunity to provide a great service.   Let’s see the outcomes here:

1. NoTime Ltd doesn’t gain more business.
2. Time2SEO Ltd do gain more business.
3. The new clients of Time2SEO Ltd get a sub-standard level of product and service and so are disappointed.
4. In effect, search engines, through the way that they judge the popularity of websites, have contributed to client companies (of Time2SEO Ltd) becoming less efficient through finding Time2SEO Ltd in the search results (client companies buy widgets, the experience is negative, which makes the client companies less efficient than if they’d found a better supplier such as NoTime Ltd).

So what’s the answer here?  Is it for NoTime Ltd to themselves focus on getting quality backlinks to their website so that they can try and rise about Time2SEO Ltd?  No, because most companies in the real world don’t have the time or money to invest in sorting out backlinks, never mind all the other SEO stuff they need to do.   They also don’t believe that they should have to.

The answer, quite simply, is for the search engines to look at things afresh.  Allowing searchers to find companies in natural search results partially because of their backlinks strategy makes a mockery of search engines wanting to supply ‘quality’ results.  The quality is on the surface because many of those companies high in the natural search results aren’t actually the best companies to deal with – they’re just the best at raising their visibility.

It would take a brave search engine indeed to go down the route of introducing a true definition of ‘quality’ into their ranking criteria.   For there to be systems whereby the customers of companies grade the level of service or product they get, and that’s what counts as a factor in natural search engine positioning – now there’s something that would be beneficial to everyone (except the poor companies who need to up their game).   Such a system would have to incorporate ways to detect fraudulent gradings of companies of course but there are ways to achieve this.    Sadly, coming towards the end of 2009, there is still very little innovation coming out of the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (when it comes to natural search engine positioning criteria), but the opportunities are there for the player who really wants to make natural search engine results genuinely of the best quality possible.

The smallest cameras in the world

It’s not easy to get it perfect on websites and mistakes sometimes slip through.  But is there really any excuse when you’re a big company who should have some sort of quality checking in place?

Searching for a present recently (a digital camera), I had one particular need in mind – that the camera had a cost of about £100 and it had dimensions small enough to fit in the pocket.  I certainly found that but it appeared that the cameras were a bit TOO small.  In fact, probably record-beating.

I was on the Comet website and I’d narrowed down to the £50-100 price range and started looking through the cameras.  First to look at was the Samsung L301 Black.  I clicked on the specification tab to see the dimensions of the camera, which took me to the page (which will probably be a dead page in no time) of http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/530085/SAMSUNG-L301-BLACK/tab/specification.   The dimensions were certainly small, coming in at 1.0×1.0×1.0(H/W/D)cm, as you can see from the screenshot below:

That’s quite an impressive camera to have 1×1x1 cm dimensions but have a 2.7 inch LCD screen.  It’s also worth noting that it didn’t appear to have an Megapixels, which would be kind of worrying in a digital camera.

So I kept looking and guess what?  Comet had more the same camera in pink – with the same dimensions.

Looking at another model (the Samsung ES57 Silver and also Pink) there was the same 1×1x1 dimensions.  I dug deeper and discovered that all the Samsung cameras had the same dimensions displaying.  

For awhile I thought that Comet had perhaps got wind of an impending influx of pygmies to the UK and had stocked cameras perfect for their tiny pockets.   But then I realised it was just poor attention to detail, further emphasised by the Megapixels box in the specifications screen of every single camera on the site, which displayed as:

So what does this all mean?   It certainly means that whoever was responsible for uploading the details of the Samsung cameras should be shot.   It also means that Comet probably don’t analyse their website statistics in much detail because if they did then they may have found that for at least the past 5 days the problems have been there, which will be having a negative impact on the potential of people to buy the cameras?

What’s of most importance though, is that my interest was in looking at the camera dimensions before anything else and because I couldn’t find what I wanted, I went and bought elsewhere, via a website that actually had the correct information.   That site also had descriptions next to the Megapixels box instead of that X, which makes me automatically think of them next time I want to make a purchase and leaves me wondering how long it will be before Comet realise their oversights and make the necessary changes.

urls – long? short? memorable?

Travelling today we saw a website url on a van that made us double-take (and laugh). 

The van was fairly ordinary except for the url printed on it of www.barrycursonsplumbingandheating.co.uk.  We’ve seen some pretty long urls in our time but that one has to be up for a top ten award!

But it made us take note of it just to investigate further.

Looking at that website we found content that, although it could be a lot stronger, was adequate for a local company and there’s been an attempt made to get natural search engine positioning.  The purpose of this piece though isn’t to go into the problems with how that SEO has been done, or how the website could be strengthened, but to focus on the url itself …

At a total of 40 characters, that url is far too long for the average person to accurately remember.   We got it wrong on the first attempt to type it in by missing the s on ‘cursons’.  So we dug into the shorter url of www.barrycursons.co.uk and found that it’s owned by the same person and, at a much snappier 22 characters, would have:

a. been more much memorable on the van

b. saved in costs of printing on the van (currently the van almost needs an extension to fit it in)

It made us wonder how many people would have seen that van but they wouldn’t have investigated further because the url was too lengthy, or tried to and failed.  We don’t know the full story behind why such a long url was chosen as the ‘out and about’ visibility of the business but we do know that it probably leads to lost business.

Some would say that ’size matters’.  That’s true in some circumstances but when it comes to urls, we’re happy with our small 17 characters www.custwin.co.uk url.

PPC – the 0.1% vs the 99.9%

Winning business from a company website is usually achieved through both of the following together:

1. A website that’s strong enough to encourage visitors to make contact/buy after visiting it.
2. A website that’s well promoted both online and offline.

For 99.9% of companies that’s the situation.  If a website isn’t strong enough then there’s little point in actively sending traffic to that website and because most companies are in competition with others, it becomes a constant battle to not only raise the visibility of products/services but to ensure that people buy when they visit the website.

So it’s quite unusual to see a situation that isn’t ‘the norm’ but that’s what we’ve had for some time with a client.

We started working with this client some time ago and our brief was originally to send PPC traffic to the website, which we did.  Client feedback has always been that good levels of enquiries/business are gained and so in theory, everyone should be happy.  But not us …

Our focus with clients is to ensure that the maximum possible benefit is gained from PPC traffic to the website and if we identify weaknesses within a client website then we will highlight them as opportunitities for improvement.   This is what happened with this particular client because we could see numerous options to expand the PPC campaign but didn’t feel confident that the website was strong enough to convert that extra online visibility into enquiries/business.   After a period of time we had a meeting with the client to discuss further and discovered something very unusual …

This particular client sells a product that is fairly niche but has quite a high potential customer base.  In short, those people looking for the product (or phrases related to the product) are already in a position where they have little choice but to buy the product and so, regardless of the strength of the website, they end up buying anyway.  In normal circumstances, people would land on a website, not like something about it, and would go to the next website in the Google results and so on until a company fully impresses them enough to buy/make contact.   In this situation, what I refer to as the 0.1%, the lack of strength in the website doesn’t have a massively detrimental effect on the amount of business gained because the potential clients have no choice but to buy.

Of course, it’s true that if this client wanted to gain even more from the traffic to their website then through website redevelopment work, that could certainly be achieved.  But for now, being in the very small minority of companies that has no competition for their products, they enjoy that position of being what’s probably 0.1% of all company websites that don’t have to be strong in order for PPC to succeed.

Back in the real world, for the other 99.9% it’s as ever important to ensure that the company website is incredibly strong before spending too much money on advertising such as PPC.

Google Adwords Trademarks – The Unlevel Playing Field

Although Google have relaxed the rules on Adwords advertisers being able (or not) to use trademarked phrases in Adwords adverts, there is still an unlevel playing field in some situations.

For those that don’t know, it used to be possible to register a company trademark with Google and although that wouldn’t stop people having adverts appear when that trademark phrase was typed, it would at least stop the advertiser from using that trademark phrase in the Google search results.   For example, if you type a phrase such as ‘Toyota Hilux’ you may see adverts appear in the Sponsored Listings but it would be rare to see the word ‘Toyota’ in those adverts because it’s been registered as a trademark with Google.

Where it becomes more complicated is when phrases are deemed (by Google) to be linked to medical issues and Google are pretty hot on stopping advertisers from using such phrases in their adverts.   Here’s a story about Botox …

A couple of years ago, as an advertiser, if someone typed a phrase such as ‘botox courses’ you could have an advert appear in Google Sponsored Listings that had the word ‘Botox’ in it as much as you wanted it to be.  Then (I suspect through a combination of the Botox trademark owner and Google also seeing Botox as being a medical-related word), Google stopped advertisers from doing this.   If you type a phrase such as ‘botox training’ into Google (UK) you’ll see adverts appearing for advertisers that aren’t allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their adverts, but have found creative ways around the problem.   For example, look at the screenshot below to see how two advertisers have used ‘BTX’ instead of ‘Botox’ to get round the challenge:

It’s not ideal, but using BTX does at least give those advertisers some options.

However, there’s an unlevel playing field because one of the other companies that displays in the Sponsored Links is displaying with the word ‘Botox’ very much prominent in their adverts, as you can see below:

So it begs the question of why it’s possible for one company, offering the same type of service as the other advertisers that appear when the phrase ‘botox training’ is typed, to be allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their advert text?

On behalf of our client who also offers Botox training courses we contacted Google by email and phone.  Four times in total over a period of months.   Each time we were told that Google couldn’t comment on the adverts of other advertisers but that yes, Botox was a phrase that shouldn’t be allowed in adverts and that they’d get it rectified.  As can clearly be seen here, it hasn’t been rectified and, understandably, the other advertisers are losing out because of the unlevel playing field that penalises them as follows …

1. Someone types the phrase ‘botox training’ (or variations of).
2. They see several adverts appear but only one has the actual word ‘Botox’ in it.
3. They click on that advert as a preference because it’s clearly what they were looking for, whereas the ‘BTX’ type variations don’t have that same ‘feel good’ factor.
4. By clicking on that advert more than the other adverts, that advertiser gets not only more clicks to their website, but their click-through-rate (CTR) becomes stronger, which means that the competitors end up spending more budget to try and keep their advert positioning high.

Yes, we’re looking at yet another example of Google failing advertisers and in this case it’s all about them having poor processes to deal with advertiser concerns.   The situation is simple:

1. One advertiser is being given priority treatment over other advertisers.
2. Complaints have been raised and supposedly the situation is being reviewed.
3. Several months later, nothing has changed.

And Google wonder why their advertising revenues are down!  Yes, it’s got something to do with recession but much of it is down to the fact that they are clueless about understanding what their advertisers concerns are, and then acting upon them.  This leads advertisers to look at alternative ways in which to promote their businesses, which leads to decreased revenues for Google. 

This is just one example of advertiser disatisfaction, solely related to the unlevel playing field in the Sponsored Results, but add this to the issues that many advertisers have and the fact that those advertisers will find other ways to promote their businesses, and you will see the gradual decline of Google due to the fact that it just doesn’t understand that its real future success comes not from the big boy advertisers but from the millions of small companies worldwide.

And if Google don’t listen to those ’small’ advertisers now then by the time the Google heads are out of the sand, those small advertisers won’t be interested in what Google are offering because they’ll have found other ways to generate business growth.