According to KeywordDiscovery, this phrase, “How many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep,” garners 14,912 searches per month. Nobody is advertising on this keyphrase, so initially one might get very excited about the possibilities.

But upon further analysis, this figure becomes very suspicious. Queries with related keywords like “How to kiss” and “Spider bites” get less searches than this ultra-specific phrase. In fact, “how many spiders do you swallow in your sleep” doesn’t even show up. Other variations of this phrase receive 7 or fewer searches. It seems fairly unlikely that a 10 word phrase would get 14,905 more searches than all other similar queries.

As a PPC manager, one must be prepared for anomolies in keyword data. Both in preparing to respond to opportunity and to know what not to waste time and money on.

KeywordDiscovery explains one possible reason for the spider swallowing anomoly:

“The main reason for large extremes are parked and expired domains. Parked domains account for a large chunk of the engine’s profits and are classed as searches.
For example, if you visit http://www.kazakov.info, sedo (the domain parking provider) sends a search request to Google to retrieve and display the search results for the term ‘medical software’.

“This counts as a search every time the page is visited. This inflates the number of searches for that term and this is often reflected in the Keyword Discovery data (mostly on popular search phrases). This is why you may see searches for keywords such as “online website marketing”, for which real people would be very unlikely to search for. This particular term would be likely to appear on an expired domain that previously provided SEO or marketing information.”

Upon typing the phrase, “how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep,” into Wordtracker, zero results are returned. Obviously, therefore, 14,912 is inaccurate.

Just like people, machines and bots are not perfect. Good managers need to be able to discern and make good judgment calls on the data they receive. Moral of the story: investigate your keywords thoroughly and don’t get caught with dollar signs in your eyes, or you’ll be paying $0.02 per click on ten word phrases that never get searched.

]]> http://www.semvironment.com/how-many-spiders-does-a-person-swallow-in-their-sleep/feed/ 2 http://www.semvironment.com/good-morning-msn-and-burkina-faso/ http://www.semvironment.com/good-morning-msn-and-burkina-faso/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:20:31 +0000 jameszol http://www.semvironment.com/good-morning-msn-and-burkino-faso/ Note: This error was fixed sometime during the day on June 10, 2008.

If you happen to review your MSN adCenter accounts this morning – specifically the geo-targeting of ad groups – you might be in for a BIG surprise!! You are targeting a remote, land locked African nation called Burkina Faso…here is the screen shot of what you might see in MSN:

The above can be found by clicking any specific campaign -> ad group -> ad group settings -> around the middle of the page you will see this funky geo-targeted setting.

This is not happening to all accounts but it appears to be happening to a handful of them…

Do not panic though – so far, it appears that the real geo-targeted campaign is still showing ads appropriately in the original targeted area...for example, all of my United States targeted ad groups are still displaying ads in the United States and I have not seen any clicks or impressions from Burkina Faso when running geo-targeted reports in MSN.

I called MSN and found out that this is happening to several accounts and it has been escalated to their ‘senior team’ to fix the glitch. Remember, it appears your ads are still showing up in the desired place…but I would advise that you check your own ads and geotargeting to make sure it’s all right.

If you find out that you’re targeting Burkina Faso, MSN advises to not change it because they will reverse the displayed problem and are trying to alleviate any potential problems that changing it might have…like ads not displaying at all…

Run a report yourself for the past few days to make sure you have not accrued any cool clicks from Burkina Faso:

After signing into MSFT adCenter -> Reports -> Create Report -> Report type: geotargeting (all the way at the bottom of the list in the drop down) -> Custom date range -> Choose the past few days -> Click ‘create report’

Dreamhost didn’t offer any consolation, support, messaging system, anything except their general status blog.

I guess you get what you pay for in this industry…most of you knew that right?

We’re on the hunt for a dedicated server now – and we’re NOT even going to consider Dreamhost.

Do you have any recommendations?

Ugh – migration is going to be a nightmare.

{Keyword;}

So I typed in the display url and found the email address of the director of marketing and sent him a message politely asking him to forward this message to the right person:

“I thought you would like to know that your ad for ******** software is showing up for the search query ‘******** leads’ and the headline in your ad says this: {Keyword;}.

Simply replace the semi-colon with a colon and add a default keyword like so:

{Keyword:********* Leads}

Now your headline will show the default word if the search query is too long or it will show the search query as the headline.

Hope that helps!

Sincerely,”

I was trolling back through the ads for that search query and found that they fixed the mistake! Wow, I felt good that somebody took action based on what I said…doesn’t it feel good when that happens to you?

I probably send notes like that regarding landing pages, text ads, keywords, etc. 3 to 5 times a week. I don’t ever have mal-intent with these messages so if you ever get one from me, it’s all in good faith.

That was until I felt the wrath of Google over the past week!

I saw it coming I guess – it happens in the SEO industry…or it used to happen until Google smacked any SEO that shared a secret by patching/fixing/closing the “gap”. And it still happens every once in a while.

What the heck am I referring to? I’m referring to this cycle:

I can understand and see the value of this cycle for certain things that help people fraudulently take advantage of a system – of course that needs to be stopped…it’s killing the stuff that really helps IMPROVE relevancy, users, systems and businesses that simply makes my blood boil.

This month Google changed their auto-tagging function so it would render the “AdWords keywords exposed” tip useless for a short time! We’re talking with Google right now but in the mean time…the stats may not reflect exactly what you expected for a while (since January 15th?). I’ll write a separate post about the details of what I have done, what I’m testing, and where I think the issues is because I simply can’t place my thumb on the right solution although I’m confident we’ll come up with it soon!

Enter Evolution

This is why there is a secret “10%” of SEO knowledge out there…and I’m now convinced that we are probably going to hold back on our ultimate PPC secrets that we planned to expose which will contribute to the idea that there is a secret 10+% of PPC knowledge that is not and will not be exposed.

Evolution changes everything:

I believe this new innovative/creative evolution is what drives the success or failure of a PPC marketer or an SEO.

So…my questions to Google are:

Why won’t you let us easily see every exact query that comes through AdWords?

Wouldn’t it drive advertisers to be more relevant? Better ROI for businesses and therefore increased confidence and budgets for AdWords?

Are you or are you not striving for the most relevant results to a search query?

Why do I think Google Sucks?

Because their behavior with this particular issue is not consistent with their perceived “willingness” to help small business owners make more money and get better ROI with AdWords!

Summary

Google SUCKS and I will find another way to improve the community’s ROI quickly and effectively – this time I’m going to discretely release the solution…probably via RSS messaging and email.

What?!?! The Max CPC bid is only $6! I received this error a looong time ago when I figured out the max allowable CPC (in general) is $100 (or was $100 at the time) and I was trying to bid $101 – so why did it stop me at $6?

I chatted with an AdWords rep at Google and they looked at the above image too and had no solution – they did ask if the bid was higher than the daily budget which I had already considered. The daily budget was $50.

Needless to say, I lowered the bid to $5.99/click and got the same error. I was in a hurry so I lowered the bid to $4 and it updated just fine.

Does anybody know what this error could have been attributed to? I looked through AdWords Help, AdWords Google Group, and WebmasterWorld to no avail…I think it might have been a fluke error that I won’t be able to replicate again.