The sense of tight interplay between a business owner’s wish to “go out and get some response from a certain kind of searcher” and the pace of that response can be very satisfying, to say nothing of profitable.

Nearly 100% of pages of Google Search results with high commercial intent show several text ad listings in the most visible part of the page. Think that doesn’t matter? That it somehow doesn’t apply?

Unfortunately, some experts have told business owners just that. The operators of firms that sell trendy tools to help merchants churn out blog posts and the like won’t provide balance in their marketing recommendations, for fear of undermining the value of their tools. They tell business owners that “85% of educated people won’t click on a paid link” or “sophisticated searchers in your industry are clicking on the organic links,” so “PPC is a waste of money.”

So? So? and “Really?”

I never realized until recently that much of the business community is being told flat-out lies about PPC by people who are fundamentally biased towards forms of SEO. Organic search is a wonderful thing — I’d never deny that. But when sold in a certain way, by experts that preach high marketing ideals when all they’re really doing is barely-masked, same-old SEO tactics, it’s a bit of a fairy tale. Everyone can’t get everything for free. There is only so much free to go around. And the tool vendors and evangelists are selling the fairy tale to too many people. The pot of gold has only so many nuggets to spare at this point.

The average small business owner (and by “small business”, let’s make no mistake, that doesn’t mean small dollars: small business owners are often affluent and eager to pursue best practices) is then convinced to spend months committing to a publishing schedule and listening to marketing advice that shapes the pace and tenor of the marketing strategy to the needs of the toolset vendor. Months go by. Targets get missed. Website investments of $35,000+ sit there as expensive, white-elephant fixed assets. The well-off business owner transforms themselves into a “make money in your spare time” content marketing workaholic instead of just investing a few more dollars in variable marketing costs to achieve  the needed balance.

There’s nothing wrong with content strategies, of course. We endorse them. But we endorse them for clients who are neglecting them, and who are currently spending $20,000-$100,000 per month (or more) on paid clicks. They aren’t getting cheated on high-intent paid SEM traffic.

Those who have never done PPC, and who are being told not to do it, are being cheated.

I just talked with one such business owner today. He cited all the statistics about how great organic search is purported to be for his market segment… and how bad PPC should be, if you follow the logic. I said “well, it sounds like you’re trying to create blog posts to generate traffic on some long-tail search terms, which by the way you can also do with PPC [people are often told PPC can't do long tail terms, or that it can only do long tail terms. For some reason, vendors lie a lot about what PPC can and cannot do].”

I continued: “I’d just like to see what actual referral success you’re having with that strategy. Sounds good on paper, but are you actually ranking well on many of these terms, or do you basically not show up on page 1 or 2 of the SERP’s, same as all the other more popular and unattainable terms you don’t show up for?”

He mentioned that when the tool vendor came to him, he had just surpassed 200 visitors a month to his expensive website. He had set a near-term target of 1,000 per month, and wanted to get to 10,000 a month within about a year. With an aggressive effort (something he was accustomed to executing in his long and successful career), he was going to get to 10,000 one way or another.

Then he told me he wasn’t seeing any results from following all the high-flown rhetoric of the “inbound marketing, content marketing” tool vendor. “Last month, I was around 520 visitors. This month, we’re at 587.”

Want to get to 1,000? Work and wait and believe for another year or two. Want to get to 10,000? Forget it.

587 visitors a month. That’s about how impactful “inbound marketing” is on the ground for real business owners who need real results these days. And the intent of the people who stumble into a site to read content about expensive luxury products they cannot afford? It’s non-commercial. It’s non-existent. Tire-kickers enter gibberish into the lead forms, on the rare occasions they do turn into prospects.

Are we selling solutions, or fairy tales?

For 2,000 extremely high-intent visitors, paying a healthy $3.00 per click, you’ll shell out $6,000. Certainly, that’s why many small business owners would balk at the investment, particularly when respected industry experts tell them it’s a waste of money. But what if that $6,000 turns into $75,000 in sales?

You have to at least try it. You could grow old waiting for the inbound marketing fairy tale to come true.

Seth closes with a call for “vigilance, candor, and outspokenness.”

But how does any of that relate to what people like us do for a living?

In a less obvious way, it relates. The Canadian Marketing Association, and its counterpart, the AMA, for example, have often lobbied to save marketing practices that nearly no citizen can stand, such as telemarketing. They cloak their lobbying in the guise of “ethical” marketing — while defining ethics. Maybe that’s why we recently let our membership in the CMA lapse.

In the early 2000′s, I found myself in the midst of a little bit of an identity crisis. I’d spent ten years studying democratic processes in public policy, tax policy, and involved myself in progressive causes. Now all I was doing was working in an industry that helped companies sell stuff. Writing a book to help folks make more profit. Who was I?

I’m no saint, and I sure hope you don’t think you are. I drive a gasoline-powered car, and got a speeding ticket over the weekend. I plan to drive to the service office to pay the ticket today. Still, when it comes to the big trends, how can we do something not to be the personification of evil?

In 2004 as I was writing about AdWords, it dawned on me that it wasn’t all bad. I realized that Google, and its AdWords program, were bent on saving the world from the pollution of interruption marketing (of the type that Godin named and shamed in his great book of 1999). In a way, then, irrelevant ads seemed to me like a kind of environmental pollution. No one is a saint, but mitigating such pollution is better than spreading more of it than one has to. I even suggested a term for the excessive proliferation of ad pollution by the mainstream advertising industry over the years: “surplus interruption.”

How can we make some small gestures this week to cut against the Midgley grain, to avoid being the “leaded gasoline advocates” of the marketing and advertising world?

I certainly don’t need to tell you to stop sending heavy paper flyers to every household in half the cities in towns in North America, because I’m pretty sure you don’t do that. That excess of unwanted paper is so great, that in another context (yellow pages books), many cities have even banned it!

Here are some suggestions:

• Set tighter impression caps on your remarketing ads in the display networks. And bid less on them. It isn’t so urgent that prospects must be reminded (to the tune of the highest bid you’ve got in your arsenal, virtually guaranteeing placement on any network site) of their interaction on your site, again and again and again. Less is more.
• In that vein, make all of your display ads more interesting and more topical. Is the creative being forgotten?
• Stop writing long missives about how to do SEO that simply fuel people with hope that they won’t have to work harder on the fundamentals of their business, just as long as they figure out ways to create all kinds of brand new pages of so-called content built around different shadings of commercially-valuable keywords. Calling all of this endless production of mediocrity “valuable content” is just a euphemism for more clutter, crap, busywork, boondoggle, and subterfuge.
• Plan a startup business model around native monetization models, transactional revenue, or something closer to transactional value. Avoid banking on massive numbers of page views and unreasonably high CPM rates. Avoid even more banking on colossally-even-more-massive numbers of page views and “junk” CPM rates that reach $1.50 per thousand impressions only because six large ad units are crammed above the fold, and another sixteen smaller ones below.
• Re-embrace user experience and intuitive navigation. Redesign a garish, cluttered website and resolve to cut out the navigational options and excessive information, boasting, and graphical elements that don’t seem to do anything to help people find what they’re looking for. Send a prospect to a well-tested lead form instead of a home page with a tiny-fonted phone number, chunks of rambling text, and low-resolution images of two magazine covers where your shop was written up ten years ago. Stop coming up with HiPPO-driven excuses why the status quo is good enough when it comes to your website, and step back to “outdated,” “old-fashioned” basics like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think or Seth Godin’s The Big Red Fez, in which he advises “Don’t Hide the Banana.” In comparing website users to a monkey looking for a banana, Godin actually came up with a simplified way to describe the all-important concept (Spool et al., Xerox PARC Research Center) of “Information Scent.” Information Scent based design is “not just another set of opinions.” It’s important research about what works, and what turns people off.
• Making your 800 number large and blinking does not exempt you from the above.
• Check that opt-in email frequency.
• If you’re a human being, please don’t automate your tweets.

But everyone knows there are no formal regulations pertaining to the actual posted rates the banks provide, based on their own calculations of profitability, communications strategy, and the cost of money to the banks. Despite being regulated, if their cost of money drops, they can offer special rates. It’s up to them. And that’s just what some of them have done.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty decided they shouldn’t. Using not only the weight of his office as a prod, but also (undoubtedly) behind-the-scenes reminders of the special breaks, insider dealings, permission to enter certain categories of investment banking activity and global finance, and favorable legislation the major financial institutions may continue to enjoy (in areas such as service fees and credit card interest rates and terms, for example), Mr. Flaherty scolded some key financial institutions when they decided (based on cheap money in the global financial system, not least of which comes from the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy decisions) to post rates for five-year fixed mortgages as low as 2.99%, as a special Spring offer. He so harassed Manulife and BMO that they reversed their promotions. The government told private companies what to do, in other words, despite there being no law or regulation on the books that prohibited it.

Apparently Minister Flaherty was concerned about a potential housing bubble. People in their 30′s with lives to lead and babies on the way apparently want to do something crazy like lock down the same kind of home ownership lifestyle that has been the norm since Flaherty and his wife bought their first home sometime in the 1960′s. And with interest rates so low (thanks to the central banks’ monetary policy), who could blame them? Homeowners didn’t create cheap money. Neither did lending institutions.

At least one bank president, a Mr. Waugh of Scotiabank, railed against the excessive government interference.

Never mind, Mr. Flaherty, that mortgage brokers, second-tier institutions, etc., rub their hands with glee at automatically now being handed the mantle of “low-rate leader.” Never mind that anyone with strong credit who sits down with their banking rep will immediately be shown the “real” rates, and if they go across the street to a white label lender, will have a rate offer in their inbox numerous basis points below that by the end of the week.

Yet, several of the largest lending institutions decided to roll over and change their posted rates… in most cases to rates above the psychological barrier of 3.0%. Those who didn’t are getting the leg up in terms of consumer attention. What unseen governmental wrath may they now face?

As usual when governmental actors overstep even the bounds of already interventionist government policy, there is a bit of a domino or trickle-down effect. In this case, it trickles down to marketing. Do you think it is just a couple of disgruntled bank presidents or board members that are affected when a large line of business is asked to take a zigzag course in the middle of its busiest season? There are millions of shareholders to think about, first of all. Millions of consumers in the market for mortgages. And whole marketing departments and advertising vendors who need to “make do” with a watered-down message when they had earlier had coherent, well-thought out plans developed around rate specials intended to raise consumer interest in an important season during a fragile economic rebound.

It looks like the government’s random jawboning in the banking sector has just made pretty much everyone less effective in their jobs. And everyone is conditioned to stop driving forward in their area of expertise, lest the wise prophet of bubble doom have another bad hair day and announce his latest viewpoint.

I rarely get political here, because it’s not the place for it. But an agent of the government telling the financial sector what they can and can’t say… from a government that came into power promising less regulation and more economic freedom? It just proves: the longer they’re in office, the less connected they are to the real interests of consumers, and the real challenges of the private sector.

I just hope that most consumers understand that the informal, non-posted rates they may actually negotiate when they sit down with a bank rep haven’t changed. And in many cases, they’re below 3%. If you’re employed and bullish about the future, it’s not a bad time to buy.

What’s driving the optimism for a company that lost 8 cents a share (more than estimates), but posted strong revenue growth of 68% year over year (ahead of estimates)?

• When it went public, the company had scant revenues, but was already becoming universally known and widely used.
• Unlike some companies in this user-generated-content space, its international expansion is relatively seamless and legit (like TripAdvisor).
• Mobile! Some companies worry that rapid shifts to mobile user engagement mean challenges for monetization. Yelp is already killing it in this channel and is only just getting warmed up.
• The “freemium,” “claim your company and then consider the benefits of paying for enhanced listings” ad sales model is logical and is amenable to constant refinement. Quite simply, Yelp is doing a good job of perfecting and scaling the model, and there is no reason to think it won’t be highly profitable as it grows. Compare the nightmare scenario at Angie’s List where the money largely comes from users, they churn endlessly, and to make up the slack, the company is also taking revenues from companies, something their print advertising has trumpeted they never do.
• Despite some grumbling about review content (a necessarily messy world where the veracity and usefulness of reviews falls under constant scrutiny), Yelp is easy to recall, and basically likeable. When you see a story about folks reviewing jails on Yelp, it’s a fairly good sign that you may be top of mind. Controversy isn’t bad, as long as people understand what they can do with your app.
• Most of all, Yelp is doing what, in going public, it tacitly promised investors it could do: turn into a viable, big-time business of far-reaching relevance to consumers and businesses in every city and town in America, and many countries around the world. Those who bet against them executing on that have been proven wrong.

Sounds like one of those questions that might’ve made Yahoos really bear down and think hard in 1999, and again in 2003. Which is why, a decade down the road, I wonder if Yahoo needs to reinvent itself entirely, rather than just try to execute better on being Yahoo. That was the argument I made in my previous post. (I’m sure quite a number of folks at Yahoo disagree.)

This week I caught wind of a new beta product that’s about to launch for advertisers: Yahoo Stream Ads. (Screen shot below.) The ads are being promoted to advertisers as being “native” and “performance-based.” Based on some personalization, the ads will run on the Yahoo home page as units accompanying the news stream.

The fact that “monetization should be native” is something I gather Fred Wilson knows a lot more about than I do — or pretty much anyone else. For this reason alone (Wilson’s savvy and that being conveyed to the Twitter braintrust), I figure that Twitter has a chance to figure out its monetization puzzles and thrive financially, despite long odds.

Yahoo’s new ad offering looks kind of like what Twitter is doing, but based only on screen shots and some brief bits of hearsay, I’m not really sure what it is. It seems a bit to me like merely contextual ads that may be shown to users who have certain interests, when they are viewing certain kinds of content. This kind of advertising can work, as many of us have seen. The more the algorithm learns about relevance and performance, the better it can work.

How significant is this development? I suspect it’s just another small piece as publishers focusing on less effective forms of performance advertising experiment with what many advertisers are starved for: performance-based media that can be tightly segmented.

As for how “native” various forms of monetization are, that’s going to be a subjective debate to an extent. The only real certainty is that many forms of display advertising are ineffective, irrelevant, and from a business model standpoint, essentially broken.

Would Yahoo do better in future if it focused on, for lack of a better term, native advertising that advertisers can count on to perform well? Of course. If only Yahoo had somewhere other than the Yahoo home page, or the current generation of what Yahoo counts as content, to run this advertising. But this too may come.

P.S. Did Yahoo get the idea from this guy?

A lot of people don’t have time for Yahoo anymore, so that’s probably about right. Yahoo’s situation has been dire for many years, yet the company has bumped along at about the same size for so long, it’s easy to lose sight of the need to do something dramatic to change its fortunes.

Here’s what Yahoo should do:

• Acquire Yelp
• Then, divest every last shred of its “content” and old-media-world functionality to a major media conglomerate. Some revenue stream from licensing and revenue shares, plus a small stake in the parent media company, should be retained.
• Move any stray pieces to Microsoft. Maintain relationship with Microsoft if it will assist in areas like mapping, etc.
• Develop a plan to migrate any and all uses of its mediocre, disparate services to a future architecture with a unified, robust user ID.
• Then, acquire OpenTable
• Then, acquire FourSquare
• Build a new company laser-focused on mobile and local functionality.
• Find and/or build important technology that is way more useful and important than Summly. Summly? Come on, guys!
• Rename the company to something like “Yelp”.

Yahoo investors, you’ve been warned. It will be a bumpy ride, but total reinvention is the only way to make Yahoo relevant again.

Many years ago, people started talking about “vertical search” and “vertical portals” taking over from the soon-to-die “a mile wide and an inch deep” services such as Google (in search) and Yahoo (in portals). Just in case it was an important trend, I snatched up a domain called “vortals.org.” (Didn’t keep it for long.)

Where that theory kept failing was on the front of Google’s role as a gatekeeper in deciding who gets to find out about a company in the first place. Your service can be really useful and specific to a market segment’s needs, but how are you going to get the word out in an online setting? TripAdvisor got lucky (timing-wise), and stayed good long enough that it was the exception that proved the rule: they ruled the top couple positions in the organic SERP’s so well for so long that they won over the consumer drip by drip, in the effective way that a steady replenishing of the funnel with free “new visitors” from organic search referrals can achieve. Amazingly, they still seem to do that well in the free SERP’s. Again: the exception that proves the rule. TripAdvisor, today, is a $7 billion company. Awesome work, guys.

Many specific services haven’t been so lucky — shopping search engines, for example. It got costly to keep reminding people to try Pricegrabber, or whatever. That company seems to be enjoying annual spikes in traffic at holiday time, but its audience is dwindling year over year. According to reports, PriceGrabber was bought by Experian for $485 million in 2005; it was unloaded for less than $200 million in 2012.

As the logic of the claim of “vertical search engines chipping away at Google” unfolded, it became clearer that a handful of destination digital brands (we wouldn’t call them vertical portals or vertical search engines today) might break through to become a “destination brand,” but they’d need to do it will Google’s blessing. So this hardly boded ill for Google’s bottom line or its status as a dominant player. In line with our premise when we started writing about the industry at Traffick.com in 1999, these monopolistic gatekeeper companies (these were Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft then… Google hadn’t pulled it off yet) can reach such a stage of ubiquity that their competitors and ecosystem coopetitors may be seriously hampered if the gatekeeper simply stops giving them permission to exist. Do a search one week and find a variety of resources, the next week, maybe you find Google resources primarily, with the option of paying for increasingly expensive ads. Google isn’t quite all-powerful, but they’re not going to let their whole business be eroded by the “rise” of anyone in particular, or a variety of threats from “vertical search engines” who are trying to Out-Google Google.

The supposed failings of Google being “too generalized” and trying to cover too much ground are a recurring theme — most recently in this New York Times article that wonders if Google will lose traction to appealing apps from companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Kayak, and Weather Underground, as more people seek quick answers and tailored tools in a mobile environment.

Google should, and still might, lose a healthy amount of user engagement to these more specific services. It’s no secret I’m a big fan of companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor who have built appealing, useful services on their own, with their own loyal communities of engaged users. Sure, they have flaws, but in building these services independently to the level of success they currently enjoy, Yelp and TripAdvisor (to say nothing of many other growing services like OpenTable, Pandora, LinkedIn, Angie’s List, etc.), it’s bravo all around.

What seems to unite these success stories? They’ve all raised large sums of cash — and their profiles — by taking their companies public. This way they have war chests to keep building the value of their services; to hire lawyers to beat back attacks from larger predators; to build their profiles through sales and marketing; to leverage and scale their platforms for better economies of scale; to achieve international expansion; and to get their names out there in the media, who love to cover companies whose stock you can buy.

It’s incredibly hard to gain permanent brand awareness in a world where bigger players like Google decide how visible you are. And Google won’t take any of this lying down. In an Android, Chrome, YouTube, Google Apps, Google Plus world, Google’s Microsoft-in-the-1990′s-analogous chokehold on the digital user’s environment is well along the way to being complete.

But with direct pipelines to their user bases, wisely built through timely and large cash infusions, this new generation of “vertical portals” seems better positioned to stand firm than the flimsy attempts we saw a decade ago.

Will many of them wind up being acquired, or consolidated? Or will we see more long-term diversity with more large (but not enormous) “vertical” companies being run independently? That doesn’t seem like a stable set of affairs when Wall Street tends to dictate that the biggest companies keep doing something to get even bigger. What’s likelihood of TripAdvisor, Yelp, OpenTable, etc. staying independent for longer than five years?

It will be interesting to watch. Some of the results could be surprising, heavily dependent on the type of “lens” users prefer to see the world through (assuming that sufficient resources and regulation are in place to allow some reasonable degree of choice of lens). Does everyone want to be subject to an opinionated “master lens,” a giant Google Glass, if you will? An AOL, Facebook, or Apple style walled garden? Or will folks find ways of enabling more neutral platforms (or somehow using the above technology in a neutral way) that will help them do a better job of enabling many “starting points,” a postmodern collection of “lenses,” in the manner of their choosing?

Companies like Yahoo can do their part by blowing up their old, broken purple monolith model, acquiring some of the above “lenses” (like Yelp, and why not OpenTable while they’re at it), and leaving open the possibility that those parts of the new company grow so fast that the new company of tomorrow is actually renamed Yelp.

Whatever happens, I think a lot of people are still cheering for that old idea that “verticals” can chip away at the dominance of an all-consuming player that actively tries to hamper the growth of that ecosystem for anticompetitive, profit-driven reasons alone.If we don’t have choices, then what’s left?

Is that realistic? Well, it’s more so if investors and investment bankers are willing to bet on it – so score one for big bad Wall Street. “Greed is good.”

The last generation of “vertical services” rarely came close to the type of scale needed to reach a tipping point of full and direct access to consumer mindshare. This time may be different.

For example, our company recently adopted Google Apps for Business, joining the legions who have already done so. It hasn’t been without its issues. But our old way of doing things was worse.

For various tools, though, I’ve often felt that a less efficient mix-and-match approach was somehow healthier. I arrived at this view based on my belief in something I call the Single Overlord Adoption Threshold. America itself was founded on the basis of checks and balances. It’s an ideal; an ideal of multiple centers of power and influence so none gets too big. It’s such a valuable ideal to so many, that Americans put up with a lot of political gridlock, for fear of the alternative (tyranny).

People are starting to get it.

Om Malik has recently declared that he’ll never use Google’s new competitor to Evernote because of how arbitrarily they shut down the much-valued Google Reader… even if it’s better.

That’s sort of why I still like and use Basecamp from 37 Signals. Anytime a more impressive, integrated alternative has come along, I’ve wanted less integration… less “impressive.” For some reason. Probably for reasons similar to what Malik and the American founding fathers had in mind.

Better-integrated, more impressive, cheaper systems developed by a single overlord have many advantages, but if they can all be snatched away, that syncs up perfectly with what Nassim Taleb criticizes as “fragile” systems.

Adopting non-Google solutions for mission-critical business and personal use, by contrast, may make your life more robust, if not anti-fragile.

So I’m really not sure — when the case is so obvious in this “Evernote-competitor” instance — why people are so unwilling or unable to see the same dynamic in action on other fragile, all-in Google moves of a more far-reaching nature — like Android? At a plenary session at this week’s SMX Toronto, I just heard a roomful of Canadians (all but two) essentially swear they’d never get another BlackBerry. But if the OS is as good as Android or iOS, and there are many other attractive reasons to use the non-overlord product, why the paranoia that somehow life won’t be as optimized or integrated if we don’t rush into a Google environment?

The funny thing about this is — this is exactly how many people used to behave with “Microsoft stuff” before Apple, Netscape, Google (and others) became the clever upstarts that toppled them. Of course, in many cases it would have been absurd to suggest people even had a choice. To stick with Corel Wordperfect for documents (once the leading word processing software) became, at a certain point, “impossible.” (But was it, really? What about all those Apple users who for years didn’t use Microsoft’s Office products? Remember the years where document format translating companies made a ton of cash helping people convert stuff?)

And Google’s behavior — “embrace and extend” and try to play even in verticals where it doesn’t belong or doesn’t truly have its heart in — resembles that which was once so vilified in Microsoft.

Certainly, when it comes to project management, note-taking, etc., we have credible alternatives to the overlord products.

In other areas where many of us have left ourselves vulnerable and fragile — Google Analytics, say — it can seem tougher to easily replace or at least “back up” our data and workflow so that we can be covered if some Black Swan event occurs. But maybe we should be thinking harder about, if not replacing Google Analytics, then at least implementing a backup. BUBGA (Before Urchin Became GA), only a small percentage of business owners were site analytics mavens, but that percentage tended to dig deeper into the field, willing to deal with cumbersome logfile analysis software of various stripes… so that they could have more control over their own data. Now, most of us are just handing over the keys to that kingdom – directly to Google.

(As an aside, I still feel it was quite a blow to us when Microsoft abandoned Gatineau, the code name for its direct competitor to GA.)

I think it’s food for thought. We too easily race for the convenience and integration of the leading products, ignoring their risks. Largely that’s out of herd mentality, and a wish to conform and avoid criticism.

When there truly are credible alternatives — such as the Blackberry 10 OS — it’s time people realized that it’s worth trying out those alternative… even if it’s simply on principle.

In many of these areas, Google is the new Microsoft. Does that mean, then, that they will someday also fall out of favor and become “tired,” like Microsoft apparently did? Not necessarily. There’s no law of nature that says that will happen.

(And of course, how tired is any company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, really? A friend was telling me today about how much he loved his Surface tablet. I suppose some blog commenter will want to explain to him that he is just “wrong!” The point is, it’s his choice, and he’s made it! “Logic” of a certain sort says he shouldn’t have. The price point for the version with a keyboard makes no sense in the mass market; nor does the positioning — do I need a laptop that works with a tablet, and why pay for a third or fourth device? But most of those calls are made by people thinking about what people “should” or “will” want, in the context of a belief that (say) Google or Apple are basically all-knowing and either inevitable or impossibly cool. And yet, when someone picks up a Microsoft or Blackberry product and likes it, their positive reactions are genuine, and the dollars they’re willing to spend are genuine. There is no “inevitability” in any of the current trends.)

Overall, many people are underestimating the “Founding Fathers factor” here: a populist will to stop simply adopting everything Google is already gradually emerging, as evidenced in Om’s rant about Reader. Over time, I believe many more people will begin joining this “on principle” rejection of “better, cheaper” Google products.

Anti-Microsoft sentiment, at one time, was so widespread you could answer the doorbell and hear your mail carrier talking about open source and how he was going to get a “Linux box.” The sentiment is out there, and if Google pushes too far… it will return in force. All people need is alternatives.

Bye for now,

Andrew

P.S. This post and blog are powered by WordPress for one reason, primarily: after we’d been using it for six years, Google drastically reduced support for Blogger.

Tomorrow you can catch me speaking at SMX Toronto, on the subject of PPC Analytics: Crunching Your Own Data.

I’ll cover some semi-advanced issues with attribution and search funnels, of course. But as is my modus operandi typically, I’ll seek to uncover complexities in seemingly simple processes and data. I’ll argue that you need to get your arms around these complexities and work from a clear plan… because you probably aren’t.

Take ad testing. There are at least four or five common approaches to ad testing. But most campaign managers mix and match strategies… change tack all the time… which isn’t a strategy at all.

The vast majority aren’t even aware of how to determine whether tests are statistically valid. Most of the rest are aware, but don’t stick to a plan or consult the statistical confidence stats.

Among other things, I’ll also cover cool and key segments to manage… and include a couple of key nuggets as folks gear up for Enhanced Campaigns in AdWords. See you there!

Despite the incredible power of ad rotation in AdWords, most campaigns underperform on the creative dimension. It’s a constant struggle to find that next leap in performance.

Seth Godin had a term for using diversity to stumble on new directions and thought patterns: it’s called mDNA (or “meme DNA”).

We’re closely watching our tests right now… trash talking… watching revenue figures… and eagerly anticipating the mouthwatering dinner that the company (or colleagues) will have to buy us if we win one of the contests.

What’s going on with the winning entries? How about the losing ones? In both cases, massive learning.

A real hallmark of these tests is the realization that almost half the time, someone is attempting some way to win that the others react viscerally to as “cheating.” Although all the ads are well within the contest rules, the client’s parameters, and Google’s editorial and other rules — for some reason, people are coming up with loopholes you just didn’t think of.

Someone picks a different landing page as the destination URL. Someone does something a little different with the display URL. Someone puts unusual (but perfectly acceptable) punctuation in the headline. Someone uses DKI unexpectedly. Someone tries something sneaky to increase the average order value. Someone tells you how to browse the site, because the landing page might not be explicit enough. (Among other things, the latter is a meta-message. Not only does the offbeat CTA help you decide what to do next, it’s also reminding searchers that *this is advertising* about *searching for a product* that is hard to find. Maybe that’s why it works. It both entices and filters.)

And then there are the surprises that break no rules, but didn’t occur to you. Someone uses copy that is a bit more flowery and full of itself than you ever thought would work for what you assumed was a commodity product. Someone speaks to a vanity benefit that you just wouldn’t have bothered to try, because you unconsciously dismissed that as a motive for buying this product.

At the end of the contest, there will be one winner per ad group. And much will have been learned.

Above all, when a half dozen or a dozen professionals enter a really contentious (but friendly) competition to test something, you are reminded of how little testing typically happens when a single person is trying to “run a test” with their own ideas of which elements to test.

And isn’t it amazing that when given a challenge and a wide scope with fairly unrestrictive rules, we create our own mental prison anyway? Subconsciously, it’s all about “Oh, I thought when we meant ‘testing’ we meant try these couple of relatively inconsequential variations, plus one benefit statement we threw into the mix for good measure, and we were just about done.”

Not every second pair of eyes will do much to improve on well tested ad copy, to be sure. Often, new contenders fail. But put half a dozen, or a dozen, highly motivated pros in there and ask them to break stuff for bragging rights and a free dinner – and watch the fireworks.

I’m also a firm believer in aligning performance with motivation. And if you can fuse fun, incentives, competitiveness, and plain old trash talking with client performance goals… all the planets and stars align.

Get a second pair of eyes on that? A good idea? Umm, yeah! At least a second pair.

Who says cheaters never prosper?

P.S.:

Is it cheating if we ask you to vote for us (that’s @webmona and @andrew_goodman) in the PPC Associates 2013 Most Influential SEM tournament? Now that’s our kind of March Madness. Vote early and often. We’re in the quarter-finals.