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My Name is Roget’s
By Cameron Ferroni | November 12, 2007
On my mind this week - in my never ending quest to make the world an easier place - keywords vs. categories. I won’t go so far as to say I hate keywords, but man, the level of complexities that they introduce is frankly overwhelming. Before I started in this business, I had absolutely no idea the machinations that were involved in running a pay-per-click ad. Think about the average small business trying to figure out all of the keywords that they should buy in order to drive traffic to their Web site. Once they have done that, they actually have to enter them all in multiple advertising engines, and they have to continuously manage them. Add to that the various ways that the search engines handle them - e.g. a certain large engine that will assign you a minimum bid price based on super secret algorithmic determinations - and it quickly gets overwhelming. On the other end of the spectrum, you have advertisers that buy literally hundreds of thousands of keywords: Heck, they have to get new versions of Excel just so they can keep track of them all in a single spreadsheet. And in the middle, we have systems trying to keep track of millions of keywords, bid prices, do reporting on them, let people sort, manage, modify, dynamically insert, etc.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: Why? Well, it comes down to the fact that computers are still really really bad at determining actual human intent. And when computers are bad at something, we often end up trying to compensate for their inadequacy by overlaying human interaction. In this case, because we can’t really tell what a user will type in when they search for a plumber - “plumber, plumbing, Roto-Rooter, clogged drains, sewer leak, flooding, backup” - etc. - we force the advertiser to hit the thesaurus to try to figure out all of the different possible words and enter them in. Oh, and then to add insult to injury, we try to make it all better by creating keyword suggestion tools, to tell people, hey, if you are a plumber, here are some good keywords to buy. It’s enough to make my head spin.
This is why I love, love, love the category concept. Just have the advertiser tell me they are a plumber. Then, if we are showing a page with content about plumbing, we can show their ad. If someone types in one of the thousands of words that we know are related to plumbing (since we wrote the keyword suggestion tool in the first place, so we know the mapping) we can show the ad. Sure, it makes it really hard to do things like “keyword level reporting”, and “mesothelioma” is going to take a hit in its bid price, but isn’t that worth it in the name of simplicity? At the end of the day, an advertiser should be able to say, “I’m a plumber, in Seattle, I’ll travel up to 25 miles outside of Seattle for a job, and I specialize in residential issues” - and that should be enough for these crazy computers to do the rest for them.
Topics: Local Advertisers, Local Search, PPClick, Verticals, Advertising |
November 12th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
The challenge Cameron is at least twofold:
1. I only specialize in drain & pipe repair/installation but you bunch me in with all of the other plumbers who do toilets and such.
2. By having simplified condensed categories you are potentially cutting yourself off from a lot of potential organic search traffic resulting from keyword variations which could help you increase your inventory so you could generate leads for that Seattle plumber you sold ad space to.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
1. I get it, but I would argue that we are building a ton of infrastructure and complexity into our collective businesses, just to satisfy the sophisticated/corner cases. Even just having 2 layers of category with the ability to choose multiple second orders would be a huge win.
2. Not sure I’m following your point here - the traffic I get is independent of the keywords that my advertisers buy (at least they way we are setup)…
November 13th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Category only classification, Specifically in Local Search:
1.) Creates much lower conversion rates, for the advertiser.
2.)Reduces the user experience, by putting the onus on them (the user) to deduce whether or not the particular business does carry the particular product/brand or offer the unique service/specialtiy that an end user is ssearching for.
I.E. - If I search for PING golf clubs your category level classification will delivery me a list of sporting goods retailers and in fact many standard sporting goods stores won’t carry that particular product/brand.
Eventually you will train me the user to ignor your ads.