Scott Bush

PPC, or “Pay Per Click” advertising is huge these days, and rightly so. Everyone searches when using the internet, whether it be Google or Yahoo or Microsoft’s Live Search. This integral feature of the Internet is provided free of charge because these companies get ad revenue from the simple text-based ads that appear along the side of the “organic” results, presented under the moniker “sponsored” results.

The simplicity of the ads—a title, two lines of text, and a URL—belies the complexity of the process by which they appear. I won’t go into it here because (a) you won’t read pages of explanation about keyword analysis, bidding strategies, and grouping of ads to improve quality scores; and (b) you can read a great explanation at O’Reilly’s site if you do want to read pages about it. It suffices to know that it’s an auction: you bid to have your ad appear when someone searches for a relevant keyword. Suppose you sell dog food. Someone searches Yahoo for “dog food,” so you want your ad to appear so they can click it and, with any luck, buy 50 lbs. of your kibble.

The auction is tricky. There’s lots to it and even if you make it in the list consistently, you might get shaken out of position by a newcomer. Is there a better way? Well, some companies offer “direct-placement” ads. These are the same ads, but these companies guarantee they’ll appear in one of the top 3 positions for whichever set of keywords (or phrases) you pay for. Seems good, right? Then why doesn’t everyone do it?

I investigated one of these companies, Nett Solutions, after a cold-call from them. I was skeptical. I’d never heard of direct-placement ads and their model flew in the face of the search engine’s auction model. But, I was curious. I spoke with a PPC campaign manager who told me even it were possible, the keyphrases they’d be able to offer would be so obscure as to be worthless (imagine buying “purple dog house”—no one’s searching for that so it’s worthless if you sell dog houses). I read dozens of forum posts on search engine sites about people who’d been burned by scam companies selling this service. Most of those discussed customers’ sites’ rankings being hurt—or removed altogether—because the scam companies achieved their goals temporarily by gaming the search engines’s systems. I even spoke to my Google AdWords representative, who told me flat-out “Google does not participate in direct-placement ads.” Fair enough, I thought. It can’t be done (at least legitimately). I included this info in my recommendation of PPC-management vendors. But my manager was curious (he knew a thing or two about Internet marketing) and wanted to call their bluff. “Uhhh, okay” I said and began working with Nett Solutions.

This post is getting long, so I’ll summarize in three points:

1. It worked - We chose seven keyphrases—relevant ones, too. We were given a price for each (on the order of a few hundred dollars a month) and paid a very modest start-up fee of $100. Within a few days the ads were up. We checked night and day, from various computers—even had out-of-state friends look. The ads were always there and I never saw it outside of the first position (above the organic listings) after a few days. I was impressed.
2. It didn’t work - Despite this, our click-throughs (CTs) were abysmal. After a few weeks I asked for a report of impressions so we could see whether the (a) ads weren’t being seen that often so our CTs were low, or (b) our ads were being seen but they weren’t compelling (I gotta say, they were). Nett Solutions couldn’t provide one. “Wait until three months,” they said. That’s ridiculous. I pressed on and finally got one after two months. Kind of. It only provided CTs, not impressions. The CTs were about 10x higher than our web metrics reported (I’d set up special URLs for the ads to better track the results). When I asked about the discrepancy and why no impressions were included, I was instead given a sales pitch to help create better landing pages for the campaigns.
3. Salesy - They were very much focused on sales. The first guy I spoke to was a salesman. He talked a lot about the reporting we’d get when I asked about it, but once the deal was sealed I never spoke to him again. I worked with an account manager who, as mentioned, tried to sell me on landing page assistance rather than answer my questions. Yet another person–the most honest of the group—actually created the ads. Or, I should say fixed the ads because the first batch went live without me writing, approving, or even seeing them.

To be fair, they did everything they said they would. No impressions were guaranteed or even suggested, and they did say that campaign reports wouldn’t be available for three months (but the sales guy did say he could get them for me when I asked). And they respected my cancellation request without any trouble.

So, if I’m ever asked about direct-placement ads I’ll answer: yep, they “work,” but I wouldn’t go that route. Money is much better spent on hiring a reputable PPC management company. It’s transparent (both you and the company can access the advertising interface) and there’s no games.

First off: OWA is Outlook Web Access, the web-based version of Microsoft’s e-mail, calendar, and contact manager. Typically you use it when you’re away from your work computer but need to check your work e-mail (to learn the latest office gossip or which benefit the company is cutting next; that sort of thing). Today, I’m using as I work from home.

Now, OWA is pretty cool, especially the latest version. (In fact, XmlHttpRequest, the technology behind most cool web applications like Gmail, was first developed by the OWA people.) However, the dirty little secret behind OWA is its mouth-breathing cousin, OWA Light. A great comparison of the two can be found here.

Having developed web apps before, I know about cross-browser difficulties, and having worked for a corporation I know about fiscally-driven business decisions. So I understand the OWA team at MS probably sat down and said “let’s give those losers on the Mac and Firefox-using counter-culturists something so the Justice department keeps off our backs.” Just kidding. Seriously, giving up some advanced features like adding/editing mail rules, viewing messages in conversation mode, and recovering deleted items seems justified. Other features are on the fence and probably only matter if you need them: accessing the Tasks module (I don’t even know what that is, so I don’t care) and viewing your calendar in anything but day view.

Some features are absolute essential and why they’re missing I can’t understand. My two biggies: message flags and search.

• Message flags - I organize my inbox and track what I need to do (in part) with flagged messages. Someone requests a change on the site but I’m too busy right this second to do it–boom, red flag. An e-mail with a website I need gets flagged green for reference. Sometimes I use purple or orange flags for a bunch of messages that come in for a specific project. Quite useful, but it’s missing. Why? Simple thing to do. Even if MS left out sorting or searching by flag, they could’ve implemented a simple drop-down menu with colors in it to represent the flags. There’s no cross-browser concern there.
• Search - I am a Gmail user (okay, fanatic might be a better term). It’s simplicity and power in search is amazing. OWA Light has no search… unless you want to search your contacts or address book. This is a non-trivial feature, I know. But honestly, something as integral as searching e-mail! Why wouldn’t they have included this at the expense of other features or simply said “even non-IE users need search!”

Okay, I feel better for having said my piece. I’m probably stuck with OWA Light until I get my nice new Macbook Pro where I can run Windows (at a decent speed) and use the desktop Outlook client.

This may be a weird post but I simply couldn’t go on without singing WordPress’s praises. I use the open-source publishing platform for this blog, so if you have no idea what WP is, at least you know you’ve been seeing it.

Until a few days ago, I had been running version 2.1.2 of the software; I’m now reveling in version 2.5.1. Whereas it was useful and usable before, it’s now beautiful and slick. This version has a refined user interface on the administrative side, with a classy light-blue, white, and yellow color scheme. It now organizes post-related functions in a more sensible manner, including a more intuitive method to publish posts at a set time in the future. Another exceptional new feature is how easily you can add media: audio, visual, images, etc. There’s a much-improved media browser that clarifies how images will appear in posts by showing small visuals of how text will flow around images. It still auto-saves posts, too.

Besides blogs, WP is an excellent platform upon which to build regular websites. I’ve built one that way, and am working on another. It’s also great for distributed website projects such as a student newspaper like the Mountlake Terrace Hawkeye (they’re implementing a WP-based site for the online version of their paper). Student journalists are given “contributor” roles, allowing them to login and write stories (or copy and paste from the printed versions) but cannot publish them. That duty is left to those in “editor” or “admin” roles, who can edit and them publish the stories. The turn-key ability to leave comments is an automatic community for the school to discuss stories (comments should be moderated in that environment, given the penchant of high school students to write something shocking just because). There are many plug-ins to make WP-based sites even more functional, too: online forms, photo galleries, etc.

As I mentioned, this was going to be a weird post.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of using a web application by 37signals… well, you should. My first introduction to them was Basecamp, a project-management tool that actually helps facilitate the project. They also offer tools for collaborative writing, information sharing, and customer-relationship management.

The reason I like Basecamp is because the site was clearly designed to work with the web browser. Rather than drowning under tons of images and page loads for every click, it employs a snappy interface relying on true interface design concepts like size, color, and hierarchy. The scriptaculous-style visual cues like fading colors and sliding elements provide a slickness that’s hard not to love.

I mention all that because 37signals recently posted a blog entry about why they don’t use Photoshop to mock-up their interfaces. In my job I’ve had to work with websites “built” by ad agencies in Photoshop and then sliced up into an image-laden table. 37signals’ entry outlines all the reasons why this approach doesn’t work well. To be clear, they’re mostly referring to interaction-heavy web applications rather than interaction-light brochure-style web sites of the sort I’ve been given to publish. But it’s so refreshing to read some of the reasons they present for not using Photoshop when I recall so clearly shaking my head saying “jeeze, why do people build sites in Photoshop?!” For example:

The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web. Once you’re looking at a static Photoshop mockup you can’t quickly change the text without going back into Photoshop, changing the text, saving the file, exporting it as a gif/png/jpg, etc. You can’t post it online and tell someone to “reload in 5 seconds” like you can when you quickly edit HTML. You have to say “Give me a few minutes…”. Also, type in Photoshop never seems to be the right size as type in HTML. It just never seems to feel the same. It doesn’t wrap the same, it doesn’t space out the same.

That’s the reason why, when asked to make changes on such a site, I mentally cringe and think about the time and frustration it’ll cause me to implement those changes. It’s a real mess, but to people just looking at the site it’s not readily apparent—it just looks like a pretty site. The next time this situation arises I’m going to give one of those Photoshop document-to-valid, semantic XHTML from it. Now that’s something I’d like to see.

Update: had two “entries” on this quiz: surprisingly, one of those got four out of five correct and I know she didn’t cheat because she guessed while we were together. Well done! Answers are now highlighted.

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The term “web 2.0″ is used more than kleenex at a funeral. It’s been defined a thousand times and executives use it in the hopes that by repeating that mantra, their company’s sites will become two-dot-oh-ified.As I researched this topic, I was amazed at some of the names of these sites. They’re unintelligible! Ask anyone “What’s ebay?” and they’ll answer “a site that overcharges people to sell their junk.” “No!” you yell at them, angry for no apparent reason: “What does the word ebay really mean?” “I don’t know,” they stammer, frightened at your inexplicable rage over oddly-named websites. Same for Google (yes, I know it’s a 1 followed by a hundred zeros): both make no real sense but both are household words. I suppose the founders of the following web 2.0 sites thought that, one day, their conceptual alphabetic jumbles would represent such ubiquitous services that everyone would be bliin-ing things or kosmix-ing each other. They were wrong.

Below is a list of many, many web 2.0 sites whose names are ridiculous and, I swear, not made up. Well, five of them are. But that’s the game. You identify (on a separate sheet of paper, please) which of the site names below are fake. I’ll post the answers in a few days. No cheating now: you could just copy, paste, and add “.com” to them to see whether they come up. But where’s the fun in that?! Besides, some have gone belly-up I think. Have fun!

• 24im
• aupeo
• bdeep (a web concept that two colleagues and I tried to launch… so this one was almost a real site)
• bliin
• collagr
• docoloco
• endeve
• gigpark
• jzuxie (random letters ;-)
• kaltura
• kerika
• koinup
• kontera
• kosmix
• kublax
• lexisum
• mux
• mypita (like a pita sandwich that’s yours)
• nesteggr
• pixoo
• qoof
• respectence
• rollmio
• ruqurios (get it? “are you curious”? I flexed my 2.0 muscle on that one!
• scoodi
• sosius
• tafiti
• ubuket
• wauw
• vuze
• xakasha
• yooguu
• zocdoc
• zyxwv (it’s the last part of the alphabet listed backwards)