Google Hates Your Business Model
What is the “Google Slap”?
Photo by Dr.S.Ali WasifOther titles I thought would be good for this article:
Google knows better than you and your customers
Google Knows Best
Google decides your business model
What is the “Google Slap”?
The slap is an act of “punishment” by Google to websites, consisting of
A degradation of the Quality Score on the keyword level for your Adwords campaigns
Organic Positioning degradation (drop in positions not links)
A degradation of Page Rank (loss of authority in the network)
which adversely affects your SEM, your SEO, and perhaps also your relations with strategic business alliances and the general public.
Normally this “slap” applies to websites using bad marketing practices, “Black Hat SEO” (optimizing pages via forced illegal techniques such as link farms), in Adword’s, use of outside niche keywords, irrelevant, overly broad and inconsistent with each other, and so on. And many campaigns were hit with the “Google Slap” because the squeeze pages contained content full of sales hype rather than useful information.
So, what’s changed?
Google obviously has a right to determine which pages represent the greatest quality and best match to keywords used, but in 2008, a round of Google Slap actions on small vendors took considerable toll, driving many companies out of business quickly. Many argued that their pages conformed to Google’s AdWords’ recommendations for pages, and yet they still received very low PR rankings.
That’s the theory, but Google is no longer pretending to be neutral as claimed.
Google has returned and shown partisanship when it comes to businesses based on affiliate marketing because, without apparent cause, thousands of net workers and business Internet marketers with affiliate relations have suffered a massive Google slap.
Stunningly, Google has decided to ban businesses that send a user through a flow of offers or what is also known in the industry as coreg or co-registration. The goal in co-registration is to present a user relevant offers and have them sign up for multiple deals. The company makes money by charging advertisers in the path a Cost Per Acquisition [CPA] or Cost Per Lead [CPL] basis.
With Co-registration, the process of generating sales leads starts the second a consumer decides to join, and clicks on an offer, and opts-in to receive more information. Co-registration offers the opportunity to take advantage of additional deals after the main value proposition has already been delivered. Some consumers may be annoyed seeing additional offers, but the consumer has a choice to take the offer or to say, “Skip”.
Co-registration can be a respectful service offered to potential subscribers. The company I had setup the PPC campaigns for is best in class with regards to protecting the users confidentiality, never reselling their data to third parties, as many other marketers in their space do to pad their income.
Where I think Google is flawed, rests not in the poor user experience as described and claimed by them. But a business decision made by Google regarding a business model, not the actual results generated from the campaigns, offers presented, efforts in optimizing landing pages, behavioral targeting and segmentation, resulting in the true user experience as represented by conversion rates.
My personal “Google Slap”
I was the one that set up the PPC campaigns and optimized the program so this client had the benefit of a PPC ninja working their account to garner incredible conversion rates, but the numbers [and screen shots] speak for themselves.
With a 25% conversion rate for the products [content network in this case], services and deals that were being shown in the co-reg format, this cannot be described as a bad user experience.
There are plenty of business out there that would literally kill for anything over a 5% conversion rate.
These conversion rates are based on the last page, the “Thank you” page where the conversion pixel fires.
I spent 6 months working feverishly taking a business unit from $100k’s of thousands of dollars to a mutli-million dollar Google high performance PPC account. Thousands of ads and 10’s of thousands of keywords were added to this Adword’s account both in the search and content network. As you can see from the screen shot below the business was going gang busters till Friday August 1st, 2009 where the bottom literally fell out.
On Friday evening the entire account saw it’s Quality Score’s drop from 8,9’s and 10’s to 1. Nothing like killing an account with no customer service over the weekend. No notification was sent, no reasoning and no communication for 2 days because Google took action, but does not provide customer service on the weekend. To add insult to injury, the phone message on their system tells you their hours are 9-6 but neglect to mention those hours are Pacific time.
Talk about flipping out. I had to wait till Monday before I could speak to anyone and even then, they couldn’t tell me what happened to the account. Even better, I was looking at the AdWords editor data which did not update correctly, indicating quality score as the issue. I went through several conversations, 3 service specialists and tons of emails until almost 30 days later a senior account representative got to the heart of the matter. Google hates Co-Registration as a business model.
Unjust banning
So my question to Google, was this an algorithmic implementation or a business decision based on user feedback? Googles automatic site ban for coreg is not intuitive. Many of those businesses were in fact not violating Google’s guidelines and do not deserve an outright ban: The algorithm could apply a variable penalty based on the conversion rates, page views, time on site or any combination therein.
I submit a 25% conversion rate is not a bad user experience and that Google is way off base on their assumptions of business and business practices.
Additionally, through the use of behavioral ad targeting and segmentation we reduced the bounce rate of the campaigns from 70% to 40%, again confirming the consumer appreciated our efforts in presenting a good user experience.
Pay per click (PPC) marketing isn’t the easiest thing to get right. I should know, having spent a small fortune on Google Adwords, before I learned how to get good placement that generated reasonable click through rates (CTR) and conversions.
Google quality score, you either work well with it or go broke because of it. Google quality score is a variable used by Google to reward good quality ads that link through to valuable and relevant websites. What does that mean? Google’s reputation is based on its ability to match their users with the best and most relevant content that matches what the user is looking for.
So how does Google, a company so focused on metrics totally miss the boat on this and decide a bounce rate of 40% and a conversion rate of 25% results in the equivalent of a non relevant and poor consumer experience? What’s your thoughts regarding Google’s ability to decide whether your business model is right or wrong.
I think Google is going to have to become more accessible. I really don’t have a problem with them banning abuse methods (I think co-reg is perfectly acceptable depending on the circumstances) but if they’re going to be in the practice of killing the income of businesses and/or people, they need to be more responsive and easier to access. 30 days for a solution is ridiculous in my opinion. I’m quite sure it’s possible (and probably is already the case) for their heuristic analysis algorithm to “leave a note” about what it’s doing. I mean, the bots on Wikipedia leave notes when they arbitrarily delete edits. How much more should Google be doing? Lots I say.
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Wow. I’ve heard about the Google “slap” before from a PPC standpoint, but didn’t know that it could affect your entire adwords campaign in this way. In the end, what was Google’s official response to the whole matter after you presented them with your above average performance metrics?
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Hi Marc,
Google Senior PPC representative said their decision was final. That Google was loosing out on revenue too and the metrics did no matter [there's a bit of irony for you]this was based soley on the business model of co-registration. They would not answer the business decision versus algorithm conversation and were very cut and dry about the entire matter
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@Jeff @Marc -
I guess when you’re the 1000 pound gorilla (or should that be guerrilla?) you can do whatever you want. I know some bigger publishers with really big budgets have personal account managers at Google. My guess is they get by with a lot more, because it’s not just the smaller folks doing co-reg. “Don’t be evil.”
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Right on. So this is the PPC side of the SEO problem.
What I’d like to see more discussion about is the clear monopoly dynamic at work here.
If there were a more healthy competitive search ecosystem, it wouldn’t be such a major impact on your business and not so urgent, as the ranking (or ppc) penalty would only impact a fraction of your revenue. However, because of google’s monopoly on search, business is forced to optimize for their technology, no matter how poorly it works.
Also, if there were more competition, google would have to compete by being transparent about how it ranks and penalizes businesses. Why doesn’t google offer a reasonable customer support line or means of recourse? They don’t need to compete, strictly because of their size. By contrast, microsoft at least provides a flag in their webmaster console to let sites know if they’ve been penalized. Microsoft is not the biggest, so they have to compete. The end result is that small companies are forces to spend outsized amounts to diagnose a problem with PPC or organic search traffic, compared to large companies.
The secretive practices of google and lack of recourse mechanisms can easily break smaller companies. In a market where there is only one ’seller’ (of search traffic) the seller can ask any price for its product.
I think there’s a growing case for regulation of how search companies deal with the public – it’s an issue similar to that of ‘net neutrality’, if you think about it. Anticompetitive practices force smaller companies off the playing field.
enough rambling for now, but not enough grousing
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yup, you hit the nail on the head. The competitive nature or lack thereof puts Google in the spotlight and potentially opens them up to lawsuits on several levels.
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With such impressive stats I’m surprised that Google didn’t offer a better explanation. Looking at how much revenue they were losing in the process there had to be SOME reason that they weren’t telling you. Google may talk a big game with all their free stuff, but when it comes to AdWords they are all about the money.
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Hey Robert,
the whole experience was quit surreal to me. The thing I found the hardest to understand is the 30 days it took to get the true answer. I went back and forth with several teams and no one could lay their finger on why the campaign was QS=1. They kept sending me to links on landing page quality, but that was not the answer. I got the run around pretty good. The desicion came from up high and it took quite some time to filter down to the troop level.
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