When Google Hides the Negative Keyword Creation Tool, Should SEM Agencies Worry?

Originally posted at searchmarketingstandard.com . . .

Over the last few years, I’ve been impressed with Google’s constant march toward AdWords transparency and filtering. Think about all the free tools they’ve launched designed to help advertisers understand and profit from their AdWords campaigns. Highlights to me include: Google Analytics, Google Conversion Tracker, IP-address filtering, site-targeting and site-exclusion, Website Optimizer, dayparting, and geotargeting. This seems to be a concerted and very smart business strategy: If you have the best traffic, you should flaunt it.

So it came as a bit of surprise this week when my co-worker Hilary informed me that Google’s very-useful negative keyword creation tool (a part of the overall keyword creation tool) had disappeared from the AdWords user interface. To me, this could be a short-term Q4 revenue play, or it could be part of a larger strategy that puts Google at odds with search marketing agencies.

What Did The Negative Keyword Creation Tool Do?


Before delving into my analysis, let me explain what this tool does. Google and all other search engines allow you to not only buy keywords but specifically not buy keywords as well. For example, if I was buying keywords to sell a Prince Tennis Racket, and I bought the keyword “Prince,” I wouldn’t want to show up on searches like “Prince and the New Power Generation” or “Prince Albert in a Can,” but I would want to show up on “Prince Tennis Racket.” Adding negatives like “-Power Generation”, “-Albert”, and “-Can” would allow me to filter my traffic to avoid these non-relevant searches. And as Google’s “matching algorithm” increasing expands the reach of my keywords, it’s important to be just as thorough in excluding keywords as most advertisers are in including keywords.

Indeed, I often tell aspiring search engine marketers that the game is no longer “he who has the most keywords wins” but rather “he would applies the most filtering to his best keywords wins.” In today’s Google search results, you can no longer expect to be the only advertiser when you buy a six or seven word keyword phrase. Instead, Google will just broad match the most-relevant generic keywords to show up alongside you. So you should try to buy those generic keywords, but you should also try to apply as many negative keywords as possible to those generics, to prevent the situation described above - marketing tennis and paying for funk music fans.


Until last week, Google made it very easy to research and add these negative keywords to your campaigns. All you needed to do was go to the keyword tool, type in your generic keywords, and select “suggest possible negative keywords.” The tool would then spew out a few hundred related terms and you could click on each term and instantly add them to a specific Ad Group or to an entire campaign. Since the tool was using Google’s search algorithm to come up with related terms, you could feel confident that you could build a comprehensive list of negative keywords in minutes.

When Tools are Removed, Who Loses?


But now that tool is gone. It disappeared after Google’s most recent system upgrade. Adding negative keywords is still possible, just a lot more painful. Now you have to research your own list of keywords, and then go to your campaign settings and manually upload your list. Experienced search marketers I’m sure will feel that this isn’t really that hard a process, and indeed, it is not. It took me about five minutes to teach my newbie team member the alternative way of adding these keywords.

Then again, a lot of the free tools that Google has released in the last few years, have also been ‘no duh’ tools for experienced online marketers. Google Analytics, for example, was released years after most marketers had already invested in far more sophisticated Web analytics tools. Conversion tracking is nothing more than a very rudimentary pixel tracking method - also around since the last century.


In other words, removing an easy-to-use filtering tool will only end up negatively impacting novice AdWords advertisers, who don’t know the alternative ways to get the same effect. As I noted above, such a move seemingly flies in the face of Google’s concerted attempts to level the playing field between the savvy marketers and everyone else. What could possibly be the rationale behind it?

I thought about this for a while and I really couldn’t come up with a very good answer. Indeed, I have two possible theories and I’d love to hear other opinions.


Theory #1: Google Wants to Make More Money in Q4

If Google signs up a lot of new merchants for the holiday season, and Google downplays tools that filter traffic and encourages merchants to ‘go all out’ on the big generic keywords, this could be a short-term windfall for Google. After all, these less-savvy advertisers wouldn’t actually understand that their purchase of the keyword “nightstands” would also have them showing up on searches like “one nightstands.” The result would be more clicks, and more money for Google.


Of course, the long-term result would be dissatisfied advertisers who got a lot of untargeted clicks. If and when Google’s competitors catch up to Google in terms of quality and tools, Google could pay the price for doing anything that reduces the quality of the advertiser experience on their site. And because this would directly contradict all the other pro-transparency moves Google’s made, I can’t believe that this explains the reason for downplaying negative keywords.

Theory #2: Google Wants To Manage Your Campaigns for You


So that leads me to Theory #2. Google wants advertisers to ’set it and forget it’ when it comes to their online campaigns. This essentially means telling Google how much you want to pay for a conversion, setting a monthly budget, and letting the Google advertising machine do the rest. Google’s recent launch of their Conversion Optimizer supports this theory - just set a cost per acquisition and let Google figure out the right bid.

You could extend the same logic to decreasing importance of negative keywords. Just tell Google how much you want to pay per conversion, give Google some general keywords that work for you, and let Google do the rest. The assumption would be that over time Google’s system would filter out your bad keywords, simply because they didn’t meet your cost per acquisition metrics.
There are other tools Google has recently launched that support this theory, including the Ad Text creation beta and campaign optimizer (which suggests keywords and campaign improvements). Add Conversion Optimizer, Ad text, and campaign suggestions together, and you could have the foundation of a completely automated Google program - all you need to do is pay the credit card bill. In such a model, negative keywords are way too hands-on.


If theory #2 is true, the chasm between search marketing experts and search marketing novices will increase significantly over time. The experts will continue to use the AdWords API, desktop editor, and any advanced tools that still remain in the user interface. The novices will increasingly rely on Google’s automation to do all the work for them, putting their faith in Google to deliver the highest ROI. I could even see Google creating two user interfaces, one with the bells and whistles experts want, and the other with rudimentary reporting that novices desire.

Theory #2 also puts Google into direct competition with search marketing agencies. If Google really can create an automated system that delivers ROI for advertisers, what’s the value of search agencies? Right now, I ask that hypothetically, because I know that Google isn’t anywhere near building technology that can beat out the best agencies (combining technology and people). Still, if Google continues to get better at their tools, more and more advertisers will be willing to trust Google and save the 5% to 10% they currently spend outsourcing their campaigns.


Much Ado About Nothing?

I may be totally creating a conspiracy theory out of nothing here. It may just be that Google did some user experience testing and concluded that most users didn’t like or use the negative keyword creation functionality. Google is, after all, all about as much white space as possible on their pages! Maybe I’m just overthinking every Google move.


Then again, Google has a lot of smart folks at Googleplex, and Google doesn’t make changes to AdWords on a whim. Search agencies make a lot of money these days, and I sense Google doesn’t like seeing middlemen making money off their platform. Stay tuned.

Kermit the Frog - Name Murderer!

Let me admit right now that this post is not search marketing - or even online marketing related. So die-hard marketers who only read this blog for insightful advertising analysis, you can skip this post.

That being said, there is a technology angle here. One of the coolest Web sites around is the Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager. If you haven't seen this site, check it out. You can type in any name (or portion of a name) and it graphically shows you how that name's popularity has ebbed and flowed over the last 100 years. I think it uses AJAX, which means you can keep adding or subtracting letters from a name to see more or fewer choices.

It's really interesting to see names that rapidly rise or decline in popularity, and then to interpret why that name had such a sudden shift in usage. The best example of this is the name "Adolph." Back in 1890, Adolph was the 158th most popular boy name in the US. In the 1920s, it has slipped to 270th. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, it dropped precipitously. By the 50s it was ranked 634th, and by 1970 it was too unpopular to be charted.

It's rather obvious what happened to this name's popularity - Nazi leader Adolf Hitler destroyed any parents' hopes of having a baby Adolph (or Adolf) who would survive grade school without getting pummeled on a daily basis.

An alternative example might be a name like "Faith." In the 1980s, Faith was the 361st most popular girl's name. With the rise of country music star Faith Hill in the early 2000s, the name suddenly became red hot: by 2005, Faith has reached 49th!

Or consider a President's name. "George" was 69th in the 1980s, dropped to 109th during George Bush Sr's presidency, and in 2006 was at 153rd. "Richard" was 8th in the 1960s, but dropped to 15th in the 1970s after Nixon's Watergate. The boy's name "Kennedy" was only ranked in one decade - 733rd in the 1960s - and disappeared from the map forever after that. And for those of you paying attention to this year's politics, "Hillary" was 268th in the 1980s, 315th in the 1990s, and in 2006 is 982nd. Could spell trouble!

The strangest example of how popular culture or world events can impact names is the case of the name "Kermit." The name Kermit had its most popular era in the 1910s, when it was ranked 269th. The name declined steadily, but as late as the 1960s was still in the top 700. Then, in a period of two decades, by the 1980s the name had disappeared from the list.

My conclusion for the demise of Kermit is simple: no one wants to name their boy after a frog! Yes, as much as Kermit the Frog is loved by America, he has single-handedly destroyed the use of his own name.

I warned you that this would have nothing to do with online advertising. Hopefully you'll agree it is fascinating nonetheless!

Message from Facebook: Big Brother Has Written on Your Wall, and He Wants to Sell You Something

Those of you hiding under a rock today no doubt still heard the news that Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for a mere 1.6% of the company, giving Facebook a hefty $15 billion valuation.

This investment begins a period that will truly define Facebook's fate. Right now, the company is on top of the world - phenomenal membership growth, massive valuation, and sexy enough to attract Silicon Valley's brightest - even from Google - to join and grow the company.

But contrarian that I am, I have to point out three major challenges Facebook now has in front of it.

1. Will Facebook Users Embrace Microsoft? With this investment, Facebook is no longer the hip community founded by and for college students. It's big business. There is no longer anything counter-culture about Facebook. So the question is: how will Facebook's core users react? Will 20-somethings want to be part of a community that is backed by Microsoft, formerly known as the evil empire?

A potential analogy here might be Barack Obama. When Obama was a 'potential' candidate, he was cool, hip and had tremendous buzz. Now that he's an actual candidate, however, many people see him as just that - a political candidate. It's hard to keep your 'outsider' street creds when you are in the midst of a race to be the ultimate insider. Will Facebook suffer the same fate?

2. Will Facebook Users Embrace Monetization? Despite the good work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Microsoft as a company is all about money. Suffice to say, to value Facebook at $15 billion, Microsoft is betting that Facebook will find a way to turn eyeballs into dollars.

And it therefore comes as no surprise that Facebook is planning a big upcoming advertising announcement in the near future. While savvy Facebook users have no doubt expected this for some time, it's an open question as to how they'll react when part of Facebook's real estate starts to be paid space. After all, these are the same people who went bonkers when Facebook introduced the "newsfeed" a few months back.

3. How Will Google Fights Back? OK, Microsoft *finally* beat Google out for a deal. Good for Microsoft, it's about time. Now Google is in a new position as a company - what to do when you lose an acquisition/investment play. This loss is not going to go down easy over at the Googleplex, both because they see Facebook as a threat and because they absolutely hate Microsoft.

Google is going to react to this move, and likely react aggressively. Indeed, it's already been suggested that Google may be launching an open source platform to rival Facebook in a matter of days. The tenuous friendship between Facebook and Google may be officially over, and Facebook needs to brace themselves for a potential battle.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that it's all downhill from here for Facebook, merely that the greater your success, the greater the challenges. Google is an example of a company that faced these threats (adding paid ads to their site, grappling with the silly 'don't be evil' mantra, fending off attacks from Microsoft and Yahoo), and has clearly come out the other end quite nicely (market cap bigger than Citibank or WalMart - I call that a success). But once you get to the top, everyone wants to bring you down. In the coming months, we'll see how Facebook deals with the pressure.

Newsflash: Users are Lazy! Make Them Work at Your Peril

As a big college football fan, I frequently visit Rivals.com to catch up on the latest news or chat with other fans on the message boards. Rivals.com is free for anyone to use (you don't even have to register), but to chat you need a user account, and to access premium features (like recruiting news) you have to pay an annual fee.

I'm a registered member, but I let my paid subscription lapse a few months back. Last week when I tried to visit the site to read the message boards, I got an annoying jump page from Yahoo - Rival's new owners. It basically asked me for my password and to accept the new terms and conditions of the site. Without assenting to these two requests, I could not access the site.

So what did I do? Rather than digging through my email accounts to find a password I haven't needed in a year, I just left. I went to another sports site to get my college football fix.

I'm sure there are good legal reasons for this page, but I'm equally sure that there are good alternatives to forcing users to update their registration and consent information before they can access any part of the site (imagine if Google updated their Ts & Cs and they required every user to click "I agree" before they could do a search on Google).

The result: Yahoo's lawyers are happy, but Rivals is probably losing users in droves, to the delight of their competitors. Rivals-Yahoo has violated a cardinal rule of Web sites - don't put anything between a user and your site.

An even better example is Plaxo, the online Rolodex for your connections. A few years ago, Plaxo and LinkedIn were probably pretty even in terms of usage. But Plaxo requires you to download software to participate - and requires your contacts to also download software. All you need to do on LinkedIn is register online.

By forcing users to take the extra step of downloading an application, Plaxo made a big bet: once we get people to download our software, the switching costs are so high that we'll have them as users for life. LinkedIn took the opposite approach: let's make it as easy as possible for users to participate, knowing that we are also making it easier for users to switch to another service.

The results have clearly favored LinkedIn. As you can see from Google Trends, Plaxo is on the decline while LinkedIn is on fire. When you create extra work for users, in most cases they'll just decide that your site is not really worth the effort.

Users are protective of their information and they are equally protective of their time. The moment you interrupt their surfing experience with an unnecessary user registration demand, software downloads, acceptance of Ts & Cs, or behavioral targeting surveys, you are giving consumers a reason to go somewhere else. Don't let your greed prevent you from being successful.

Dispatches from the Field: The Indian Internet Opportunity

I was in Bangalore last week on business and I happened to have dinner with an Indian venture capitalist. He told me that VC interest in investing in India (note that the last four words started with ïn", pretty cool!) has really exploded over the last few years.

That in itself is not exciting news. After all, we've been reading about Indian outsourcing for some time and I suspect that even the non-techy 'man on the street' associates Bangalore with offshore development. So investing in outsourcing wouldn't really cause me to raise an eyebrow.

But it turns out that a lot of the VC investment isn't around outsourcing but rather around Internet companies for the Indian market. And here's why this is such an amazing opportunity. Currently, there are only 40 million Indian Internet users - that's out of a population of over one billion. Compare that to the US where the number is something like 250 million - basically everyone but toddlers - out of a total population of 300 million.

Now granted, India is not going to reach that level of saturation anytime soon (the VC also told me that TV penetration in India is only about 30%). But let's assume that within a few years 10% of Indians will have Internet access. That's about 100 million users. And these users are fundamentally different than the US usage base simply because they are exclusively upper middle-class or upper-class users. Translation: 100 million users with a lot of disposable income.

The bottom line is that the Indian Internet opportunity is probably as big or bigger than the US market and it's in it's infancy (four words starting with "i.") It's like the US Internet market in 1995. This is a goldmine we're going to be hearing a lot about in the next few years.