Most search technology is a pile of crap

Jump to Comments

There I said it.

I was sitting with a potential client last week and had to listen to them wax lyrical over a piece of “Search Software” he had seen a demonstration of the other day. The look of disappointment on his face when faced with my reply that we were a search agency, not a technology development company and that we do not have a “Googlebuster 5000″ with which to optimise his campaigns told me 2 things:

1)    I was not going to get his business this time around
2)    I would most probably be seeing his company in 6 months time to pitch again (probably not seeing him though)

Whilst sitting there during the discussion my mind began to wander and I remembered the good old days of bid jamming on Overture. For those who remember, you got to see how much your competitors were bidding on Overture and the principle was that you only paid £0.01 more than your competitor. Out of this evolved a concept of bid jamming. This was where if I saw my competitor had left his bids too high, I could inflate my bid to just a penny underneath his to make him pay a lot more than if I kept my bid as to what it was. If you were using automated bid software such as Atlas you could set a rule that automatically found bid gaps to jam and that could detect when you were being jammed and automatically dropped below this point.

I played about with the software and whilst using it for a client I realised that you could outthink it pretty easily.  It wasn’t long before I was manually going through my top 20 keyword lists and setting my bids £0.03 below my competitors rather than the £0.01 so that those who were using this bid software would never pick it up, thereby maxing their budget out. At the time I remember laughing to myself and thinking I would need to check the next day and probably find the dame thing had been done to me. To my surprise, over a 6-month period not one competitor who was using the technology ever checked.

It occurred to me then, as it occurred to me during the meeting that people will always look for the easy way out, for something to help them sleep a bit better knowing that a machine has it all under control. But the reality is that all there is to well optimised search campaign is hard work. Even if you are going to use some bits and pieces to help you put larger campaigns together, the meat and potatoes needs to be manually controlled and watched like a hawk for real success.

So knowing all this I began to think about the current reports of doom and gloom within the finance industry and how there are those among us who have laid their bed in the face of the recession that is about to hit us.

Whilst the banking industry has been targeted as a hotbed of greed and the cause of the crisis in which we find ourselves, this is only because the current crunch has yet to be felt in other industries. For now, let’s point fingers at those horrible, greedy city types that put faith in instruments and products that were not robust, nor as safe as they claimed they were. But other industries have done the same thing. There has been so much money to go around they have been able to make hay in the sun without delivering any real value. And as the reaper smiles at financial institutions that gambled and lost, so too will those companies that have been selling snake oil for the last few years be hit by increased scrutiny over their accountability as cash becomes scarce.

Search marketing is as guilty as any industry on this count. I cringe when I hear prospective clients tell me how they have spoken to another search agency who has this tool that reduces minimum bids on Google Adwords whilst optimising the page for the best CPA and makes them a cappuccino at the same time. The idea that there is this “technology” that is available that cracks the hard work the search engines have put in to keep people like us guessing, is the type of stuff that belongs on infomercial channels. It’s the equivalent of developing those six pack abs you have always wanted, by attaching electronic pads to your stomach as you sit on the couch watching TV and eating your pot noodle.

Not possible.

Google and all the other search engines employ some really clever people and spend huge amounts of money to make sure that they stay ahead of anyone who threatens to figure them out.

Even if the search agencies were able to devote some serious budget to developing the kind of technology that could do everything that they say they do, Google would just change the rules in a way that would make them more money.

Especially considering that the companies who solely focus on developing this type of software and who have significant investment on their behalf, their kit, when you really get under the hood, for the most is part is just ok. Not brilliant. Not revolutionary. Not blow your brains out. Just ok. Works for some clients, doesn’t work for others and breaks more often than they would like to admit.

And yet search agencies continue to bang on about CPA tracking software, dynamic campaign optimising and other pieces of absolute made up rubbish, as if G-d Himself had come down and spoken to them in a dream informing which was the righteous way to optimise campaigns. This recession is going to hit us in search a lot harder than we give it credit for (no pun intended). Yes we may come out less blistered than say our cousins in offline media such as print and TV, but make no mistake we are still going to take a shoeing. It is true that we are not a mature industry, that we are yet to hit our ceiling point in term of how far we can grow and that search is still the most accountable and ROI focused media around etc ad nausea. However, the current crisis is because there is less money floating around.  Therefore unless our clients resort to paying us in clams, we are going to take a knock on how much we can deliver and as a result it will impact our bottom line

However, I hope that this downturn creates a need from the client’s side for more transparency and greater accountability from agencies. I hope that clients realise they cant place their faith in an automatic pilot that is on offer, but rather have to spend time getting to understand the medium and know what they are paying for. Most of all I hope that the very people who sold their “Googlebuster 5000” are made to answer for the utter rubbish they have evangelised for so long about.

4 Comments

Filed under Search Marketing

Tags: paid search, ppc, search engine optimisation, search technology, sem, seo