expertSEM

In USA Today, an article about the military’s online marketing efforts caught my attention. It seems that the combined forces of the Army, Navy and Air Force, while able to take over middle-sized foreign countries, was unable to keep their recruiting ads off a gay website, GLEE.com. This illustrates in hilarious clarity the importance of a couple of SEM principles, foremost: SCREEN YOUR NETWORK!


To understand this, you must be familiar with how media buying and ad distribution on the Internet works. If you want to place banner ads (or in the military’s case, help wanted ads) online, there are millions of sites which host them. Obviously, finding the relevant ones, then approaching each and hammering out a deal with them is inefficient, so an industry of middlemen grew up to do just that for advertisers, the Ad Networks. In turn, the advertisers specify wide or narrow parameters for showing their ads. For our present example, it probably went something like “we want diversity in our recruits, so show job listings on diversity oriented sites.” This task then falls to an overworked, entry-level English major who is supposed to go and find all sites within the network which satisfy the advertiser’s parameters. Each network may have tens of thousands of sites to comb through, and without a clearer parameter (*ahem… “No Homosexuals!”) the employee did exactly what he thought was correct and found diversity sites on which to display ads.


All of this is standard, but the next part of the equation is what makes or breaks advertising professionals—screening that list. At this point, the account manager in charge of the campaign gives the green light; however, if they did their job, they would look at each site to make sure they weren’t going to waste a client’s money, or more rarely, embarrass the client. Clearly this did not happen or there was an oversight on the Ad Network, and they added this site to the diversity network without much thought into the client base that would be running on it. Either way, vetting the list up front and frequently thereafter is a best practice which should be followed whenever a media purchase of this type is arranged.

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Today my colleague, the Internet Gatekeeper, returned from the Direct Marketer’s Association trade show with a typical tote bag full of swag. Among the various tchotchkes was an enormous 14” by 1.5” diameter pen from a company which shall remain nameless.

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If there’s one thing that scares PPC marketers, it’s click fraud. While I maintain that the incidence is rarer than it’s made out to be by alarmists, it’s quite obvious that there are fraudulent sites trying to take advertiser’s money illegitimately. I was tipped off to this one by a friend who happened to see it within many of his PPC content targeting networks as a high traffic, no return site.

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Though the PPC Handyman is currently landlocked in mountainous Colorado, there was a time when surfing was a daily adventure. For any Angelenos out there, Topanga was my spot. A few things about California surfing for those not familiar: (1) early birds get the worm—by the afternoon you are dealing with windchop that cuts up the surface; (2) it only looks easy, really it takes years of practice and work to achieve the facility that makes it so seductive to observers; (3) fight for the big ones—king size waves aren’t guaranteed, so when one rolls your way, be prepared, fight for position and go, if you don’t the next guy in the lineup will, and you’ll just have to watch his cutbacks as you scan the now flat horizon.

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