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I ordered a battery for my Plantronics headset from Headsets Plus last week.  It’s about the size of a SD Card.  And it was the only thing I ordered.

Their site, order process, and other parts of the process was okay.  The packaging… not so much.

I’ve been hearing of stories of retailers starting to adjust how they package items, and have seen other examples of wasteful packaging online, but I think this one is among the worst I’ve seen.

When I placed the order, I even included this in the comments during check-out.

This thing is tiny - if you can ship it cheaper than $6.94 via another method please do so and credit my card.

At least most of it was recyclable.

I’m not a huge tree-hugger or anything, but damn, people.  Have you not heard of padded envelopes?

Lee Odden hit a nerve with his last post.

“The [seo] challenge comes from a combination of:

• The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to
• Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

…. “Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

One undercurrent effect here is that there is a shift in responsibility for the success of a site from the SEO (with his bag of tricks, magic levers and dials) to the site owner (producing relevant, domain specific content worthy of links.) It also may spell a major shift in the role of SEO to content producer for some companies, and not a lot of SEOs will be able to deliver on this.

I’ve seen, time and time again, that getting a company to assign (talented) resources to the production of content is very difficult. Either because of laziness or lack of long-term mindset, there is a rift that develops between the consulting SEO’s recommendations and the company’s willingness or ability.

So, the clients nod at the ‘you’ll need to produce quality content‘ task discussion, when time comes, nothing gets done. Either they will avoid the task altogether or they’ll assign “an intern” or someone that’s already doing 3 jobs to the work… and the output hardly counts as link worthy.

That rift causes huge levels of stress and can be interpreted as a lack of ability on the SEO’s part. Saying “but you’re producing crap content” hardly mends the issue. It will be the responsibility of the skilled SEO to not only identify and recommend the content production, but also in educating clients on the value of this activity.

Image: Mikel Ortega

Pay per click advertising works best when you maintain control over your match types, negative keywords, ad rotation, and landing pages. The minute you relinquish control to broad match and other “lazy” modes of traffic, the minute your cost-per-lead/sale can go through the roof. This got worse in the Summer of 2005 when Google started making broad match into “expanded broad match” - greatly increasing the situation an ad will display by loosening restrictions — and now it sounds like things are going to go broader still. I’ve read that on May 20th Google is expanding the beta (or possibly launching) the Automatic Match system (nicknamed “Screwgle” by Paul Boutin at Vallywag) and it sounds like broad match gone amuck meant to improve Google’s profitability.

From Google:

“Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information. The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or lower than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic. Automatic matching won’t allow your spend to exceed your budget, and it also won’t affect the traffic you’re currently receiving. In addition, automatic matching will have no impact if your campaigns already capture the majority of relevant traffic.”

I’ve not used this system ( I wasn’t in the beta ) but even just reading this email I can already list at least 9 things I dislike about it.

1. It does the equivalent of keyword research on the fly, trying out keywords to see if “they stick” based on Google’s data. This removes the human from keyword research. My experience is that 80% of keyword research is ELIMINATION of poor quality choices before you spend money on using them in your campaign. In other words, there is a lot of intuition applied based on advertiser domain knowledge and automatic match eliminates that phase. While some may think this approach is a good way to learn keywords to use, I think there are better ways, especially when they involve harvesting keyword data and then doing some smart detective work on the results.

2. The almost impossible task of creating negative keywords that will negate the constant algorithmic display of Google-chosen keywords. Think “automated embedded match without the associated automation on the negative embedded match side…. How often will you check it? How often will amateur or new advertisers? I’m guessing never. So you will very likely end up advertising for phrases where you do not offer the product being searched for - a classic waste scenario.

3. The enabling of the system by default. Many advertisers won’t know what hit them. While Google has assured everyone that this is an optional system, it would be likely that it will be turned on.

4. It further dismantles the smart idea of keyword-specific URLs and landing page parameters, not to mention dynamic keyword insertion. Caveat - I have no idea how Google will handle existing exact match and phrase match keywords - I’m assuming it will use the old rule of most-restriction-first-shown.

5. It spends your budget. All of it, on your behalf. With my clients, I prefer to ease “up” to their daily budget. That means starting with precision matches and loosening them gradually to find a sweet spot between relevance and volume. This way you don’t waste money or possibly reduce quality score while you tweak your campaigns or testing (by throttling our ads.)

6. It encourages lazy adwords management. When your ad campaigns are running, having them unattended can create an unhealthy black box between you and your pay per click. The variety of auctions, bid types and match types already has advertisers perplexed - and adding another dimension will make it worse. I really worry about “rush” and “fire and forget” Adwords solutions. They are insanely wasteful. This is why I hate turnkey PPC setup programs.

7. The only way you can see what queries are generating ads is to turn on a Search Query Performance report and watch for irrelevant queries - then create negative keywords for them as they come up, whack-a-mole-style. A never ending cycle that few advertisers will remember to do.

8. Advertisers will need to look at the special Automatic Keyword Performance data in reports to see how well these automatic matches are working and add special tags to your destination URLs for logfile analysis. This means yet another tag on the URLs.

9. Google does a pretty bad job of limiting broad match. With this already causing grief, are we really going to make things better by loosening it further? Yes, I know - some of you will say that broad match has its place in pay per click marketing. As Brent Hodgson expertly points out, perhaps that it’s a way to cast a net and capture heretofore unknown keyphrases. If you have endless funds, yes. But it’s a bit like testing newly designed bulletproof vests on real humans - it’s nice when you get it right - but when you don’t, it’s bloody expensive. I think other keyword development tools + log analysis + intuition + internal search logs make a hell of a lot more sense.

The right way to do Adwords

Take the time to grow a keyphrase list, divisions into thematic adgroups, and built up a collection of negative campaign and adgroup keyphrases that use phrase and exact match. Easing into your budget using split testing of ads and optimization of landing pages, you can eliminate broad match (conceding: except on your experimental campaigns.) This process alone can improve the conversion performance of your campaigns by a factor of three or four.

I should underscore that I’ve not used the system, but I’m very familiar with adwords and extended broad match issues. Is there a chance that the algorithmic remnant-sale system will work? I guess, but only if your Adwords campaigns were AWFUL to begin with and you’re willing to throw money to the wind and see where it lands.

Update:  Some real world data about this feature has been posted by Jim Gilbert and Mike Churchill

I have been doing SEO for almost 12 years now. In that time I’ve done dozens of Yahoo! Directory submissions under an embarrassingly large number of Yahoo! Ids (remember when the SPAM solution was just to change IDs?)

But my credit card number has remained the same. So each year, $299 charges appear for Yahoo directory submissions I did after they started charging for it (I have dozens that were grandfathered in.) The trouble is, I am unable to identify which URL they go with - and in a few cases I used my clients’ Yahoo! ID for submissions. I realize now what a horrible mistake that was.

None of the charges appear on my Yahoo! billing screens for any of my current Yahoo! ids. I assume that the most recent charges were done on a client ID, but somehow my billing info was used. So I call the billing department…..

Me: Hi, I have these $299 charges on my card for Yahoo! directory submissions I did.

Yahoo: Can I have your Yahoo! Id?

Me. Sorry. The charge doesn’t appear for any of my Yahoo! ids. However, I do have the charge card information and can PDF you the statement to review.

Yahoo: Can I have your charge card number.

Me: Sure, [I give it]

Yahoo: Ok, I see the Y! directory entry.

Me: Great! [I'm thinking the call will be short and sweet]

Yahoo: Do you know the alternate email address?

Me: I just need to know the URL so I can determine if it should be in the directory or not, and that will probably tell me which client Yahoo! Id I need. I’ve changed email addresses since the late ’90s a few times and in a couple of cases used my client’s Yahoo! ID for submissions. I don’t have access to the old one. But here are my current email addresses [I list them] and my current Yahoo Ids.

Yahoo: Sorry, none of those match the ones on these Yahoo! directory submissions.

Me: Probably not - it’s an oldie. Can you move them to my current account? The billing information should be the same on each account.

Yahoo: Yes, it’s the same

Me: Great!

Yahoo: But we cannot use that information.

Me: [growing concerned] So, even though I’m being charged for this Yahoo! directory entry you cannot tell me which URL it’s for if I don’t have the old Yahoo! id that was used to submit it?

Yahoo: That’s correct.

Me: Doesn’t this seem a little out of whack to you? You have tons of evidence at your disposal to see that it’s me, including my phone number [I offer to have them call me back] and my billing information.

Yahoo: Sorry, that won’t work. I can cancel the Directory listing for you and give you a refund.

Me: [feeling out of options - I don't want $300 charges for clients I don't have anymore]

In the end. They would NOT tell me which URL the charge was for. I ended up having to cancel the listing, possibly affecting the SEO performance of my client and waiting to see which one vanished from the directory.

The URL of a charged directory entry is not a security risk. There is no good reason not to tell this to the party who is being charged.

dead end sign by David Joyce used under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License

My email to the client representative for a $10k portal software said:

“The edit RSS page for the portal is giving a page not found error for [I entered url] - what do you think would cause that? Thanks, Scott”

The reply from their customer service email:

“We don’t answer questions like that here, and don’t forward things to the support team as a policy. You need to fill in a support ticket for this. [link]”

The link was to a form that had 54 fields. I felt compelled to let them know who the customer was and went on with my day, pissed. It was all I could think of when we had a budget meeting about whether we should continue using the portal.  We didn’t renew.

Was this kind of behavior the reason we cancelled a $12k/year support arrangement? Not sure, but I certainly wasn’t in the best mood when it came time for me to voice my recommendation for the renewal.

I know support ticket systems pretty well in the small-enterprise variety. I have had a few when I was doing hosting and have interacted with probably 20 different ones. My company has since moved to basecamp to give things a more human touch, and basecamp has recently followed some of the advice in this post. I am guilty of the things in the past. But to you, beloved reader, I will say I see the errors of my ways.

Let me be the first to say that if you have 100s of clients, selling a commodity item such as hosting, I recognize the workflow issues you’re facing. We all need to move support issues through the system as fast as possible when margins are razor thin. But if the support systems creators were a little more aware of the non-tech and/or busy customer community, perhaps things could improve.

(more…)

No wonder we’re a tired nation. It takes 5 minutes to read a no-parking sign. I came across this sign today, and thought it was kind of pathetic. 65 words to say “15 minute parking” .. nuts. Where will it end. By 2028, the sign will reach the ground and you’ll have to check a box agreeing that you read it.