Beware of Microsoft AdCenter, et al.
I was excited to try out Microsoft’s free $200 promotion for new signups at AdCenter. In all, I discoved some serious problems with the service and figured I’d pass them on to you.
Highly untargeted leads
I ran simutaneous campaigns on Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Using the same series of keywords, the same ad copy and the same budget, I found that Google referrals were as much as 10 times more likely to make a purchase than MSN or Yahoo. In some cases, the numbers came out to be over 20 times more likely for certain keyphrases. So I’m now highly skeptical of Microsoft’s claim that their traffic is highly targeted.
Incompatibility with Browsers
Lots of bugs creep in when using an alternate browser to Internet Explorer in AdCenter. It’s a major pain to try to navigate their control panel in Firefox, Opera, or Safari. I found that Firefox worked best of these three, but as AdCenter is all Ajax-ified, the user interface is poorly designed and you have to click way to much to get around. Not a comfortable experience at all.
Billing and Promotion Problems
The only and I mean only service that has billed me correctly without any issues is Google. I am currently in a dispute with MSN over their billing system. For two weeks after I paused a campaign it continued to suck out money for which I have to fight for it back. A full two days after I issued a complaint I got an automated email response and I’m still waiting (it’s been over a week now). Well over $200 has owed me, and I’m really ticked about it. Yahoo Search Marketing did the same, but they would not refund me one dollar. I’ve decided to never do business with Yahoo ever again. Google on the other hand, has been very receptive to billing questions, has responded promptly, and has even listened to inquiries about PPC spam refunds.
Conclusion
Both Microsoft and Yahoo are really rushing to get their PPC services ahead of the pack, and I find their services to be laden with bugs and problems. They’re just not there yet. Once again, Google has out done their rivals. Beware of the Microsoft and Yahoo products because you’ll likely find errors all over the place. I personally wish to dissuade all of you from using these services until significant improvements have been made.
Some Feedback on Displacement Scores
I just got an email from a good friend about the displacement scores we’ve been testing. I hope you all can have similar success using this measurement!
Dave,
Here’s some interesting data I found that might help your research. I googled the following phrases:
you can do this
“you can do this”
Once without quotes, the second time with quotes. When I googled it without quotes, the education.byu.edu/youcandothis page didn’t show in the first 50 results. When I googled it with quotes, we were 5th on the list. I was curious to see the displacement scores for the phrases, so I checked it out:
you can do this - 8,748 (something like that)
“you can do this” - 16
Using your legend, it matches perfectly. You say that for a score of 11-70, “penetrating the top ten will require active link strategies as well as a coherently crafted relevant page.” We haven’t done many linking strategies, but we have done a coherently crafted page…(like all our pages, we’ve made sure that the title, URL, h1 tag, and body text match the keyword). In your analysis of the data, I think our lack of linking strategy is made up by the fact that we are an .edu domain. That gives us the beef to make up for the lack of incoming links.
Anyway, your scores matched the data. An .edu domain with a well-crafted page was able to break the top ten search results for a keyword with a 16 displacement score. It was not able to break the top ten search results for a keyword with an 8000+ displacement score. Just as I would have expected.
Displacement vs. Keyword Competition Model
A reasonable measurement for how difficult a certain keyphrase is to rank in search engines is the “Keyword Effectiveness Index” or the keyword competition model. Simply put, you take the number of searches in a given month for the target keyphrase and divide it by the number of estimated results that appear where the engine says “Showing 1-10 of [5,000,000] websites for [keyphrase]“.
# of searches / total estimated results = KEI
(Some SEOs like to square the number of searches to make for an easier number.)
One of my qualms with this measurement is that it pulls in all the junk web sites out there into it. For instance, one keyphrase may bring up 200 million results and another will pull up 50 million. The KEI for each will be much different, yet when there are that many sites, you’ll inevitably have to optimize your site and actively campaign for it to rank higher. Another reservation I have to making the KEI value a major measurement is the fact that users can’t even go past 1,000 results if they wanted to. Indeed, most users stick to the top ten results, and the vast majority concern themselves with the number one spot, period.
The Displacement Model
How difficult is it to enter the top ten? Now this seems to be a more worthwhile measurement. The Displacement Model is built on the assumption that the top ten is the main target goal for sites outside the main results. To grab a spot in those rankings, one of the current top ten will have to leave, in other words, must be displaced to make room for you.
While Google’s algorithm is built on quality links and page relevance, I felt that comparitive analysis of random samples and the top ten for any given keyphrase would yield some possibilities. After over a thousand data sets obtained from vigorous querying, I pored over the statistics and developed what I can the Displacement Score: a measurement that attempts to explain the difficulty of displacing a site from the top ten.
The Tool
I’ve made the Displacement Score available to all! I recently read that Google has stopped issuing new API keys, so I’ve made mine available for 3 queries a day. I hope you all won’t run on the bank here and deprive me of my alotted 1,000 queries a day, but I don’t use them up, so feel free to use the tool to your heart’s content with your own API keys if you have one.
Honestly, I’ve run this score through as much statistical analysis as I possibly can and now launch it with the hopes that you can give any peer reviews, feedback, and what not. In the end, it ought to help you at least sift through your keywords and identify target markets with effectiveness.
