Out With A Bang

It is a block that we walked around many moons ago…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=100

And in the 15 months since, my knowledge of all things SEO hasn’t improved. I remain pretty wedded to this notion that if the content is good enough, your community will find you; you’ll find a place around their campfire provided you add something of relevance and interest to their conversation on a regular basis.

… that and the fact that I had neither the will nor the simple wherewithal to pay anyone to optimise my site on a regular basis in the hope that I would somehow look that much sexier to a Google spider.

Of course, once we decided to ditch the Google AdSense strip and launch something rather more home-grown onto an unsuspecting world in the shape of www.Addiply.com, so my need to work my way up the Google rankings with £400-a-month’s worth of ‘optimisation’ held even less appeal.

Even in these straitened, League One times we’re still pulling around 20,000 monthly uniques to MFW/norwich not having a spent a bean on optimising our site.

All of which, therefore, made news of Google’s impending move into the display ad market rather interesting… or rather, wryly amusing as the Man from G explained one or two of the problems with the current display ad market as publishers and advertisers alike try to tweak and twiddle themselves into the most optimal state possible in the hope that the right ad (display) would find its way onto the right, relevant site…

Here we go… http://tinyurl.com/m9lc2d … and, in particular…

“With a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns,” he [Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of product management] said. “With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don’t bother, or don’t invest as much as they would like.”

“On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty… We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone…”

Whereas planning their text ad campaigns is a piece of cake, right…?

Because I’ve had two conversations in the last week with two smart, web-savvy people for whom both the cost and the complexity of tweaking the right ad words to make any ‘AdSense’ was getting beyond even them…

… that they didn’t have the ‘thousands of hours’ to plan and manage their campaigns. And, more importantly, neither did they have the will or the wherewithal to out-source that planning to a third-party agency.

That, in short, they were the sum of all Mr Mohan’s fears; that when faced with such complexity – and, dare we say it, such obscurity when it came to quantifying the actual results – that they didn’t bother.

And on the ground – on the corner of 17th/Main or behind the counter of Josh & Archie’s Shop – people don’t have the time, the energy or the MSc in data manipulation to product-stroke-ad place with kind of dexterity and understanding now required.

It is a dark art, getting ever darker. And as whole swathes of local and niche advertisers look to take their first, tentative steps on-line, they simply don’t ‘get’ it.

Particularly not in a depressed economy in which every last ad cent-stroke-penny needs to be accounted for.

Which is one of the reasons that I trawled through the YouTube archives for a piece of Not The Nine O’Clock News brilliance.

Only for the word ‘gramophone’, IMHO you can substitute ‘Google ranking’… and watch the kind of fun that any SEO marketing company can have with the unsuspecting advertiser-stroke-publisher for whom – even now – this remains a whole new world.

http://tinyurl.com/m9lc2d

People want simple. They want accountable. They want open. And honest.

They don’t want a bag on their head. Or the slimline salad dressing.

I want to place my ad there.

How do I get it there? And what does it cost? A tenner a week? Fine. I get that…

And to my mind – particularly out there in local/niche land – it needs to be no more complicated that that.

What can I get for a tenner? OK. You mean I can just place my ad there, myself?

Yes.