Absolutely no beer in this park. Except maybe a little beer. Or a lot, depending.
Responses to my question, “Would you move to an 11-tooth mountain cassette that let you go single ring up front if it meant having to buy a new rear hub or entire rear wheel, new derailleur and new shifter?” continue to arrive in my email, and all I can say is that we’re all wafflers. We hate that system, unless it’s cool, in which case we like it. Or vice versa. To be fair, a few of you have gone bold and declared SRAM’s 1×11 system utterly undesirable. Very few have felt they must have it at all costs. But most of you just sort of might use it, if the price is right. You could go either way on 11-speed mountain.
I sympathize. There are a lot of things about which I’ve gone back and forth over and over again and always feel like I just need more information. One of those things for me is advertising. Unless Google went out of business, you’re probably seeing some form of add there on the right. Maybe it’s a group of ads and maybe it’s a single animated one. I have no idea, because Google tailors whatever ad is over there not just to the content in my post (which should be pretty interesting), but also to you–to all the other data Google has on you. It occurred to me the other day that I should mess around with that. Particularly if there’s a chance I can generate about $8 a week, which is the approximate cost of the beer that makes this blog possible. Mostly, though, I just wanted to see what Google would put there.
I’ve set up some AdWords accounts in my day and was recently asked about setting up another. Retailers all have to contend with AdWords as a necessity, but for a lot of manufacturing and distribution businesses, AdWords is still just some mysterious way Google generates greater income than a majority of the countries in the world. The whole point of AdWords is driving people to your ecommerce site with a single mission: buy. Buy that widget you just searched for. You know you want it, and now we know you want it, and Google sent you to us, so let’s just do this thing already.
But brands without any direct call to action–like Coca Cola–what’s in it for them? Go ahead and Google “coca cola,” and I promise Coke’s paying mad money to show up at the very top of a list of organic search results that are all about their company anyway. If the whole page is results that point to your product anyway, why the hell pay to compete with yourself?
The prevailing theory here seems to be that companies like to control their message. They like to own their content. When people search for Coke, Coke wants to get in front of that search result, instead of, say, “Coke Plus Mentos Makes Boy’s Stomach Explode.”
But by all accounts Google’s algorithms also factor in what I guess we’d call “gravity.” Spend a million bucks on ads to get people to your site, and your site is going to have residual life to it even after you stop paying. Just like having money makes money, having traffic makes traffic. But frankly there’s a lot of weird shit about how Google does stuff that I know absolutely nothing about. There are a lot of people who’ll tell you they do, and that they can make you buckets of money based on this great Search Engine Optimization system they’ve developed.
It’s been my experience that few of these people have divine knowledge, and the majority of them are engaged in business practices that are “ambitious” at best, “fraudulent” at worst. I just can’t bare to listen to SEO wonks prattle on about “synergizing” this and “value adding” that, and “creating multi-platform relationship” and stuff. These are basically all the things that anyone who isn’t a complete asshole does to grow a business anyway. Give people a reason to find you, and once they do, make it so they want to come back.
So few articles about SEO I find to read online are of any real value. Usually I just want to find the douchebag who wrote the article and beat him to death with his own leg. Hence my experiment. Based on the stuff I write about here, what ads will Google deliver to this page.
So far, I’ve seen one for ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Playoffs. What in the hell made Google place that here, I don’t know, given that I’ve never mentioned basketball . . . until now. Damn, you’re good, Google.
But the interesting part for a guy who’s about to build yet another AdWords campaign is to go back to my older posts and see what Google thinks they should be selling. The SRAM post I’d written on 1×11 seems to’ve gotten Google infatuated with “Needle Valves” and no fewer than two ads for needle vales are showing up for me on that page. One of the many joys of having a blog called “canootervalve” is all the plumbers my ads are bound to attract. There’s also an ad for AdWords (oh, Google, you are so meta). Oh, and there’s a Zoosk ad asking if you want to “meet a real girl for free.” Google’s ability to tailor ads to you, my audience of five guys, is uncanny.
As someone who’s always been on the other side of Google advertising, though–making ads and trying to generate return on investment through them–I’m fascinated to see how long it takes Google to figure out what it is I’m really writing about.
Then, ideally, they can tell me.
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