Comments on: Vignette: Google's Sales Call and the (New?) Fifty Percent Rule

By: Nathan Weinberg

Nathan Weinberg — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:48:26 +0000

John, needless to say, FMPub sites pull in far more traffic than my two blogs, in aggregate, and larger sites get special “consideration”. If, instead of asking about the publisher split, you had asked about how to improve ad targeting, my personal experiences have shown that Google has ways of accomodating. You might be able to benefit quite a bit financially if you call them back.

By: Rishi Khaitan

Rishi Khaitan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 20:59:19 +0000

I got a similar e-mail from Google for one of the sites my company runs. The rep wanted to discuss “exciting new advertising opportunities with Google”. Like you, out of curiosity, we followed up and of course there was nothing “new” or “exciting”. Just plain old AdSense but the part that I found surprising is that even though he initiated contact, he obviously didn’t spend even a minute learning about our site before contacting us. I’m assuming that their conversion is good enough that they don’t have to spend time and effort into having a more sophisticated (prospective) customer management.

By: Jennifer Apple

Jennifer Apple — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:33:27 +0000

Last year we were called by Google for some “optimizing” help and our AdSense revenues tripled after we implemented their suggestions. We ended up working with 3 different experts and it has totally benefited us. Felt obliged to share this.

By: Joe Holcomb

Joe Holcomb — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:42:04 +0000

Common practice John. When training new sales reps on the publisher or advertiser side it is typical with many search companies just to give the rep a list or a couple of places to mine data from in order to show them how to dig up leads for themselves. They go at these blind without any information or background on who they are calling. I'd find it hard to believe Google doesn't have a CRM system to manage this stuff and make reviewable notes for future calls, but maybe they don't.

As far as the revenue shares go it is VERY common practice for all search companies to give a larger share of the ad revenue to their bigger publishers while pushing low rev shares to the small publishers. With enough small publishers you do make up the difference in revenue and lower you're overall TAC. Not that this needs saying but wanted to include it for those who may not be aware.

By: Aaron Dykstra

Aaron Dykstra — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:05:11 +0000

John,

The part I found particularly interesting about the conversation was that the rep cared little for your concern about AdSense's relevancy to your site pushing it over to it isn't being displayed in the right location.

This seems like their sales force is not working to make you into a client, just trying to push their stuff on the uninformed. Not necessarily evil, but not going to help the semi-educated. They should have gone to where they can taylor the advertising to coded keywords or what not. I am somewhat shocked that this was not taken care of correctly...

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:00:51 +0000

In an organization as large as Google, it's no wonder that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I doubt the thumb doesn't know what the index finger is doing. After all, when they decided to stop showing AdSense ads on my site I thought they were being rather silly.... here I was, actively promoting AdSense and telling people to write sites with great content and they take away the ads because the word "Google" is in the domain. Well, what do you expect, my book is called Make Easy Money with Google so of course the natural domain for it is... wait for it... MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com!

I appealed the decision, but no go. Ah well. I've not yet decided if I'm going to switch domains or not, I'm running my own text ads in the meantime. Which makes it all so ironic, doesn't it?

Google is not the small web startup it once was, a long long time ago. It's a big company now, and that means that bureaucracy, policies and all that big-company stuff are inevitable.

By: gavan

gavan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 14:16:13 +0000

I agree with Halley ,have been involved in sales myself and sounds like you were chatting to a low level salesperson ,telemarketer .She is most likely working from a script and knows nothing about percentage payouts.

Sounds like the sales manager should be fired

By: aaron wall

aaron wall — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:56:00 +0000

>mining Alexa

Am sure they have about 10,000 as much user data as Alexa does.

Interesting that they came out and said majority…would have been nice if she would have slipped up and gave a bit more…maybe next call

By: Halley Suitt

Halley Suitt — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:53:06 +0000

I've been in sales a LONG time, and this salesperson shouldn't be embarrassed, she should be fired.

She works at Google and didn't bother to find out that you've written a book about search ... okay, THE book about search ... and that your business Federated is all about web advertising ...

Yikes!

Are you sure she wasn't actually from the NSA or something?

By: Me

Me — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:59:16 +0000

“Boing Boing is pretty eclectic, and it’s hard for networks like AdSense to figure out what ads to run.” Using the adsense preview tool on individual posts pages of boingboing, generally the ads don’t seem off the mark to me.