An Open Letter to Google

I’m frustrated with Google.

Google, I’ve had enough.

I’ve been a client since the beginning, when you sold search ads on an impression basis. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with you. Sure, I don’t spend as much as some of the big firms, but you were kind enough to send an electronic picture frame to me last year to thank me for my business.

But I’ve had enough with the “black box” algorithms in your advertising program. Advertising with Google ought to be transparent, but it’s far from it.

I realize you had to tweak Adwords to prevent people from gaming the system. But how you calculate relevancy and minimum bids is frustrating. Clients don’t like frustration.

You see, my firm launched a web community a couple months ago called Virtual Ventures. If you search for Virtual Ventures or even our domain name, virtualventures.com, you don’t see our site on the first page. You see lots of articles regarding our site, but not our site. That’s OK; I know it takes a few months for you to index fresh sites.

I’m willing to pay for search ads in the meantime.

So the prior week I set up an ad campaign to show ads when people search for “Virtual Ventures” and “VirtualVentures.com”. The ad asks searchers to visit Virtual Ventures, which they are most certainly interested in doing if they search for one of these phrases. There are no other ads running for these terms, and advertising with you will make our site visible while we wait for you to index it.

Following carefully selecting the ad text and keywords, I submitted the campaign.

But I won’t see my ads anytime soon. Apparently your black box thinks that the term VirtualVentures.com isn’t very relevant for advertising the site VirtualVentures.com. Nor is “Virtual Ventures”. You’re asking me to bid $5 per click for “VirtualVentures.com”, or asking me to make my ads more relevant. Sorry, not even a Google engineer could pick a more relevant ad for these keywords.

There’s not much I can do. You have a stranglehold on most web traffic, especially the tech-savvy audience I’m trying to attract. But I’m not happy; and that goes for a lot of other clients as well.