kev.in

At the risk of being called a keyword Nazi and having to endure accusations that I care just a little too much about this stuff: Microsoft just managed surpass my experience with Yahoo.

As I mentioned, I’ve been advertising my online community classifieds site, Dibs.net, on Google for almost a month. Last night I decided to try out Microsoft’s advertising network for my community classifieds site. I copied some of my better performing ads from my Classifieds Ad Group on Google into my Classifieds Ad Group on Microsoft.

Here’s representative ad from the bunch:

I was in business fairly quickly — or so I thought. Microsoft has a similar “editorial guidelines” process to Yahoo’s. But at Microsoft, the process must go something like this:

1. Take break from huffing paint fumes and watching Scooby-Doo
2. Flip coin
3. Heads, you get to advertise with your keyword; tails, you don’t

Microsoft rejected what I consider to the the most important keywords from my advertising, including “classifieds” and “community classifieds.”

I’ve given them a chance to respond before I start calling them names here

(PS – Google’s success in advertising appears to be not without reason.)

Update: Microsoft took only a few hours to respond, and did so positively by reinstating the classifieds-related keywords. Good for them (and me). They blamed the problem on their automated editorial process, which raises the question: why would anyone automate such a thing? I think we can all agree computers are great at some things, but applying subjective and vaguely defined editorial guidelines isn’t one of them. Either way, I take back my paint fumes and Scooby-Doo comment above, since it appears they aren’t nuts after all.

I’ve been advertising Dibs.net on both the Google and Yahoo ad networks for three weeks. I’ll have more to say later on, but I did want to share some notes about Yahoo’s “editorial process” regarding what search terms they let you advertise against. This process is allegedly for quality purposes, so that more relevant advertising is displayed to searchers.

Google has taken a more free-market approach to their editorializing of search terms you can advertise against. I’m sure they have a quality-control staff to keep ads clean, but they tend to let you spend your money however you want. I’m no Google fan, but I think Google’s approach is far superior, mainly because the market actually does self-correct mispositioned advertising: as people find their advertising for certain keywords isn’t working, they pare back the selection of keywords to be more laser-focused. I did this very thing; it works.

Yahoo, on the other hand, voluntarily protects certain company names (though who knows which ones) and is awfully serious about the relevancy of keywords you choose. But it’s all so inconsistent and confusing that you never know what they will allow. For example, they apparently allow some misspellings of brand names, but not others. And today I got notice they decided a term wasn’t relevant enough to Dibs.net — which surprised me, since I often describe Dibs.net using the exact term they rejected.

So, I just fired off an email to Yahoo support to see if they can make this situation clearer than the Mississippi mud they’ve given me till now.

Can you give me more detail as to why you believe the keyword “flea markets” isn’t applicable to my company, which is itself an online flea market (dibs.net)?

Removing the keyword from my campaign strikes me as an overly aggressive editorial decision, especially after conducting this search on Yahoo and noting NOT A SINGLE AD relates even remotely to flea markets. In fact, mine is the MOST RELEVANT of any company there. Of the most absurd listings you apparently allow, BizRate, Shopping.com, PalmersUniforms.com and Restaurant.com are advertised on the “flea markets” keyword.

Yes, Restaurant.com advertises under “flea markets” but dibs.net cannot? Come on, Yahoo! I’m trying to like your ad service. I really am. But this sort of random, haphazard enforcement of “editorial rules” leaves me plain confounded.

I have paused my advertising until I receive a response explaining how Yahoo can possibly hope to apply such picky rules consistently.

Thanks,
Kevin Hunt

We’ll see what they have to say about Restaurant.com’s flea market. Mmmmm, makes you hungry just thinking about it, doesn’t it?

Update (8/23): Yahoo responded this morning. They explained that because Dibs.net’s content is not about flea markets, the keyword is not allowed. Ok, fair enough, if those are the actual rules — but they’re not. That would be stupid. I responded and asked if Amazon would be allowed to advertise with the keywork “book stores,” since they have no information about actual book stores. Also, Yahoo’s response did not address how a site about restaurants can use the keyword they are disallowing for me. I’m still confused.

Come on, Yahoo! I really want to like you. Granted, this isn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme of things; but if I’m to commit an ad budget to you, you’d better clarify your rules and apply them consistently.

You might be wondering what I’ve been up to since leaving my job several months ago. I made a movie to explain, in a series of pictures, what my day-to-day life of the last four months has entailed.

After countless hours of designing, coding, modeling, learning, networking, drawing, hacking, zipping, unzipping, scanning, testing, documenting, administrating, photoshopping, rewriting, tuning, fixing and launching, I have finally resurfaced with something I am really proud of.

I’m really excited to announce the opening of dibs.net, a local community online bulletin board for buying and selling stuff. (To check it out now, see what I’m selling on my personal site: http://kevin.dibs.net or read the “About” page: http://dibs.net/about).

Why did I build dibs.net? As the saying goes, “to scratch my own itch.” There are other ways to advertise and sell online, but none came close to what people need. For example, eBay items need to be shipped; they charge high fees; plus everything takes a week to sell. Craigslist, on the other hand, works well for getting the word out, but the barrage of email is a nightmare if you have more than a couple things for sale; I could never keep track of who wanted what, when they offered, how much, or when they were coming over.

Enter dibs.net! I built in features for:

• answering questions from interested buyers, and adding your answer right to your listing, so you don’t have to keep answering the same darn questions over and over
• managing many offers at a time, including accepting and rejecting
• really great-looking listings, with no limit on photos
• personal account URLs, so your stuff is listed exclusively at yourname.dibs.net

The result? There is no better way to buy and sell things in your community.

Of course, there is plenty more to it than that. You’ll have to check it out to see everything it does. Now if you’ll pardon me, I need a nap!

It’s alive and kicking!

Read more about dibs.net.

For the last few months I’ve worked tirelessly on my pet-project-cum-fulltime-startup. The cadence of my work has accelerated in recent weeks as I have put myself under more and more pressure to “go live.” I have pulled all-nighters or crashed into bed at 5am more frequently than I’d like to admit. Through the neglect of non-essential errands, my car has developed a thick film of grime on its exterior and my hair has become shaggy and unkempt. My eyes are permanently bloodshot. My dog no longer reacts to the word “park.”

The only guarantee about working tirelessly is that you will end up tired. And maybe a little cranky. Check, and check.

But despite these tribulations, this experience has been rewarding and worthwhile. I love what I’ve built, and I hope the world does, too.

This weekend I am focusing all of my remaining energy on launching. In the end, the feature set is going to be well beyond what I had envisioned for the initial launch — a shortage of external deadlines and product managers leads inexoriably to an abundance of features.

Also, as I like to read about the plumbing and machinery behind web pages, I hope to have a chance to explain all the details of how I went about building the service. Since I’m a one-man team, I’ve been dependent on time- and money-saving strategies, including technologies like Ruby on Rails, Amazon EC2, Apache Solr and Ubuntu Linux. That, and more, in a future posts.

For now, sleep.