Google Isn’t As Smart As We Think

It’s not often you listen to a panel that contains a CEO of a large B2B lead generation platform play and a founder of a company whose entire business still comes from incentive marketing. Throw in a travel comparison site and a start-up looking to generate a whole new category in the lead generation world, and you found yourself with us earlier in the week at a small function that tried to introduce customer acquisition to a room equally if not more diverse from those working on hedge funds to a medical director from one of the largest pharmaceutical companies. I’d say you couldn’t pay for such an audience, but since they did charge an admission fee, I guess you can. One company in particular had almost all in attendance scratching our heads, out of amazement not confusion. While they don’t call themselves a lead generation play, their site functions in much the same way that a company in the lead generation space might – matching consumers with a particular need to appropriate entities that can help them with that need. In this respect, you could almost consider Google a lead generation firm as they have created a marketplace of intent and show users relevant results for their query. Those in the customer acquisition space, though, tend to go one level deeper, from query to inquiry and CPC to CPA. As a result, the economics tend to support a relatively straightforward business where site owners and their affiliates can grow the business on the spread between the cost of an acquisition and the revenue generated from a sign-up. Such a model applies for an enormous percentage of the offers that populate our space, from dating to diabetes supplies, with the quasi-linear scalability making it ripe for paid search use.

The millions spent on paid search, the open to anyone nature of the space, and the constant changes in the landscape – from the players to the rules each puts out – has not just those spending money online focusing on it but those who report on the space, like us, doing so as well. Unlike email and natural search, anyone can get into paid search, and a decent number who had no prior understanding have found a way to carve out not just a living but a more than impressive one at that. Which brings us back to the company that presented the other night. They have little in common with how many in the customer acquisition space get started, but they possess something that many of us think about but lack a clear direction on obtaining – natural search traffic. Since their public launch in January, they have gone from practically zero unique visitors to one million in roughly nine-months. Most of us wouldn’t mind those numbers, especially if the traffic goes to a site with some conversion funnel. Let’s assume that the traffic goes towards something of moderate but not high value, like an auto lead, where a lead goes for, call it, ten dollars on average. The site works well, and for comparison sake, converts close to that of a good performing paid search campaign with 5% of the traffic filling out a form. That would mean our site of one million visitors per month sees 50,000 leads per month and income of $500,000. Not bad. Even if you had a staff of five and some outsourced people making it effectively a staff of 10, you would have roughly six million dollars annually for perhaps at most three-million dollars in overhead. Most people wouldn’t mind having a business with those metrics, or even half those metrics. If you do operate in a more lucrative market and have strength in the conversion process, those numbers could look even better, and they most likely do for the site that presented. The problem, though, while most people want a site that has inbound organic traffic at scale, if you have experience operating in our space, you won’t want to spend the at least 12 months it took the presenting company before they even launched.

Assuming that you wanted all the benefits of inbound traffic without the investment of time and money before launch, you would be like most people, and you’d start to look for alternatives to receive the upside without the downside. Such tricks have become tougher and tougher on the paid search side because that’s Google’s multi-billion dollar revenue stream, but after years of similar smackdowns for those in the organic space, it looks like the attention has perhaps shifted more from insuring the stability of their user base to the stability of their revenue, leaving the door open for some clever but shifty strategies for organic traffic acquisition. Those that cover search regularly have mentioned the issues with sites that purchase links and the potential backlash that can occur to sites who buy and sell links. In SEO, links matter. The more you have, the better it is, especially if they come from a wide range of sites and don’t get added in mass blocks. Google has spoken out against some of the more obvious, such as buying links, and if you have had such a slap happen to you in the past, you probably took the threat seriously and curtailed your activities. Another link scam though, seems to persist, one more interesting to the performance marketing space, because it’s much more something a super savvy performance marketer would think up – counter spam. It’s far from new, but it’s persistence and ease to spot (from a human and thus automation perspective) makes it easy to think that perhaps, either Google focuses less on certain areas, or being a little harsh, that they aren’t as smart as we necessarily give them credit.

Here’s how it works, go to Google and type in "dell coupons."  In the results, several sites will come up, for example, BestOnlineCoupons.com, AllOnlineCoupons.com, and OnlineComputerCoupons.com. Interestingly, each of the ones mentioned, besides having a high organic rank, has a surprisingly similar look and feel. They happen to be all registered in San Diego as well, even though the PO Boxes are different. If you look at the site, let’s take BestOnlineCoupons, you might notice this on the front page:

For those of us who spend money on traffic, you might wonder why they’d give up real estate for a "counter." Further down the page, they give even more real estate promoting a site called AmazingCounters.com. If they give up space, it must be important, goes the logic, and so it is. The way we tell is by going to Yahoo Site Explorer to look into the in-bound links the site receives. We type in BestOnlineCoupons.com and get the following as the first result –  acarol.woz.org.

Go to acarol.woz.org, and it’s not exactly the type of site that discusses coupons or would link to a coupon site…until you scroll down and see the counter.

A check of the code, shows us the following:

<a href="http://www.bestonlinecoupons.com">
<img border="0" src="http://c4.amazingcounters.com/counter.php?i=831610&c=2495143" alt="Overstock.com Coupons"></a><br>
<small><a href="http://www.allonlinecoupons.com/st/overstock/">Overstock.com Coupons</a></small>

Needless to say, it riles those in the legitimate SEO space, i.e., they don’t buy traffic or artificially inflate their relevance, but it’s a good lesson for those in the performance space. That giving away tools for free has a value, and it’s a value that when you understand the web, you can it turn into substantial profits. Or, maybe it just means Google isn’t as smart as we think. If anything, it’s just another great example of how people have figured out how to make money in an environment where Google Analytics is more powerful and free.