Maine finds PPC
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This is an interesting blog post about the Maine Office of Tourism and their bull in a china shop like blundering into the world of Search Engine Marketing. To be fair, I think at least half of the blame goes to companies like Google for making Adwords so difficult for the advertisers to understand. While it may make perfect sense for the Maine Office of Tourism to promote Maine using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, the author of this blog, Lance Dutson, points out that the end result of their efforts is to drive the pricing up for legitimate Maine businesses. It brings the question to mind, if someone is searching at a place like Google for the terms “maine accomodations” one would suppose that they’re already intending a trip to Maine. Thus, is it really an effective use of the Office of Tourism’s budget to bid on those keywords? If they really wanted a return for their buck, perhaps they should advertise on keyword such as “new hampshire accomodations” and try to poach some tourists from their neighbors. The other part of Mr. Dutson’s complaint is that the Office of Tourism, by using a firm that really does not understand the basics of PPC advertising, their ads appear on keywords such as “Bangor Maine plumbing” which they really have no business doing. So, not only do resorts, hotels, inns and such in Maine have to compete with the Office of Tourism, but so does Paul the plumber in Bangor. Kudos out to Threadwatch for leading me to this post.
Please read in the comments, Thomas McCartin from the firm that manages the Maine Office of Tourism’s PPC campaign was kind enough to post his side of this interesting story.
Peter Davis is a web developer, investor, author, entrepreneur, and most importantly a father. 
[...] Peter Davis picked up the story and has a good take of this at his blog: http://www.petertdavis.net/162-maine-finds-ppc/ [...]
Peter,
Your comments are interesting but they rely too much on what Lance Dutson has posted as fact, but which has been shown to be largely his own uninformed speculation.
I took particular note of your suggestion that the MOT try targeting phrases like New Hampshire tourism since people searching “Maine Accomodations” have already decided to come to Maine. That conclusion is a common (and logical) thought among those not expert in the travel industry and not familiar with the extensive syndicated and proprietary research that industry experts rely on. For example, when we first competed for the MOT advertising account, we relied in part on research that indicated that within the state’s core geographic market, more than 20 million qualified visitor prospects had considered Maine as a vacation destination but decided NOT to visit. That underscores the fact that the MOT cannot take for granted that someone who expresses some level of interest has automatically made the decision to visit. Using that logic, then a retailer can automatically assume that every person who walks into his or her store is going to buy, and of course any retailer will debunk that theory. Furthermore, research indicates that most visitors to the New England region shop more than one destination (often selecting two or more) before they make a final travel decision. It would be irresponsible for us as an advertising agency or for the MOT to ignore these prospects who are the most likely prospects to be turned into visitors.
Unfortunately, due Mr. Dutson’s opinions being presented as proven facts, statements like the one above appear, that describe our agency as a firm that doesn’t understand the basics of PPC advertising. The fact is, Mr. Dutson, and I suspect many others, don’t understand travel advertising or how to effectively incorporate a PPC component into the media plan. Fortunately, Dann Lewis does, and he’s supported by a group of state contractors who have proven records of success in doing just that.
Thomas McCartin
Presidnet
Warren Kremer Paino Advertising
I appreciate you taking the time to post your point of view. You are correct, my post reflected only Mr. Dutson’s side of the story. I certainly do not pretend to have expertise on doing marketing for state tourism, and I can’t speak for Mr. Dutson’s experience in the field. The one interesting thing I’d like to know, though, is whether or not the ads showed on keywords such as “Bangor Maine plumbing.” Either Mr. Dutson was making that up, or it’s now been removed. I do see how it could have mistakenly happened, though, with Adwords using ‘Broad Match’ as the default, for example.
Just thought I’d add, though I didn’t see the ad for VisitMaine.com on “Bangor Maine plumbing” I do see the ad on “Bar Harbor Maine plumbing.” Mr. McCartin, is the Maine Office of Tourism providing plumbing services to the citizens of Bar Harbor?
As the person most responsible for the “hands on” management of the pay-per-click campaign for the Maine Office of Tourism, I’d like to stick my two cents in. Many of the available online tools available for keyword research, such as this one: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ give some indication of the amount of traffic a key phrase can generate. By far, travel or tourism related keywords outnumber non-tourism words by a huge margin. Rather than attempt to include every possible combination of ‘bangor maine’ with a tourism related word or words, a much more reasonable and logical approach is to use broad or phrase match. Would the ad show for ‘bangor maine plumber’? Probably, but rarely, since it’s not a popular search. Would a person truly looking for a plumber click an ad clearly titled “Visit Bangor Maine”? Not likely. Mr. Dutson’s contention was we were paying for ads like ‘bangor maine plumber’. If we were paying for ‘bangor maine plumber’, the cost was the price of an impression, which is nothing.
If it doesn’t matter, then why did you remove the bid on the term “Bar Harbor Maine plumbing” a short time ago? I notice that the ad for VisitMaine.com no longer shows for that keyword, or any other variation of “Bar Harbor” I’ve just tried now. Why remove it if it’s not important?
Also, it wasn’t exactly the point Mr. Dutson was making, as I understand it. When you place a top bid on a keyword, anyone else wanting to show at the top for that keyword needs to raise their own bid, as it’s a competitive bidding process. So, even if nobody ever clicks on VisitMaine.com if they were searching for a plumber in Bar Harbor, any plumber in Bar Harbor wanting to bid on Adwords would need to raise their bid in competition. Sure, it’s a poor example, as there are no plumbers currently bidding at all, but I do see his point.
Daily budgets are set at a level that prevents any of the ads from showing 100% of the time, and Google will spread out the impressions over the course of a day. Chances are Bar Harbor reached its budget limit. Also, Google uses some important relevancy factors when positioning ads. Placement is not based solely on bid.
In the example of the plumber, there are also other important factors to consider. One is: who exactly is he competing against? And what for? If he is competing for plumbing business, he should focus on ranking higher than his plumbing competitors. So, his ad may not appear as #1 among all advertisers, but it will be #1 among plumbers, and by extension the highest positioned ad for people actually looking for a plumber.
Ah, yes, I see that the ad is back up there for the plumbing keywords now. Frankly, I think this is more of a Google problem than something you and firms like yours are doing. If we do have a potential customer searching for plumbing services, and they see a bunch of contextually unrelated ads, they’re just going to tune out the ads. The more unrelated ads the search engines show, the less potential customers are going to pay attention. I doubt that this is lost on Google, maybe they just don’t care, I don’t know. It seems that they’d be smart enough to be able to fine tune their broad match so a firm promoting tourism wouldn’t show ads for plumbing keywords. I do understand it’s far easier for firms like yours to use broad match instead of manually entering the thousands of keywords individually. But, I also do see Mr. Dutson’s point that by showing MOT’s ads on plumbing (and countless other) keywords that it may have the effect of driving up PPC prices for Maine’s business community.
Is it just me, or am I allowed to wonder if the Maine Tourism office doesn’t have anything more important to do than interfering with the free market. What a waste of time it seems to me. As long as government agencies neglect the real duties and play around instead, our nation is not going to benefit. Leave the small businesses alone and get back to work, guys. I’ve never been in Maine, but if it’s even half as bad as San Diego when it comes to city or state employees wasting our tax dollars, then I think it’s time to get off the internet and take a few phone calls from potential tourists and concerned citizens instead
Mike Dammann
I work as an SEO/PPC specialist for one of Australia’s top web marketing companies, and Adwords is an area I am intimately familiar with, so I thought I would throw my 2 cents worth in here…
Firstly, as mentioned by Mark Wrenn, Google ad positions are NOT soley determined by your bid price. In actual fact, what’s way more important to Google is your relevancy to the searched term.
By a very complex series of software algorithms, they can determine what your landing page/site and advert are about, and if they deem you highly relevant (plus you have a high click rate on your ads), then they charge you LESS per click.
That lesser amount can be as small as 1 cent above the next lowest bidder, sometimes even cheaper than that.
Google is DIFFERENT to Yahoo/Overture in this respect. There, you pay for position and he who pays the most, gets the highest position.
Many of my clients get a very high Click rate on some of their keywords and their relevency is very high, so Google usually charge them approx 50% of his maximum bid rate. Very nice discount when you are playing with the big boys…
The best part of this story is that they still maintain the high ranking for their ads. That’s the real beauty of Google’s Adwords system - if you play well, they reward you with high positions & low bids.
The next comment is with regards to the complexities of coming up with ALL possible keyword combinations that someone MIGHT type in when looking for a specific product or service. That’s where broad match is such a wonderful option.
You sacrifice relevancy and discounted bid rates to get wide coverage of your target market. Heck, even eBay has some dumb ads that show up due to this option
so I don’t think we can can the MOT too much just because the odd ad for a plumber in maine shows up.
It’s damn hard work AND very time consuming to come up with the phrase & exact match keywords for a big campaign like this (I run one such similar campaign right now for a client), and it’s ultimately cheaper for ALL if you use broad match.
If the ad is NOT relevent to the searcher, they rarely click on it anyway, and it costs nothing to show the ad, so it works well all round, for Google, the advertiser and the searcher.
Lastly, it’s a little known fact that the highest position is not usually the best position to have your ads shown. The ROI is usually lower, due to the higher bid rate. Studies done show that positions 3-5 are often MUCH better value for money than 1-2, so don’t think you need to be #1 to get the best result.
Thanks very much for the comments Eran. With the broad match, is it not possible for the person managing the PPC campaign to exclude certain matches? So, if MOT got complaints from plumbers about competition for the relevant keywords, could they not exclude those keywords from their broad match?
Greetings
I linked here from MWR..Far too late, but I think I can clear things up a bit. I have the findings of the panel from which Dutson and his lawyer fled. (Email me if you want me to fax them to you -address on blog)
This truth, and much more, can be found here:
http://truthaboutlewis.blogspot.com
Look above and in the green text for the PPC section. I took out the techo-babble.
Thanks so much for your time.
Linda H