Last Wednesday, at the urging of my 'better self' (and after two specific requests from NewBoss Anais), I contacted our three DIY 'Nuts and requested that they clean up their blasted campaigns.

The first guy I contacted argued with me--he thought that because he undersood what he intended, his brain waves are somehow psychically transferred through to Webstrainer and on to ten million web searchers. It took me two days, but I finally convinced him and he removed a hundred or so low-score keywords. (He does not seem to have taken my pointed remarks about campaign organization or ad performance on board.)

The second guy was all, I haven't been paying attention, but I'll go look at things, which was annoying but at least he responded. Eventually he removed a handful of the bad words but left around 100 of them active. Which was useless.

I'm still waiting to hear back from MadBoy's Mad Offspring. He hasn't done anything at all so far about the 200+ poor quality words in his campaign.

Why these drastic steps, you ask? Why are you, Anne, notoriously 'Nut-adverse, reaching out in this fashion?
Because all I've done for over a week, by way of management on my 30 campaigns, is sit here and delete low score keywords. Almost all of our best-performing words, in fact.

Long story short, a conference call with Webstrainer early last week confirmed that a lot of "my" problem with my nosediving quality scores was the DIY 'Nut campaigns dragging the entire company down with them.

Last week, I pitched a major fit at NewBoss Anais. When I managed 45 accounts and we had one DIYer, the good I did far outweighed the bad he did. Now that I manage 30 accounts, and we've had four or five craptasic DIY campaigns running for several months this year, the balance has tipped. (Webstrainer is always quicker to shut you down for poor or even potentially poor performance than they are to give you a second chance--with ten hundred thousand people clamoring for placement on their pages, they don't need to loosen up their standards for the also-rans.)

I could, of course, sneak around and work on Gidget Company accounts, but my handy-dandy offline tool has started popping fatal error messages at me every time I try to download a new account. If I can't download the accounts, I can't work on them.

For those of you wondering what happened in that MadBoy call with the Webstrainer rep a couple of weeks ago?

Not much.

MadBoy didn't attend, but his Mad Offspring was there. The M.O. had no interest in discussing any of the things he'd done, what his results were, or any of the geographic targeting issues he'd been annoying NewBoss Anais about for two months. Instead, he demanded repeatedly that the Webstrainer rep explain to him everything that changed during a specific four-day interval this past June.

I'll spare you a lot of tedious detail--just trust me when I say that not even traveling back in a time machine to the very days the M.O. was inquiring about would have enabled the entire Webstrainer workforce to produce the information the M.O. wanted. I swear, from his attitude, he really thinks we're just withholding information from him to be mean, you know? He got pissy with us all at the end of the call. ("I guess if I'm not going to get the answers to any of my questions, that's all.")

I mean, okay, I sympathize that he wanted something and didn't get it, but applying a minimum number of brain cells to the topic--say, ten--should have revealed to him the sheer, galaxy-sized magnitude of what he wanted. I tried to apply significantly more brain cells--say, a hundred--to the question of "what would it take to capture data that way" and my head exploded four or five times before self-preservation kicked in.

In the meantime, I'm sitting here, twiddling my thumbs. There's nothing I can do to rectify the situation, no edits I can make to any of the campaigns that will do any good at all until the low-quality campaigns are cleaned up.*

I'm beyond even making rage-induced blog entries on how damaging this has all been. 18 months worth of work, down the tubes. I scrabbled, fought, and clawed for every tenth of a percentage point of quality improvement I could get for a year and a half. All gone.

I'm so stressed out, I am literally shaking.

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* If you have a bucket o'garbage, dumping perfume in it doesn't make it smell any better. And you can't take the perfume back out and use it later.