Well, to begin with, I'm this week's winner in the, "I Really Suck At What I Do" category. Again.
Ohmigodsoboring story really short:
Of the fourteen 'Nut campaigns I worked on last week, half improved and half slid down into the sub-basement of performance. Of the nineteen 'Nut campaigns I did not get to last week? Half improved and half slid down into the sub-basement of performance.
If I'd laid in bed all last week, eating bon-bons and reading trashy novels, I'd be right where I am now. (Only, you know, with chocolate all over the sheets.)
After four hours of data analysis this morning, I can confidently say that, after those bid increases I told you about, if I'd done nothing else since, all of the campaigns would look better today than they do.
I have trust issues, okay? And I have bigger trust issues with me than with anyone else. That one I know ever believes I know what I'm talking about or know what I'm doing--that's always been a constant in my life.* So much so that I've internalized it and I doubt myself before anyone else has a chance to doubt me.
In this case, it just never occurred to me that I might be doing it more or less "right" and that only the 'Nuts' collective allergy to high bids was to blame for the performance slide.
I guess I'll just write it all off to "education."
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* I am the Incompetent One. I adopted this role early in life, largely at my mother's urging. She was a woman for whom excelling meant "showing off," especially if you were a girl, and she discouraged that sort of thing. Frequently and firmly. (Girls who show off or seem to be too smart don't get husbands, you know.) If you're a child who, through no fault of their own (genetics or something), is prone to excelling but is willing to do anything for a quiet life, you easily develop the habit of never being "good" at anything.
Also? People like you better if they're better at things than you are. Many of the long-term friendships in my life have been based on me discovering what someone felt was their "specialty" and then making certain, for however many years necessary, that I was always about 50% "worse" at it than they were.
For example, Gidget feels we make a great team because I can't write, which she likes to do, and I'm good at things involving numbers, projects she doesn't like. The fact that the opposite is true--I love trying to write and hate messing with numbers--is something I'm willing to lay aside in my relationship with her.
I am the Incompetent One. As long as I keep my friendships tightly compartmentalized, it works for me. I mean, sure, I set myself up for failure sometimes, but I'm not a doctor or anything, so I can live with the consequences.
What started me off on this tangent, anyhow?
Probably my desire to think about anything but all that wasted time last week....
I'm sorry for the long silence (although I don't imagine any of you are sorry to have missed five or six episodes of whining and ranting about the same ol' stuff).
Boring story short--I'm still working on shoving us back to the Quality A-List.
The bid increases did a lot to pull in more traffic and more-or-less stop the meltdown.
Now I'm going through each campaign, word by word, researching six months worth of ad data to find the best ads for each word in each separate campaign, then reloading them as single-word "groups" (that's the simplest way I can think of to put it) with the corresponding "good" ads. This should give each campaign's performance scores a quick boost. I've done that for about half of them so far.
I knew that the words were absolutely key in these campaigns so I can't imagine why it never occurred to me to look at the data sorted in this precise way before one of our Webstrainer reps suggested it last Tuesday. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
It turns out that I've been deleting ads that were superstar performers for some words, and retaining other ads that had no business being associated with other words.
Okay, so it takes at least twice as long to evaluate the data this way. It's the right way to do it. I'm sure I'll get used to it.
Word First! That's my new slogan.
By some time next week, the extra traffic we seduced Webstrainer into serving will start to evaporate unless the campaign's performance justifies keeping us on the fast track, but it's taken me six days to get fourteen campaigns done and I don't see any way I can do the other nineteen in the three work days available to me next week.
Yes, I do have a long weekend, but I really need to spend next Friday working on The Gidget Co campaigns and on Bernie's campaign. There are some of Gidget's campaigns I haven't touched for two weeks and I'm interested in looking at Bernie's campaign in this new way I was discussing a moment ago.
In the meantime, I'm fending off NewBoss Anais with a whip and a chair. She wants two more 'Nuts to join the in-house Webstrainer Train and I just don't have time. One is a 'Nut who bailed out six months ago and hasn’t had any campaign. The other is the Southernest DIY 'Nut (and the least nutty of the three) who has been DIYing for six weeks and should now be understanding why this is not a game for amateurs. And while that's fine and more work means more job security, blah, blah, blah, I just can't allow myself to be distracted at the moment.
And there's another bunch o'Nuts, in the Flat Crazy State, whose campaign (which I have never seen) is managed by an outside, local agency, but who still, for reasons that I really don't care about, think that emailing me with their questions is the correct procedure.
I don't know, okay? I don't know what you're advertising because I don't know what you told your agency you wanted to advertise. I don't know what's working or not working because I haven't seen what you're doing.
And, no, I can't send you "benchmarking" data because, 1) you haven't shared any data with me in six months, and, 2) since I don't know what you're doing, I wouldn't know what to benchmark.
Naturally, this was wigging me out, but my actual meltdown didn't occur until the 'Nut forwarded--get this--forwarded an email from Gidget, from March, of 2008, and lectured me on how I should provide them with that kind of data. (And then asked a question about the email in such a way as to make it obvious that this is the first time they've followed up on it since they received it eighteen months ago.)
There were five full-time people in this department in March of 2008, okay? Today there's just me and NewBoss Anais--and she spends most of her time on "business development" and not marketing.
After I tossed a minor hissy fit at NewBoss Anais, she gave me permission to ignore that last email, at least for a while.
Anyhow. Nineteen more campaigns to fix. No time for blogging.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:20 PM | Comments (13)I'm bursting at the seams with stress. (Picture a double-stuff oreo where the creamy filling is sort of acid-reflux green.) *
I ate breakfast. Then I ate my morning snack. Then I ate my afternoon snack. I'm afraid to eat any more. I might be sick.
In the "will wonders never cease" category, Webstrainer actually sent me an email (well, okay, they responded to a reminder from me, but I've learned they don't follow up unless I nag) saying they do have some suggestions. We scheduled a call (90 minutes from now) and all I can do is sit here--churning and waiting.
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* Seriously? What would you wish for? That they'd find a big mistake on your part--because then you'd have been incompetent, but you could fix it?
Or that they'd find it's all about the DIY 'Nuts? Because then you'd rock, but the accounts would still be trash.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:10 PM | Comments (2)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.