I’m doing some research on t-shirts and always liked the blogger tees I got from Shellen. So I went to google and searched for Blogger tees. The first sponsored result above the natural results was for blogger but I was more interested in finding them at the Google Store.
Well the first sponsored result on the right hand side was for the Google Store. So I figured that would take me directly to the blogger tees in there so I can get some good images of them for my due diligence.
Well I click on the ad and then BAM, I get an error page! The message states…
Oops!
Sorry but it looks like we do not have any products to display.
Please check back soon.
Then I started laughing at the irony. Google, the largest ppc ad network in the world can’t optimize their own ppc campaigns. Sure, I know, they probably don’t pay anything to themselves but I’m sure they have to account for the costs. Chances are they have budgets for each division [product] and they need to know how well their own ads are converting in order to increase their conversion ratios, right?
Hmm, this has got me really thinking now. You’d think Google has automated their internal ppc campaigns to determine when 404 error pages are encountered. Or at least when there is no actual content on the pages they’ve served up on their own networks… yeah right. First off, after looking at the response headers from the error page in the Google Store, it’s plain to see they’re not even returning a 404 error code. That’s seo 101 but really not that big of a deal. Here are the response headers…
Response Headers – http://www.googlestore.com/category.asp?catid=0
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 18:32:26 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Length: 14031
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: private
200 OK
But the funny part about the response headers is the fact they’re running the Google Store on IIS 6.0 and Microsoft’s Active Server Page. Wow, that’s interesting. I can’t believe I never picked up on that before.
I guess we can count on Google to optimize your AdWords ads for conversion ratios and making sure you’re serving up decent content but not their own. File this under eating your own dog food.
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
