I’m a client of Aldebaran Web Design and Jill kindly invited me to post in her blog about my YellowPages.com pay-per-click advertising experience. This story is for you, the small business owner with a website, who might be contemplating hiring a company to do pay-per-click advertising for you. Please don’t do it! Please repeat after me: “I promise I will use Google AdWords exclusively, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design for guidance if needed.�

I started my Seattle based private psychotherapy practice in the fall of 2007, and soon after Jill and I went live with my new website, it got noticed by online advertising companies who emailed me with business offers: “Sign up on our therapist listing and double your clients!� they’d say, or “The smart therapist hires us for internet advertising!� I deleted most of them, but made the major mistake of taking calls from a sales rep at YellowPages.com.

The YellowPages.com sales rep had seen my website—and he proved he had by describing details about it—and said it was great. (Yes, I’m sorry to say I responded to cheap flattery.) He talked at length about the importance of pay-per-click advertising. At the time, I was experimenting with Google AdWords on my own, but I didn’t feel adept at it. I wasn’t sure I was really making effective ads or getting new clients from it. So…I agreed to hire YellowPages.com to do pay-per-click advertising for me, for quite a lot of money per month.

For a month or two, as the YellowPages.com sales rep warned me, nothing happened. They said they needed to “set up� my account. (Note that with Google AdWords, you can start immediately, and you have full control over your own ads, keywords, campaign themes, everything.)

A month or two later, I got an email from my sales rep with a screen shot of one of my ads. It had a typo in it. (!!) And the text didn’t sound like me. “Run into some trouble?� it said, as if my work as a psychotherapist is to help people who just broke their shoelaces. Most of my clients haven’t “run into some trouble.� They’re wrestling with deep stuff, hard issues, painful problems.

When I asked them to fix the typo, I was told that it would take several days to roll out the fix. (Again, with Google AdWords, it gets fixed the moment you yourself go in and fix it.) And they didn’t want me writing ads. “Run into some trouble� it was, and “Run into some trouble� it was going to continue to be. *sigh*

But the best (worst) was yet to come. In January of 2008, Jill began helping me with my Google AdWords campaign. Part of that included careful review of my website statistics. She started noticing some weird traffic on my site. (I followed her recommendation and use Web-stat, so I could see the weird traffic too.) Jill can recognize invalid clicks and fraudulent pay-per-click traffic, and so Jill emailed me and asked me if I hired someone to do pay-per-click advertising for me. I was embarrassed to say yes, I had hired YellowPages.com.

And here’s what we discovered: my YellowPages.com ads were showing up on odd search-engine sites (odd because they weren’t legitimate sites—they were “made for adsense sites“, sites filled exclusively with sponsored ads, and no real content), and the ads had text like this: “Run into some trouble? Puyallup Therapist. Call today to schedule an appointment.� I boldfaced the word ‘Puyallup’ because it was boldfaced in the ad, and because my therapy office is more than an hour away from Puyallup. The link in the Puyallup ad (and the Bellevue ad, and the Federal Way ad, and on several other ads) was a link to my site.

Turns out YellowPages.com uses dynamic ad-title generation techniques. If someone enters the keywords “Puyallup therapist,� my ad will pop up as a sponsored link, with the word ‘Seattle’ changed to ‘Puyallup.’ This is false advertising. Jill and I found that well over 80% of the clicks on these ads were bounces—the person would click on the ad, see that I don’t work anywhere near Puyallup, and bounce away from my site. And I was paying for the clicks!

I started emailing YellowPages.com, and what followed was a series of email exchanges that would be funny if they weren’t so infuriating.

They tried everything: “Those aren’t our ads.� Oh really? So someone else is paying out of their own pocket to post ads for me that say “Run into some trouble?�?

Their next tactic: “Our ads are performing better than you say.� No, they weren’t. I emailed them bounce-rate data and more screen shots of fraudulent ads.

By this time I was three or four levels of supervisors above my YellowPages.com original sales rep. Each time I would email YellowPages.com, it seemed, my email would be forwarded to someone’s supervisor, who would then try to calm me down and convince me that I wasn’t being taken for a pay-per-click fraud ride.

In the end, they canceled my YellowPages.com pay-per-click account. I didn’t get a refund for the money I had already spent, but they did stop the campaign and have not taken any more of my money.

I hope that if you’ve read this far, you are now a true believer: you have now resolved to stick with Google AdWords, and only Google AdWords, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design if you have questions or want to learn more about doing pay-per-click advertising yourself. Take it from me: I went in another direction, and wow, did I ever run into some trouble!!

—Stephen Crippen, StephenCrippen.com

Footnote by Jill:Stephen is now managing his own Google AdWords campaign and in complete control of his online advertising. I offer Google AdWords Campaign Consulting services to my small business website clients to help them avoid situations like these - this is not the first client of mine that has been caught in a poor quality pay-per-click scheme. I got trapped in one myself with CitySearch before I learned about how easy it is to get caught paying for invalid clicks. My goal, is to teach small business owners how to manage their own Google AdWords accounts - knowledge is power

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under the Getting Traffic, Pay-Per-Click category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.