PetesWeekly

There are two groups of small business owners: those of us who have tried selling stuff using Google, and those of us who have not.

Today I would like to talk to those of us who have tried.

When I started using Google I was seduced by the apparent simplicity: Something along the lines of that first Wright brothers aircraft. Some canvas and string and a motor just strong enough to power a unicycle with a child on it. Point it due North and press this button, and your products would go as fast as corn during a locust plague.

But climbing into the Google cockpit is a lot like climbing into the pilots seat of a new Airbus 320. (That’s the smaller one without the cracks in the wings.) You are surrounded by a dizzying array of switches, toggles, dials, screens. It is so complex you need two drivers. And then, before you are allowed to take off, you need to get a general pilots licence, and then ‘invest’ a few hundred hours in a simulatorgetting qualified for this specific aircraft.

All of this costs time and money, both currencies that we smaller players don’t have enough of. That means that our first Google experience is more like a fiery accident than a fiesta in Ibiza.

The problem is that Google seems want more and more detail when you advertise. So do the folk searching for stuff.

I discovered this while in the UK. My wife was, frankly, grumpy after the birth of the new Carruthers. Her superstructure no longer fitted her bras. We agreed that buying a few new bras was much cheaper than going to gym, at least for a while. I suggested that my new best friend, Google, might be able to help.

“It’s not going to work,” she said. “Search Google for bras and you are buried in drivel.”"Why not search for 34E?” I suggested. (Hint for men: That is a model number, equivalent to a Porsche ‘Boxster‘, or – if you are a nerd like me – an ‘iPad2 3G’.)

She rolled her eyes at me. Grumpy wives exist to inspire men to go angling.

A few minutes later she popped her head into the study. “Got them on the first click.” she said. I was stunned, and not just because she followed my advice. So I tried to buy a few myself, not that I need them, of course. At least, not any more.

In the UK, which is very active on Google with 20 million odd people active on the web at any time, you have to search deeper than in SA. (I tried the same test in SA, and found an online store in SA that was, wait for it, “closed for the holidays”.)

That started Peter Bowen and me on the quest to build some tools to make using Google easier for the rest of us. It has been a fascinating journey.

Most folk trying to market via Google seem to be mixing their knowledge of traditional mass market advertising with their Google efforts. This works as well as cheese and onion ice cream.

Google interest-based marketing truly is unlike anything that has ever existed before. No sane marketer wants us to know that because we would all abandon media marketing as fast as real people abandoned the Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia arrived.

So, next week, at 8PM SA Time on Tuesday, we will host a gratisonline seminar to look at why Google works so well compared to any other form of marketing, including Facebook. We won’t be pushing our products, but we will be showing you how some folk are getting up to7.5 enquiries for every 100 impressions/searches. Nope, that was not a typo. That’s not 7.5% Click-Through-Rate (CTR). That’s 30% CTR and 25% page conversion rates.

Book your seat here. And hold on to your underwear.