I’ve found that certain words can garner Google-gold.
Having trouble with your computer? Be sure to add the word ‘problem’ to your search.
Have a cold-caller on the line, add the word ‘scam’ to your search of their company.
Here’s an experience with a directory-service company…
Second run-in:
Two months ago I received a call to renew my vendor-directory listing with a major industry association. $395 to renew. And I’m pretty sure I actually said yes to this the first time, so I didn’t flinch, but wanted to look at results.
The telemarketer sent me the following stats per their records:
|
Results Page Views |
Landing Page Views |
Website Clicks |
|
6,902 |
642 |
1,059 |
So I looked at my Google Analytic stats and saw … 16 click-thrus … for the year!
I declined a renewal, and figured it was just poor traffic and poor data collection.
Today, a new call:
Today I received another call for for a different trade association, one I hadn’t dealt with in ten years. It’s then that I googled the now-obvious 3rd-party directory service and the word ‘scam’.
I came up with this post by a former employee of the directory service: Rip Off Report: MultiView Mislead advertisers. Here is just one snip of a very rational and seemingly factual report:
“After talking to a few people in the company about the difference, I learned that our tracking software counts any click to their listing. I found out that search engines routinely visit the online buyers guides and spider through the listings. Each time a search engine spiders a listing, it counts as a hit in our tracking software. The other tracking software packages including Googel Analytics only count the actualy clicks that a human performs to open a Website.”
Wow, that explains why the stats were so far off–spiders generate hits, not page-views or click-thrus. I learned that in 1997–most marketing managers know that by now, too. So, obviously my cut/paste of the stats I received, shown above, didn’t tell the truth.
While my experience dealing with their salespeople makes me want to avoid calling the company a ‘scam’, using that term helped me turn up this crucial info to help me make a decision.
Almost certainly the value of what they have to sell is very low. The associations they work with have little incentive to drive traffic to the directories Multiview develops on their behalf, but with only 10% of the listing-revenue, it certainly won’t be a priority to them. But to the directory company, it is apparently worth lying about.