I spent a lot of money on Google in the RV industry (to the tune of $500,000/month for a certain fortune 500 company) & there are a lot of issues with this post:
First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate evenly".
The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - which doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is tainted from the start.
Also,
> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but the differences should be proportional.
Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all. I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.
Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.
What's it like being in a position to choose how $500k per month is spent? Wow. That's equivalent to about forty engineers' salaries per year.
EDIT: I visited your website and am not sure what to think. http://joelrunyon.com/ Is it true that those sorts of marketing tactics will convince people to entrust you with how to spend $500k/mo? (Personal branding is rather important. I was just a little surprised that those particular methods would be effective.)
I run a few businesses. My agency site [1] is where my marketing services are. I don't sell through the site - it's all word of mouth / client referrals.
I handled the account with I was still at a desk in agency-world (I've since ejected).
As for what is was like, when I stepped back to think about it, it was a little surreal. But, after a while, they're all just numbers, except with more digits. If you hit your main KPIs and keep things under control, it's fun to be able to scale things up with a client where you didn't have to necessarily worry about cash flow.
Not the parent, but I managed and eventually helped lead the paid search group at one of the top search agencies. We had clients with 7 figure budgets all the way up to 9 figure budgets (or essentially unlimited as long as we were within certain parameters).
It's a bit scary and heart attack inducing if something goes majorly wrong (like going dark for a day because someone forgot to check the flight dates in the account after you took it over from the previous agency). But like the OP said, it just becomes numbers.
The cool thing is you not only get much better support and escalation paths at Google, but you can test things at a very large scale and get answers VERY quickly. And little things that might not make a huge difference on smaller accounts, suddenly equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars difference in total revenue. But again, all things are relative, so %'s might not change much.
Exactly - the fact that Google actually pays attention to you is a nice plus. If I had an issue with a campaign, I had a direct phone number for someone who could fix things.
That said, at that point, support had already started to go downhill & we found the "reps" usually knew very little / less than us about campaigns. Interestingly enough, we found that BING reps were much more helpful as they were eagerly trying to make up market share.
[EDIT]: You also get access to betas & other google "tests" they're running with adwords that most normal advertisers don't. Most of them are designed to make Google more money, but every once in a while they'd come up with some cool stuff that'd be really helpful.
Also, without diving into a little bit of how your campaigns were structured, the number of keywords & match types, it's tough to say that one domain will perform better long term, as your quality score on your ad level & landing page could change depending on the keyword/ad/landing page correlation.
First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate evenly".
The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - which doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is tainted from the start.
Also,
> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but the differences should be proportional.
Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all. I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.
Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html