I Got a Cold Sales Call

[The_Hat]

Still can't believe it, rather flattered that they would take the time and trouble to pick up the phone and directly call me to pitch to me to ad adsence and other google apps on the site I manage.

Is this a new tactic? Are the wanting new publishers that badly?

[bts111]

Yinon,

Did you join Team Dollars or are you still sitting on the bench?

[spaceylacie]

I need a new toaster, one that changes colors to match my Google radio. If they call me too, I'm going to ask for one for Christmas.

[annaz1]

No clocks, no radios, no toasters, no phone calls to me, but I appreciate the money I earn from Adsense.

Should I complain?

[musicales]

Mood radio here in the UK - wonder if they did different gifts for different countries?

Next year - it'll be the yahoo spice rack I reckon (;

[methodman]

what qualifies you to get this clock radio? :P

[The_Hat]

bts111:

Yeah I would love to place a bit of google code on the site (they even mentioned that they would reconfigure the google search app to fit it better, for me, one of the sticking points in the past), would look nice on the budget for the year. But corporate frowns on it.

I do use it on a few of my personal sites and am having good luck with it so far.

[hunderdown]

The_Hat: you might try pitching it as a SERVICE to your visitors to have AdSense ads on your site. Local people could then see local ads AND national ads--nicely targeted ones too. Why assume that people coming to your site ONLY want local information?

Just a thought. Maybe you've already tried that angle.

[charlier]

Or you could do a little geolocation on your visitors and just show the google ads to the out of state ones.

[yinon]

bts:

Nope, sitting on the bench. On any given month, Burst or TF far outperform Google for me.

I think they sought me out because my site is PR7 and averages 350,000 uniques a month, but as we know, that doesn't always translate into high CTR. I was impressed by the call, though, and how throughly their representative knew my site and its history.

[spaceylacie]

They didn't call me and I get at least that many PI's a month, maybe I should update my phone number, I still want to ask about the matching toaster...

[spaceylacie]

Oh, PI's, you said uniques... my page views are over that number too.

[Natashka]

Google once contacted me inviting one of my sites to AdSense. They didn't call (as I don't leave my number anywhere on the net), they've sent me email.

The site they invited was a craft site, it didn't have very much traffic (only about 1000 uniques per day), but it was my oldest high-quality site, since 1998, 99% of my traffic was coming from US (senior ladies with credit cards LOL), and I guess they had a lack of craft publishers at that time.

And they were right after all, AdSense CTR on this site turned out to be much higher than on my other sites with huge traffic, and I make almost the same per month with this rather small site (with AdSense) as I make with my other big sites with 20,000 uniques per month! Though with other ad networks which pay CPM (like Fastclick) I make 10 times more with higher traffic sites of course.

I guess for CPC campaign it's not the traffic that matters. They know whom to contact and why ;)

[spaceylacie]

Senior women with credit cards... they rock. That's my target audience as well.

I checked, phone # is current. Maybe they think I'm doing fine on my own.

[yinon]

Let me revise: I don't really know why they called me. Perhaps I was using a competitor and they were interested in that, perhaps the age of the site (1996), perhaps the uniques, page impressions, or some combination. Or maybe they have some super algorithm for finding sites they think will do well? I've learned that guessing Google's behavior is fun, but not terribly accurate pursuit.

[The_Hat]

Being that we are a local newspaper the traffic we bring in due to search engine results is rather negligible.

We did recently go through a complete redesign and filled up all the available positions with local ads at the same time. Maybe all of that radical change put the site on the map. Also since we put all the news stories online there is always new, fresh, STATIC html for the spiders to munch up.

I would bet that they know that our traffic doesn't get to our site via a search and THAT is part of the reason they are interested. Need to try to monetize all available internet users, not just the ones that use the engine.

[spaceylacie]

I would bet that they know that our traffic doesn't get to our site via a search and THAT is part of the reason they are interested

I think you are correct here. Google likes people who can hold their own.

[Chico_Loco]

Wait a second here - someone above said their domain was parked. How long ago did you register it?

Remember how Google recently became an ICANN approved registrar, which would give them access to the whois database. Obviously they wanted that so they could get in touch with domain owners (particularly new ones?) so that they could let them know about AdSense?

Would that be right, or legal? I mean how else would they get the contact info if it wasn't from whois/registrar? Did they call you on the same phone number as you had listed when you registered that domain?

[bbkid]

Did you join Team Dollars or are you still sitting on the bench?

anyone care to explain what team dollars is?

[novice]

Wait a second here - someone above said their domain was parked. How long ago did you register it?

That was me, I registered it in 2001.

Remember how Google recently became an ICANN approved registrar, which would give them access to the whois database. Obviously they wanted that so they could get in touch with domain owners (particularly new ones?) so that they could let them know about AdSense?

I was thinking the same thing. Although I'm not sure if Google had to be a registrar to get the whois info, maybe it just makes it easier to automate the database.

[blairsp]

Does this not tke the biscuit. They have written out to my brother, who they banned 18 months ago at the e-mail addy that he used to log in to a/s. Right hand doesn't know what left hand is doing!

[Chico_Loco]

Right hand doesn't know what left hand is doing!

So long as both hands get an increased amount of income, it probably doesn't even matter. There's loads of public companies that work sideways - and usually backwards in the end!

Has anyone been contacted that has had nothing to do with adsense or adwords up until now? I'm just very interested in seeing if they are "harvesting" information from anywhere they shouldn't be, which of course would make in unsolicitated.