How Many People Take Action On Your Advice?

Posted by jameszol on Feb 27, 2008 in Errors | 2 comments

Sometimes I will see silly mistakes while I’m browsing around…for example, I noticed one a few weeks ago that had this in a text ad headline:

{Keyword;}

So I typed in the display url and found the email address of the director of marketing and sent him a message politely asking him to forward this message to the right person:

“I thought you would like to know that your ad for ******** software is showing up for the search query ‘******** leads’ and the headline in your ad says this: {Keyword;}.

Simply replace the semi-colon with a colon and add a default keyword like so:

{Keyword:********* Leads}

Now your headline will show the default word if the search query is too long or it will show the search query as the headline.

Hope that helps!

Sincerely,”

I was trolling back through the ads for that search query and found that they fixed the mistake! Wow, I felt good that somebody took action based on what I said…doesn’t it feel good when that happens to you?

I probably send notes like that regarding landing pages, text ads, keywords, etc. 3 to 5 times a week. I don’t ever have mal-intent with these messages so if you ever get one from me, it’s all in good faith.