Is it OK to Capitalize on God? Yes: But You’d Better be GOOD at It!

I ran a little ad campaign tied to keyword “God” linked back to just this lousy landing page from a few days ago.

Google’s system is fair, and early in the game, “God” could be had fairly cheaply. $.25 a click for God. That’s not freaking bad man –for GOD!

But this God is fair and just and so is Google. People think some of the ways Google adwords work is nefarious. Those people are DOPES, do not listen to them. Google just works very well and is set up to constantly be optimizing on its own. .Here’s how it works: it can calculate the performance of your ad. If my ad tied to God resulted in clicks where every click left the page pretty much immediately (which was the case in over 80% of the instances), Google views that as a “low quality” ad. Here’s what happens as a result: the cost of the keyword gets jacked up. What happens then? Well then what happened is the campaign stopped.

It’s a good system. People don’t want to be paying for lousy ads (even @ .25/click) and moreover, Google wants ITS users to get good results. If its users continually click on your ad and then bail immediately, your ad (in this case my ad) isn’t giving Google users what they want. Google wants to continually optimize to produce better results (period), this sort of optimization is good for everyone.

For purposes of experiment, I don’t mind blowing $20 to see how it works. But how it works is because the site they landed on was not what the people who clicked wanted –and I could’ve experimented around with landing pages to see if one without a picture of Paris Hilton would’ve done better – is Google deems the ad “low quality”. Google will let you run low quality ads, even for God, but, there’s a price premium. In my case a 25X price premium! That’s right, because my ad was lousy they jacked up the CPC on God to $5. That is a CPC that is outside the bounds of what I am doing here (which is trying to learn and satisfy my own curiosity). I’m $.25/click curious, but not $5/click curious

I could have started over and had God at $.25 again, and when I create some content that would likely please God (and Google) for $.25 I may try again. For now,I think this system works really, really well. For you, for me, for Google – and maybe even for God.

Capitalizing on God: I’m Falling for Paris

Either we’re having our “wow, our little girl is growing up!” moment or, Paris has really good media spinmeisters advising her. It’s all quite a turnaround from the “it’s so unfair!” of last week. She’s taking her lumps. Doesn’t want to appeal. She did the crime, she wants to do her time. It’s the right thing to say.

But she also said, “God has given me another chance!” Not only that, she said something about how she is going to stop acting dumb and put her influence to good use. I wanted to just hug her really.

I’m mixed on the playing of the God card. I still haven’t reached a conclusion on whether Capitalism is Self-Destructive, but as fodder into the mix, I propose that in a system that capitalizes on EVERYTHING, the number one thing it capitalizes on is God.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Actually I am sure how I feel about it, but I love Paris anyway. She could’ve been resistant to doing the right thing, she could’ve used her position to just continuously do whatever the hell she wants anyway – and time will tell whether she is REALLY repenting here. But she’s saying she ought to repent and I’ll give her points for that because…it’s the truth.

As for God, that’s an essay for another day. But it’s true, as long as you’re alive, you always have another chance. My favorite fortune cookie of all time had the following fortune: it’s never too late to be what you might have been.

It really isn’t. Not for me, you, or Ms. Hilton.