Wasted Search Dollars

Everyone loves sponsored search marketing, using things like Google Adwords, right? Well, maybe not the users, who get to watch marketers throw their pay per click fees away while getting really frustrated.

I just spent quite a bit of time looking for a cargo van rental. I need to get a van here in Houston for the day. We'll drive about 150 miles in it shuttling stuff around.

When you do a Google search on "rent cargo van houston," you get a lot of results. Most of them lead to web sites of companies that don't rent cargo vans.

Why is this? Marketers are forgetting to use negative keywords. If you rent passenger vans, but not cargo vans, you should do a negative search so that your ads don't appear for cargo van searches (and you don't pay for all the clicks I just used up for these folks).

Even more egregious, though, are the companies that do rent cargo vans but won't let you reserve them online. (Hello, Budget!) After making my through several maze-like web sites, picking locations and dates and whatnot, I was told several times that I had to call the local location.

That's frustrating. It's also not helpful if you're searching outside of business hours (when most of us have time for this kind of thing).

I was ready to make a reservation. The web sites of a number of national rental companies foiled me completely. In the end, I used something that worked much better: the yellow pages.

I hope those folks enjoy paying the bills for their web sites and search sponsorships, though.