• by Harrison Magun , November 25, 2005

Like that cold, dead bird sitting under crumpled foil in your fridge, turkeys also haunt search campaigns. Sometimes we find them after a cook retires and we take over the kitchen; sometimes we just smell something way in the back of our search cabinet and wonder, "Where the heck did that come from?" I hope you enjoy the following tales of search turkeys that I selected from entries submitted by members of our search team.

15 minutes of fame. We recently inherited a search account from another firm. After close review we discovered that the prior account manager had listed her own name among the thousands of keywords. The keyword had never received any clicks, but you have to wonder, was this a self-motivated attempt to see her name in the bright lights of Google's sponsored results? Probably more likely an Excel sorting error. Lucky her name was not Britney Spears.--Andrew L.

Google who? We took over the search business for an education client directly from another agency to find that the client was spending less on Google than on another engine. The previous agency had our client so convinced that Google would not work for them that I had to win a "best of five" match of thumb wars to convince them to "test" Google. We're now spending more on Google for them than for all other search engines combined.--Adam S.

Squeal like a pig. This turkey is my (Harrison's) contribution to the potluck. Members of a paid inclusion/data feed optimization company came in to pitch their wares. They boasted that they were the feed manager for one of the largest (read: embodiment of puritan values) multichannel retailers. Glowing with pride, they logged into the account to demonstrate the high-tech feed management interface. One of the first keyword fields in the feed was "animal sex."

Hope you enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday, and watch out for turkeys in your all-important holiday shopping campaigns. Happy Holidays!