I’m sure all of us went through a stage where no one understood us and we felt alone in the world (all of us at once oddly enough). The litmus test for me was the day the automatic urinal flushed while I was still standing at it. Even an object that gets peed on all day doesn’t know I’m alive…

Luckily machines have allowed us to beat most of that loneliness and connect with people in new and weird ways.

But, there are times when it seems that machines only widen the gap between us and others. Emoticons, after all, can only communicate so much. And, now that machines “talk” to us through targeted advertising, we can sometimes wonder how much they really “know” about us. And, we can worry that they’re right.

For instance, does Google really know about my secret desires to be a controlled-asthmatic, spiritually-awoken SWAT Team Officer who sells Tonka trucks on the side while secretly nursing an addiction to teen vampire novels?

I mean do they have a direct line into my cerebral cortex? It’s all there in Green and Black and Blue and White. How could they know so much from just the Facebook friend request of my high school classmate’s creepy ex-boyfriend?

After all, they’re doing targeted advertising now? I mean there were months at a time when Google gnawed at my sub-conscience with a single question: “Are you a slacker mom?” “What if it’s true?” I worried, despite having no children at the time and being male. “What if I am a slacker mom?”

For the record:

• I wanted to be a police officer until about sixth grade, but not part of the SWAT team. (And no, I didn’t see the LL Cool J/Samuel L Jackson/Colin Farrell movie.)
• Although I played with trucks as a kid and have two boys, I can only think of one Tonka truck that we own, and that was bought by my in-laws and never referenced in an email.
• I don’t have asthma.
• While I do have an interest in childrens and young adult literature, I have no real interest in vampire novels.
• Finally, while I am religious, the wording of this ad seems far flung from anything I personally practice.

Wow, a five for five fail not only in interest to me, but also in relevance to the email in question (unless “Facebook” is a secret Google code word for “SWAT Team interest” or, for an even crazier theory, perhaps University of Phoenix is buying unrelated keywords).

The point of this post is two-fold (you didn’t think I had even a one-fold point, did ya?)
1. Buying unrelated or overly broad keywords defeats the purpose of targeted advertising. The whole point is to be able to more appropriately match your advertising to people who might buy your product/service. Because it’s unrelated, you’ll almost assuredly spend more for lower quality traffic annihilating all of the advantages.
2. PPC isn’t something you can set and forget. Because it’s targeted advertising, it ebbs and flows with the tide of the web. What is a relevant key word today may not seem so relevant a year, six months, or even one month from now. A year ago the word “twitter” meant: “to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.” Now, it’s the hottest social scene on the web. Effective PPC takes time, a bit of know-how and a lot of elbow grease.

Don’t leave your PPC out in the cold. We all know what it’s like to feel lonely.

Related posts:

1. Google Announces Interest-Based Advertising
2. Rethinking Your Google Content Targeted Campaigns
3. Anatomy of a Successful Ad Group
4. Google’s New Quality Score Improvements
5. New Automatic Matching Feature in Google AdWords

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