Sitecore is watching Google- turning the tables.

Google is everywhere , right? With so many free convenient services, and all they want to do is watch ....over your shoulder and maybe offer ads...Your searches, Gmail, Google Docs, Wave, your mobile, Chrome browser and more.

Well, who is watching Google? Well in our case at Sitecore, our Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is- and it just saved us some money and time!

We use Google ads, Bing and Yahoo Ads, and a lot of display ads as well. We have these campaigns feed into our OMS, because beyond the click performance we have visibility into visitor goals success on our website and context of the visitors' experience. We also integrate our email campaigns, PR campaigns, really anything online that ends up on our website.

A few days ago Ted, our Online marketing Ad specialist, noticed that suddenly our conversions were way down on our Google Ads. The OMS showed that it wasn't consistent across all our many campaigns, specifically the traffic from our Google Adwords wasn't engaged with our website at all, they were bouncing right away without accomplishing any goals.

Google was showing lotsa clicks, the meter was running but the wheels weren't turning on our website!

Ted then went into our AdWords campaigns and noticed some strange things about our ads and account.

Suddenly we were selling iPhone accessories! Instead of offering only our software, we had iPhone Ads popping up everywhere and linking back to our site. No wonder our OMS pointed out our conversions were lousy- other than the fact that our Web CMS allows your website to look great from an iPhone, we have no interesting iPhone accessory info on our site! So these visitors bounced.


Turns out we were hacked, or else Google accidentally merged our account with another company's AdWords account, with a name that is very close to our Sitecore name- literally the same with two letters transposed. Suddenly our ad total budget tripled, we had a new group of ads appear, and campaigns got scrambled.

Ted quickly got in touch with Google via their chat system and escalated the problem. We had to suspend our campaign, change our credit card info, and update our passwords. Of course all the crazy charges were refunded, although we lost the productivity from 3 days of online Google Ads.

The good news is by having our OMS system watching Google's system we caught this quickly, and kept the expense from being even higher. That was not our original intent, frankly. We use the OMS to integrate our multi-channel campaign results, since we do so much more than just AdWords. But, as it turned out, the OMS helped protect us as well as see the fuller online picture than presented by Google!