I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [42]
When the ads did run, the results were disappointing. I wasn't expecting much because I had seen clickthrough rates (CTRs) dropping across the web.* Only zero-point-five percent of those viewing online ads had been clicking on them when I left the Merc. I assumed the rate had continued to decline. So when our ads started running, I was skeptical they'd reach the three percent CTR Sergey had set as a goal. They didn't. Most of our banners pulled less than three-tenths of a percent—a disaster in Sergey's eyes. He demanded we stop the ads immediately because he felt we were wasting our inventory. In his view, we should substitute new creative for any ad performing at under one percent once we had shown it five thousand times. Given that we had tens of millions of impressions to use up, that would have meant creating and managing thousands of banner ads, since even successful ads would "burn out" over time as they became overexposed.
Moreover, I didn't trust the numbers our partners gave us. Netscape claimed one ad had a 476 percent CTR, which, being impossible, skewed the metrics for our entire campaign. I asked our own logs-analysis team to verify the traffic our ads actually drove, but no one had time to hand-code our banners to make that possible.
Each day I would gather the reports for every ad we had run on every partner site, plug them into a spreadsheet, and hand-deliver printouts to Larry and Sergey. I'd highlight the best performers and let them know which ads we'd be rotating in or out. The association with actual data seemed to improve my standing in the eyes of our founders. They scanned every cell in the spreadsheet and asked me why certain ads were up or down or performed differently on different sites. I didn't always have the answers, but I could point to the numbers and speculate. I became a convert to the power of data persuasiveness and swore I would make all my future arguments only when I could back them up with real-world metrics.
With attention now focused on the ads' performance instead of my own, the pressure from above eased somewhat. We had created our first hundred ads quickly and cheaply and the production costs were going down. Our most effective ads featured nothing more than a white background, a search box, a logo, and some text ("The answer's in here"; "Who are you looking for?"), and webmaster Karen and Wacom† wonder Dennis Hwang could crank those out in fifteen minutes. I had actually accomplished something to justify my existence in the eyes of our engineering overlords.
The shelves in my cupboard of confidence were no longer empty but for crumbs and cobwebs. Still, each night as I tucked my ego tight behind shuttered lids, I could just make out the sounds of a grindstone rubbing against a metal blade, slow muffled footsteps, and the whistle of an ax falling toward a wooden block.
It kept me on my toes.
Chapter 7
A Healthy Appetite for Insecurity
WHAT DID IT feel like—the experience of coming to work at Google when it was fewer than sixty people? Let me give you a few impressions. Before I started at Google, I had never said any of the following on the job:
"Yes, I see the eight shelves of programming books. Where do we keep the dictionaries? No, I can't just print out the words as I look them up online."
"Is it a good idea to have all those bikes leaning against the fire door?"
"Sorry. I was aiming for Salar. Did I get the printer? Super soakers are really inaccurate at more than five feet."
"Who do I ask if I have questions about Windows? No one? Really?"
"Wow, Larry. Who trashed your office? Well, it's just that ... uh, never mind."
"Wouldn't it be easier to buy rollerblade wheels that are already assembled?"
"Is there any way to