There was a very interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle recently about 2 companies that sell the same product (gourmet chocolate) and advertised with Pay-Per-Click but had wildly different results with their campaigns.

• One company spent $3,000 over a 3 month period on Pay-Per-Click and sold 5 boxes.
• One company sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolate each year from Pay-Per-Click.

Why was one Pay-Per-Click Campaign Successful and the Other Failed Miserably?

When the second company started their PPC campaigns back in 2002, they spent the same amount as the first company did during their trial. The difference was that the successful company had an employee that totally immersed himself in the campaigns.

• He bid on 70,000 keywords (an INSANELY high number) to start with and worked from there.
• He created a list of 1,000 keywords that he didn’t want the ad to show up for - known as negative keywords
• He went after the high-end market by eliminating words like “free”, “cheap”, and “gift card”
• He only targeted search results and not content ads, which means that they got higher quality traffic

The company that failed made a lot of mistakes along the way. They spent a lot less time on the ads and the results show that.

• They targeted both search results and content ads, meaning they got cheaper clicks but from a lot less desirable market.
• Their keywords didn’t match the ad text for which they were displaying
• The ads were generic and didn’t convey the up-scale nature of the product.

How Can You Avoid an Unsuccessful Pay-Per-Click Campaign?

I have always felt that one of the biggest problems with how the search engines have set up their advertising programs is that they made it too easy for anyone to do. They make it seem like anyone can set up a campaign and have it run successfully. Unfortunately, most of their competitors got the same message as well and are spending more time on it or hiring professionals to implement the best practices.

Pay-Per-Click campaigns can be very successful (see successful company above) but they can also be a huge failure as well (5 boxes of chocolate sold for $3,000 in advertising?). If you implement a program, just make sure that you put enough time and effort into the program to make sure it’s wildly successful and not a spectacular failure.

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