Pay-per-Click Observer

The reaction to my first report after launching a new PPC campaign, particularly one intended to drive sales, is often… anger. How could we have spent thousands of dollars and not produced anything in the way of sales? I thought PPC was supposed to pay itself. Do I even know what I’m doing? What am I doing wrong?

The answer is ‘nothing.’ It might best be explained in the form of an analogy.

Say that you’re an investor, and you’ve hooked up with someone who’s been successfully mining gold for years. Let’s call him Old Riri. You approach this crusty prospector and ask him to go out and find a deposit for you to mine, and you give him a bunch of mules, some picks, whatever it is you give gold prospectors (OK, in my mind, this is the Old West, and the prospector has tobacco stains in his beard.)

A month later, Old Riri comes back and wants more mules (Mules are money in this story, in case that wasn’t obvious.)

• “What?! I gave you 20 mules! Where’s my gold?!”
• “Partner, when I’ve found it, you’ll be the first to know.”
• “I thought gold mining meant taking gold out of a mine!”
• “It does, if you’re lucky. It also means first digging a lot of holes and finding nothing but dirt.”

Such is the business of utilizing PPC for selling your wares on the Web. Sometimes, you fall into a hole and the walls are glowing metallic yellow. Sometimes, you dig and dig and find out that there’s no gold for miles or that someone else beat you to it, and they’ve got the area locked up. There are no guarantees.

What that means, if we can knock off the gold mining thing, is that you’d better be prepared to spend some money and time with a new campaign. You might find that no one’s interested in your offering. You might find that it sells itself. Worst case, you might find that lots of people are interested in looking, but no one buys anything. That’s pure expense, and no one likes that.

Still, to really know what kind of situation you’re in, you need to run the campaign for a while. A few dozen, or even hundred, clicks don’t tell you much. Then, you need to change some things and run it for a while again. All the while, the money is going out.

If you get it right, you strike it rich. Your campaign not only pays for itself, it generates on ongoing revenue stream with an expected lifetime value of many times your initial investment.

If you get it wrong, and everyone does sometimes, you cut your losses and regroup. That’s not failure; that’s business. The best you can do is prepare yourself, think about your plan, and keep trying. You’ve learned something about what works and what doesn’t. Next time, you’ll do a better job, and you’ll have that much more of a chance of success.