Wasted money on PPC – Easter Peeps at Christmas

November 19, 2009 Google Adwords 2 Comments

If there’s one thing that’s annoying it’s advertisers that are blatantly unaware of wasted money on their PPC advertising in Google.  Today brought yet another example …

Many of you will have heard of Peeps – marshmallow sweets full of sugar and stuff, very popular in the USA.  Some time ago while in the US, some boxes of Peeps found their way back home and were very much appreciated.   Fast forwards to 2009 and an idea pops into the head that it would be good to buy some Peeps because they were so well received before.   So, being in the UK, the natural search phrase to type is:

buy peeps online

The intention is to find a UK company that is importing Peeps and then reselling them.  Even at a premium, it’s not the money that counts, it’s a ‘must have’ buy in this case.

So, looking at the Sponsored Links in Google you see:

Ignoring the top result, the next two are adverts related to Easter.  There are a couple of points to make here:

1. Although Peeps are traditionally all about Easter, they’re actually made available for numerous ‘holiday’ type occasions throughout the year.  This begs the question of “why, when someone types ‘buy peeps online’ is an Easter advert appearing?   We’ll come back to this point.
2. Google is displaying two adverts.  Does anyone want to hazard a wild guess about whether those adverts are from separate companies or just one?  Apparently, according to Google, the PPC system isn’t supposed to allow advertisers to abuse the system and have more than one advert displaying under a single keyword phrase.  On the surface, SupaPrice.co.uk and Hot-Prices.co.uk are separate companies but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that the adverts are very similar and when you click through to those respective websites, the content of them is remarkably similar as well.   This does kind of make a mockery of Google making big claims about ‘quality’ being an inherent part of the PPC system if the system itself is not intelligent enough to identify when two adverts are related to the same company.   This has long been the case and we’ve done it ourselves, very successfully, getting a client listed several times for the same keyword phrase, but getting three adverts visible at a time instead of the one when supposedly the system is intelligent enough to work such things out- fantastic for locking out the competition.  

Anyway, the purpose of this blog isn’t to highlight the significant flaws within Google’s perception of what is ‘quality’ and what isn’t (in Sponsored Links results) but is instead on point 1 above …

If interested in buying Peeps online and seeing an advert about Easter (even though we’re approaching Christmas 2009), there are two knock-on effects for the advertiser who is displaying their adverts:

1. The majority of people who search for such a keyword phrase (or probably many similar) are going to see the advert, think it’s irrelevant, and won’t click.  This has the impact of reducing the click-through-rate (CTR) of the advertiser, which means their advert positioning and cost per click will also be negatively impacted.
2. Those people who decide that they really want to get hold of Peeps (as was the case this time) click through on the advert (actually, both of the adverts) and find that the websites have absolutely no reference to Peeps at all.  Yes, they have references to Easter products but no reference to Peeps (wrong time of the year in this case).   The end result: clicks on both of those sites cost both advertisers click costs and they get nothing from it.

So, the lesson here is that anyone who has either in-house PPC people or is outsourcing their PPC and basically have people running it that are extremely lazy, and frankly, stupid, is losing money and damaging their PPC campaigns in the process.   So what’s the answer for www.supaprice.co.uk and www.hot-prices.co.uk, who would appear to be German owned?    Roll out the firing squad and shoot whoever is responsible for this embarrasment of PPC advertising that contributes to people saying “I never click on the Sponsored Links because they’re often not relevant”, while wasting the budget and success potential of the advertiser.