I turn 26 this Friday. That is young, but I have roughly the maximum worthwhile experience with the graphical web. The stories I will tell my children involve dialup, abhorrent browser incompatibilities, and, yes, how Google changed the web.
Yet, up until recently, I had never ran a Google Ad campaign. I don’t have anything to sell yet, so I figured it was fruitless to pay for traffic. Then I decided I could learn a lot about how people behave online by sending them to Amazon, where I can essentially sell them anything and collect a small percentage through Amazon Associates.
This all came to me the Thursday before Mothers Day, so I decided to focus my mini campaign ($5 of clicks per day) around a couple items someone might purchase for Mom: chocolates and Oprah’s O Magazine. It turns out the first of these is much, much more popular.
The first day started off well, with commissions barely covering my costs, which I expected. I figured on a ten percent conversion rate and I was on target. The second day I kept the same conversion rate, but lost money. And the final two days were the nail in the coffin, as the graph and table below show.
| Days in May | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 5690 | 5068 | 6118 | 2459 |
| Clicks | 27 | 26 | 27 | 8 |
| Avg. Cost | .16 | .24 | .24 | .23 |
| Conversion | 11% | 11% | 0% | 0% |
| Commission | 4.90 | 3.98 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Cost | 4.32 | 6.24 | 6.48 | 1.84 |
Lessons learned
- The choice of popular keywords like chocolate, godiva, etc. meant I needed to choose something a bit more gourmet than the $10 box of candies. I never did sell the $70 spectacle to which I linked, but folks did settle on ~$30 items.
- I wasn’t too far off with my conversions the first half of the campaign, but the lower commisions were the culprit. I would have been better off figuring 5% conversion or expecting half the price.
- Also, I suspect that my 0% conversion on Sunday was due to shoppers being optimistic enough to click, but then realizing that they were really too late with their gift for mom.
- I might have been better off going for a small-but-sustainable long tail campaign than clamoring about with everyone else trying to capture those last minute shoppers.
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