Florida Incorporation Kit would like to tell a story about PPC advertising. This is a sponsored post.

Stephen L. Nelson, one of the original Dummies authors (Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies) recently shared with me some chilling statistics concerning the Google Content Network. This summer, Nelson ran a six-week to sell his downloadable do-it-yourself incorporation kits. He sells these kits for all fifty states and, as you might expect, created state-specific sets of keywords that advertised, for example, on the keyword “Florida incorporation” and then dropped a visitor clicking on his ad onto the web page that sells his Florida Incorporation Kit.

Here’s the scary part of his story. Over the roughly six week period that Nelson ran the Adwords, he paid for 643 clicks in total and for all fifty states. Of those, 317 clicks were for the Idaho Incorporation kit. Of those clicks, 315 were Content Network clicks. Yet, Nelson did not sell a single Idaho incorporation kit.

Why does this matter? Nelson told me that the conversion rate that he receives for organic traffic runs between 1.5% and 3%. Accordingly, if those 315 visitors had instead been organic traffic visitors, he would have expected to sell between 5 and 10 Idaho limited liability company formation kits.

The final part of this story: When Nelson did contact Google Adwords customer service about his experience, they simply sent him a nice message which assured him he didn’t have anything to worry about. “Please know that we have several proactive measures in place to automatically detect invalid activity on the content network,” they said.

Gee, really? I think not.

Being into Pay Per Click advertising myself, I know all to well about these types of stories; it can be frustrating. We never really know if we can trust AdWords or Yahoo or any other ad networks, for that matter. None of their algorithms are (even close to) perfect, but hopefully they’re getting better as time goes on.

On the topic of this specific story though, there are multiple reasons this could have happened, including the fault of Mr. Nelson. We don’t know his keywords, landing page, and not really knowing much about the product, don’t know if it’s worth the $59 he’s asking for it.

I’m not saying this was Stephen’s fault by any means though. Like I said above, PPC advertising can be very frustrating, and sometimes takes a lot of trial-and-error to create a successful campaign.

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