Yahoo & Google PPC Ads A Bust After 11 Month Trial

The title says it all. After 11 months of intense marketing on my part, crunching the numbers every night, massaging the campaigns from time to time, I have come to the conclusion that my money was ill spent.

This is just a way to show that your money may be spent better and you can use this as an example if you want.

Take a close look at the numbers and decide if PPC campaigns are worth it to your business. It is entirely possible that these campaigns brought new and unique visitors to my website and they may wind up becoming future customers. But in the short term, there was absolutely NO RETURN ON INVESTMENT.

If there is any saving grace to these ad campaigns, it's that I can count them as a loss come tax time.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks guys -

I appreciate the feedback - I honestly do.

Wes, in response to your reply, my PPC campaigns were in addition to my SEO for my website. I'm #1 in my ranking as well. See for yourself:

winston salem wedding dj - Google Search

Scott Hanna said:

Greg,
when i clicked on your website, the first thing i saw was a sentence that said
Quote:
Click on the link below to help you make informed decisions concerning finding a photographer, videographer or caterer/banquet facility for your event.

.... and there was nothing below to click on.

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Scott - are you using Firefox? If that's the first thing you saw when you browsed my website, then there is something very wrong. That WEDJ.com link is all the way at the bottom of my home page.

I am going to attach screen shots of what you should be seeing. If you didn't see the WEDJ.com link at the bottom of the screen, then you may need adjust the settings on your computer. As a matter of fact, using Firefox may be the entire problem. Try using Internet Explorer instead - that's the browser that the website is designed for.

Scott Hanna said:

Then I notice that the check availability is at the top. You need to give them a reason to want to know if you are available first.

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According to Scott, Becky and Brandon at WEDJ.com, that is exactly where the availability checker should be - at the top of the page. That tells the client right off the bat if they should be spending time on your site, or someone else's.

Scott Hanna said:

the 3rd thing i noticed is a phrase that said "clients under contract may"...nobody wants to be "under contract"....they want an agreement...regardless, it should not be one of the first thing they see.

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Let's keep things in focus that every part of the country is different and that we all do business differently. That link is there to make it easy for my current clients to log into their account. Every one of my clients has mentioned how easy it is to use the system too and thank me for making it so easy for them.

Scott Hanna said:

They don't want a contract....they want entertainment for their event. Yes an agreement is needed, but the front page is not the time to be talking about that.

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Let's just say that it puts people on notice that I'm a Professional and that I don't do anything without a written contract.

Scott Hanna said:

Also, The links up top were not easy to see either. they blended into the background.

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You do have a very good point here, and I agree with you - but that's the way the template is designed from my hosting company, so there's really not a lot I can do about that. Besides, the template I am using is just about the brightest color template available. That's why I chose it. I don't like dark colors.

Scott Hanna said:

I am not trying to bash your website. Lord knows mine needs work. But PPC has been working for me. To truly evaluate any advertising, you need to look at all aspects.

hope that helps.

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Thanks Scott - I'm a number cruncher - I've worked in radio and television broadcasting all my life and that's part of my job - crunching numbers and looking at all marketing aspects and trends as to why consumers choose one product over another.

PPC was nothing more than an experiment for me - I wanted to see if it was worth a year long trial run, and like I said above, it did bring customers to my website. Granted, those clicks didn't turn into revenue streams for me, but it did elevate awareness of my business, where there was none before, and to me that's worth a little something, if nothing more than name recognition alone.

Thanks again for your responses - they are truly appreciated.

DJ Wes said:

Greg,

With all due respect, I think your listing on Google was manually input. Those 'Local listings' are business owner created listings (or taken from Yellowpages, etc.). The first 'natively' found website using your search terms is Decidio. I'm not sure how they determine listing order of the local listings ('A' thru 'whatever'). Don't know if it's first come, first served? Or maybe SEO is used in addition to user info.

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Wes,

What did you type into the search bar? I even signed out of my Google account settings, typed in "Winston Salem Wedding DJ" in the search bar and came up with exactly the same thing several times.

Are you searching on Google or Yahoo?

When I search on Yahoo, I come up with the GigMasters.com listings first then the WEDJ.com listings for native searches, then I am somewhere near the middle of the page.

I am attaching a screen shot of what I see when I click on the link you provided above. Your service does appear first in the listings, but if you look further down the page, you will see the Google map of your area.

My question is this - what's the difference in the pages?

I am also going to attach 2 captured screenshots from Yahoo to show where my listing shows up when you type in "winston salem wedding dj", and then reverse the search terms to "wedding dj winston salem". Both show very different results.

The differences between Yahoo and Google are striking in the fact that if you reverse the search terms on Google as I did on Yahoo, I come up with exactly the same results for Google each time. My business is listed first, next to the search map.

Could it be that different people are seeing different results when they type in a search term on their computers?

DJ Wes said:

I just clicked on your link. The Map you mention is for local listings only. Those are separate from 'native' Internet searches. The Local Listings section is completely user editable. You can even delete the listing altogether if you so choose. You can't delete a native search unless you pull your website down completely and even then it may take a year or two to finally get purged off their site. Am I making sense? Your 'natural' position on Google is Page 6 with this page (http://www.kickit-productions.com/useful_links.html) listed even before your homepage.

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I must be typing in something wrong or doing something wrong then, even after clearing all cookies from the cache on both computers and clearing all the internet sites from the history in the cache, I still come up with the same listing - with my business at the top of the page next to the map. I even tried this search from a computer at work I've never used and came up with exactly the same results - my businesses name next to the map.

What are we doing differently?

I'd be interested in what others here see when they type in the same thing in their Google seach bar.

sirdj said:

sparkieg,

What I get is the local listing/map but no organic listing.

Don't worry I'm in the same page as you and learning as I go. I will show on the first page for about 3-4 days and suddenly just vanish out of the face of google organically.

It's a bit frustrating at times.

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Well amazingly enough, I finally got the organic page that Wes got when doing a search. My AdWords ad (one of them) appeared on the right hand side of the page under sponsored results, but of course that doesn't really count. And he was correct, the first time my organic result shows up is 6 pages in with the link he posted.

Sigh.......