This PPC ad from Woot.com is great. I laughed. I clicked. I became an instant fan. It also got me thinking that I should be testing humor in my own pay-per-click campaigns! Thanks for the marketing tip, Woot.

Pella Windows needs a new advertising agency, pronto.

I’m in the market for a few (five, actually), quality, pre-hung windows—so of course I fired up my old friend Google and did a search on “pre-hung window”. Most of the search results were for tips on how to install your own windows…but I wanted to BUY windows, not install them.

Pella Windows has a great reputation and their Google AdWords ad was the ONLY relevant result on the entire page. That’s an Internet Marketers wet dream—a buyer who is deep into the “buying cycle”, ready to make a purchase, ready to pull the trigger, and Pella was the only (in my opinion) obvious choice. Done deal, right?

Wrong.

This buyer was swiftly and obediently delivered to an error page. Pella not only lost the sale, but they spent good money accomplishing it. They were still charged for the click, but had absolutely no way of realizing a return on their ad spend. And I’m just ONE buyer. Consider how how much money Pella is literally throwing out the window every day on this worthless (and presumably, expensive) campaign.

The shame isn’t that they wasted a $2.30 click. It’s that they lost a $1000.00 deal. That would have been a pretty good ROI on a sub-three dollar marketing investment.

The point is this: Pay-per-click marketing isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” game. It has to be monitored daily, and conversions have to be measured. Every marketing dollar needs to be accounted for. If your agency or consultant isn’t doing this, fire them.

This isn’t PPC, it’s TTC. Trick to Click. It is a policy of Google not to allow AdWords ads that mimic computer functions or confuse or otherwise trick the user into clicking an ad that they normally wouldn’t have an interest in. This ad by reunion.com sure seems to fall into that category. I wonder how many thousands of hours in lost productivity (in aggregate) were realized after users accidentally clicked this one? This is bad for Reunion.com, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for Google if users stop trusting (and clicking on) their ads.

Edit: I took this screen grab a while back and can’t reproduce the ad. Looks like Google is doing a good job at weeding out bad ads.