Search Engine Land had a nice, tongue-in-cheek post How To Be A PPC Pansy: 5 Tips To Weaken Your Campaigns
According to this - I was a PPC Pansy for about a week recently as took an expensive keyphrase out of rotation in an AdWords campaign. It was THE keyphrase that we finally got #1 in Google for after a 3 month climb.
Why pay for AdWords traffic when we already owned the #1 spot?
3 reasons:
1) As the article mentions, some people still click on the ad.
2) Sales funnel. Our AdWords point to dedicated landing pages for a clear conversion path, whereas the site itself serves several purposes for sales, support and other services.
3) I foolishly turned off the phrase match version of the term. Which meant that any variant, longer-tail queries that had the term at its core would also not show.
Thankfully I realized this lapse of reason in a relatively timely manner and was able to correct. My pride and the account is still intact.
Of course, if I had not realized it before I read this…. well, I’d be driving the breadtruck.
