Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong,or the Adwords Experiment

"Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" was a hit song in 1927, and the phrase was used thereafter to describe the logical fallacy known as the Bandwagon Fallacy: the idea that if a lot of people believe something, it must be true.

I kind of felt this way about pay per click advertising at search engine results pages. I've never seen a client get better results with PPC than with organic search, but it must be good because lots of people do it.

So, when a large company offered me $100 worth of PPC, I figured I'd give it a try.

I made a new page with a special offer. I didn't link it up to the rest of my site or tell anyone about it, place links anywhere, or indeed do anything to encourage organic search.

During the time of the campaign, I had a grand total of 118 visits to this page. 22 of them came from the ads.

Here's where the rest came from:

• 26 from organic search at Google
  
• 24 from a link some stranger gave the page at their website
• 15 from other search engines
• 10 direct
• 9 from random social media links -- people mentioning it at Myspace, for example
• 2 from Amazon.com, and I have no explanation for that
• one each from a variety of email links and other random stuff
  

In all, there were 25 different sources. The ads were only the third most frequent, even though this special landing page was essentially a secret, isolated page which shouldn't have had any traffic at all. The ads weren't a great source of traffic, and that's what I usually see among clients who do PPC.

However, there were 22 visits to the page in the week after the ad campaign ended, and none at all since then. It appears that the ad campaign did something, even if it didn't drive much of the traffic to the page.

There were, in case you're wondering, no actual contacts or leads at all.

I'm going to continue to suggest, when I'm asked, that clients go with ads on specific websites that are well targeted to their customers. That's where I've seen people have real success with ads. I'm not going to do any PPC myself.

However, it does appear that there is some benefit -- if only as a result of people who see the ad spreading the word.

Labels: PPC