| > Imagine the following scenario "Imagination" is the core of the problem here. Plenty of people are imagining various scenarios, whereas people with successful advertising campaigns are just raking in the money -- no need for imagination. I've turned off plenty of ads when they stopped working. I didn't need to turn them off to discover they stopped working. Sure, you can imagine a dozen scenarios where an ad campaign doesn't work. Fortunately, I've managed to learn how to focus on the reality of the situation -- and have reaped the rewards in the process. > you won't have accurate organic search traffic stats anymore either, because it's already cannibalized. That' not true for us -- as I said before, a successful campaign for us brings in new sources of traffic from new marketing channels. One of the early lessons I learned was to not cannibalize what's already working. For example, we grew our Facebook Page (and email list) from scratch, when we had no Facebook traffic, by using Facebook advertising. Operating under different brands -- even just for testing purposes, is a one another of the way we deal with this. Of course you can continue to imagine scenarios where we might be making mistakes. I do that as well -- it's called planning. Though, none of that really matters until money is spent (and made or lost). |
What I'm talking about in specific is search ads where the ad is for a term that ranks organically high anyway.
It's not just imaginary either, I've done a lot of over-the-shoulder customer observing. Just recently I saw a friend search for "dropbox" and then click on the first result in Google, which is a paid ad by dropbox for dropbox. They rank #1 anyway!
Now in dropbox's case it might be worth it, because they have enough competitors who would like to steal that ad spot. However for most businesses that's not the case for their top terms.