> This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don't run any statistics of their own.
Well, anecdotally, they do.
We just took over PPC advertising for a chain of regional businesses. When we got access to their existing PPC accounts, I found that they'd spent about $75,000 over the last year on PPC, and nearly all of it was wasted.
The only conversion path on their site was phone calls, and they didn't have any sort of conversion tracking in place.
Initially, I expect they got some real clicks and calls. But then over time, without any focus on conversions, they just kept optimizing for the cost per click. That meant leaving the search network for the display network, and focusing in on poorer and poorer sources of clicks. Until over the past several months, nearly 100% of their clicks have come from what look like very shady websites and mobile apps.
They cut their CPC by about 75%, but in the process, I expect nearly eliminated any ROI. $75,000 down the drain.
To be fair, I do think Google's AdWords Express tool is a good antidote to this behavior. Someone with very little PPC experience could setup an account, and run a successful campaign. And once you're spending enough, you typically get a call from a Google employee offering you tips on your campaign, and I've found Google's reps to be generally helpful.
But people who don't take understand the AdWords platform, or can't be bothered to learn, can throw away tons of money on spammy or outright scammy clicks in AdWords.