“The Science of Managing Search Ads” was a recent article on The New York Times online that profiled the online retailer, Tiny Prints. Tiny Prints is a greeting card company that faired extremely well on Cyber Monday (the online equivalent of Black Friday), with customers buying at twice the rate of last year. With web traffic up and sales pouring in, the CEO made a risky decision in an attempt to garner more profit. He choose to scale back on the Google search ads, or Pay Per Click ads, that helped direct this influx of traffic to their storefront.
This risk did not pay off. As Tiny Prints scaled back their paid advertisements, their competitors seemed to increase their focus. Sales began to drop and their traffic began to decrease. Tiny Prints realized they made a poor decision and reversed their efforts. It took the company more than a day to recover the lost traffic and to increase sales. A day that during this peek holiday season they couldn’t afford to lose.
Paid search works. And it works particularly well for events like a peak holiday season. While we may be too late for this holiday rush, what about Valentine’s Day or Groundhog Day or some other day?
