Mistakes happen, and I’m the first to acknowledge that much of my job is about making mistakes! Experimentation after all is the hallmark of search marketing. We don’t get it right all the time. It’s not even a case of “right & wrong”. We are perpetually in beta. We market to a moving, fluid target. We can only strive to improve, to see tighter efficiencies and steeper trending charts. “Fail often, fail well” is the title to The Economist article published on the 14th April 2011. Seth Godin is a fan of failure too!
Now that we’ve got over our self-importance, we can come to terms with important learnings from mistakes made. Each month I amend the ad creative on a small Adwords campaign that I manage in order that the product deals-of-the-month align with those promoted. Each month bar May just gone!
So it was from the 1st of April through to the beginning of June that the business’s Google ads displayed special offers for April 2011! You’d have thought that this would influence negatively on consumer sentiment, reduce ad interaction and see poor returns on clicks vis-a-vis impressions. The Click-Through-Rate went Up! I’m not advocating dropping the ball on your marketing campaigns, but time to time we all can be guilty of mis-management. Oftentimes mistakes question our preconceptions and as Martin Curley in The Irish Times wrote yesterday, disruptive innovation may be our ticket to ride. Challenge your assumptions & you never know what might happen :~?
