Why did you click on my ad? A franchise advertiser’s Google lament.

Earlier, I wrote about the pros and cons about our franchise phrase match strategy, and today I want to build upon one of the cons that was enumerated in that article.

PEOPLE CLICK ON ANYTHING!

(I’ll warn you in advance, you’re going to lose a bit of faith in search engine marketing as you read through this post, so beware)

From that previous post, I had written:

In that same time period (4/1 - 6/30), we were matched to 13,587 different searches. If you don't trust me,here's the entire list for you to peruse). This ranged from fairly relevant searches like "top franchises," "best franchises under 50k," and "most profitable franchises" to completely irrelevant searches like "international franchise expo jacob k javits convention center june 19," "is google a franchise," or "franchise philippines 2014."

So you understand what the browser was prompted with, the ad read like this:

It’s fairly obvious that whatever is behind that ad is probably an opportunity to open a franchise.

For that original post I simply was looking at impression data or the things that Google elected to show as ads to people based on their search.

Until yesterday, that is,when I thought to myself…”I wonder what people actually clicked?” As you’ve probably surmised by this point, it wasn’t pretty.

Here’s a list of my ten favorite search terms that FranchiseHelp paid Google to send to our website:

1. buisness (yes you read that spelling correctly)
2. yellow pages
3. fortune 500
4. cool math games coffee shop
5. what is the fastest growing business in america
6. want start
7. bizbuysell
8. donut machine
9. poultry processing companies
10. pizza

Pizza? What? Bizbuysell? Really? I happen to love “buisness.”

To give you an idea of what that looks like in terms of performance:

You see there are a grand total of 0 conversions. (I don’t think you should be that surprised).

And that’s $44.79 that FranchiseHelp is certainly not getting back...(sorry boss)

So it begs the question, why did these people click on these ads?

I really don’t know. (And yes, it does keep me up at night). I’ll reiterate what I said earlier in this post -- PEOPLE CLICK ON ANYTHING!

Sorry for venting, but that's Google for ya!