On the evening of December 5th of this year, websites across the Internet started displaying an unusual ad.
There was no text on the ad.
No image.
Nothing was being advertised.
It was just a plain, 300×250 yellow square.
And to make things weirder, the revenues from these ads were huge. Some websites saw an 800% increase in their ad revenue. Altogether, this little yellow square, running for less than an hour, was responsible for somewhere between $1.6 million and $10 million in ad spend.
Was it all a brilliant marketing campaign?
Or some behemoth company that could afford to throw away millions of dollars on a bizarre stunt?
Neither, actually. The company behind the yellow ad was a small Australian ecommerce fashion brand called The Iconic. And the whole thing was a mistake, made by an ad team at Google, which helps companies learn how to use its ad platform.
(The Iconic apparently won’t be billed for Google’s mistake, and publishers will still be paid, I guess out of Google’s deep pockets.)
Now I’ve recently been dabbling with pay-per-click.
Not on Google, but on Facebook and, more recently, on Amazon.
So the story above is pretty relevant to me.
You see, any of these companies will gladly tell you how you should run your ad campaigns. They will give you advice. They will even offer to automate away much of the work.
The trouble is, even if they don’t make a nasty technical snafu like the “night of the yellow ad,” they aren’t really experts in marketing.
And I don’t think their advice really has my best interests in mind.
So instead, when I make my PPC campaigns, I keep it simple.
Instead of relying on the fancy advice of companies like Facebook and Google, I apply 100-year-old principles from Claude Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising, and go from there.
Does this apply to you?
Probably not. But it might be something to keep in mind in case you run (or are planning to run) paid ads.
On a related note:
If you are getting started as a freelancer on Upwork, I would also not go with the recommendations of that particular company for how to become successful.
Instead, I would recommend another resource.
It’s not 100 years old.
In fact, it’s not even published yet.
It’s an ebook I’m putting together right now, called How to Become a $150/hr, Top-Rated Sales Copywriter on Upwork.
If you want to get notified when I’m finished with this book and it becomes available, sign up below and I’ll keep you in the loop: