dream vs realityHere’s a quick recap of our 2-week internal competition. How did we do? In a nutshell, not well. We ended up losing money, mainly on paid advertising.

How much? We haven’t added up the numbers exactly, but we were both each under the $100 mark. It turns out that we were both a bit hesitant to throw money recklessly at media buys/PPC without testing the waters slowly at first. And two weeks just isn’t long enough to get real data. Another factor we had not planned on is that some platforms take quite a while to approve your ads.

So what else did we learn?

1. The 2 week window may have been too small for relative newbies to the PPC game who have done better at the slow-building game of SEO and traffic generation.

2. PPC is an incredible challenge for newcomers, particularly with the variance in rules that the different platforms have. It takes more than a few days of repeated testing to figure out what works and what’s allowed.

3. Two weeks can be a surprisingly short period of time! This is especially true when you’re trying to squeeze in something new into your life on top of the other things that you can’t toss out.

4. On a positive note, setting yourself goals such as this makes you move. A lot faster than you may have thought possible. Look up BHAG for some more inspiration.

5. If any PPC gurus are reading, we’ll give you our idea for what we think is a clear cut opportunity (for free even!):

Produce content or a product that illustrates and explains what works on the major PPC platforms and what’s allowed. For example, a recently submitted ad to Facebook, adCenter and PoF all pointing to the same landing page got widely different results. Facebook rejected it, PoF accepted it, and adCenter didn’t generating any impressions.

A big old book/site of examples that work/don’t work would be incredibly useful. Facebook didn’t even give me a reason. Google doesn’t either. That’s pretty frustrating.

How do we feel about our little contest? Worth it or a waste of time? Sure, we lost money, but we learned valuable lessons that will be with us when we perform similar experiments in the future. Yep, the cliched lines about the road to success being littered with failures and mistakes are true. So get out there and fail!