the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

One of my clients is an online soccer retailer. They have a fantastic campaign to begin with, but when you add in a once in 4 years event, as the World Cup is, you get absolute top end performance. The client actually had me cap the campaign in the middle of July because the 4 guys who worked at their main store couldn’t ship any more orders during the course of the day.

Of course, being a soccer retailer, there is an ad group devoted to player names. Suprisingly, it’s the smallest portion of their campaign in terms of clicks/sales, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless because of the whole sports celebrity thing. I’m not a huge Zinedine Zidane fan, but I am a former soccer player, and he’s one of the best, so I can appreciate watching him play. Now, if you don’t know the story, you’ve obviously been under a rock so stop reading here…
Even though this is a low percentage of the overall campaign in terms of spend, I thought this was an interesting example of things an analyst has to pay attention to while managing a campaign. In particular, an analyst always has to be on the lookout for a star athlete head butting an opponent in the middle of the sport’s final game, and the effect it may have on keyword pricing and conversion.

To illustrate, here are the numbers from Zidane’s keywords broken down into July Overall, July 1-9, and July 10-31. The final game and infamous headbutt occured on the 9th.

July 1-9….

July 10-31…post headbutt…. Notice 3 things:

1. The cost per conversion before and after the incident.

2. The drastic drop in conversion rate.

3. Also notice the average postion rise, as I’m assuming many people stopped competing on his name because they anticipated the drop in conversion.

Anyhow, I just thought this was somewhat amusing. I suppose that’s about what you can expect to happen with your jersey sales when you make a completely foolish decision like that. Anyone out there have any similar examples?