Just today I was speaking with a friend of mine who I ran a PPC campaign for that quite simply didn’t take off at all. The campaign was very well planned out, the landing page was very carefully designed, the sales pitch was and very attractive, and we had plenty of ad variations that used different techniques to attract relevant clicks that eventually would convert better.

Along side this we ran a pretty aggressive market trends research to try and find out What sort of Search Volume we were dealing with and how competitions we would be facing. We picked some of the most generic terms and went along with a couple tasty niches that were found. Everything seemed ready, so we launched the campaign. I have to say, that quite possibly it was one of the worse case scenarios I have ever come across of something that quite simply didn’t stick to its market.

Or in other words, the Market didn’t respond to any of our efforts to sell the service. The Drop out rate from the landing page was staggering. And I’m not talking about a bad conversion rate; I’m talking about z e r o conversions. We made readjustments in a rush to try and invert the state of things, but nothing, the High CTR 0 Conversions. I felt that we could be at it all week and nothing we would so would make a difference.

Now, without wanting to sound too pretentious, I like to think that I know what I’m doing when it comes to setting up a good profitable PPC campaign completely focused on conversions rather then traffic. The product/service that we were dealing with was a Work hygiene and Security course for students that had a 50% discount on On-line subscriptions. So it seems that I have learned the hard way that I have to do a better job evaluating the type of product/service that is on his table. There are products/services that simply don’t sell on-line, and others…that don’t sell at all, no matter how hard you try.

So it seems that Google is starting to take more active measures against the purchase and sale of links. In a recent post in his Blog, Matt Cutt’s states that Google is testing new systems against the purchase and sale of links. Whether this involves a direct Algorithmic change or not is not clear, but it is definitely something that is being prioritized.

My guess is that Google is improving the mechanism used of find sites that are selling links and automatically preventing them from passing on Page Rank and Link weight. It doesn’t seem plausible that Google is pursuing the purchase of links itself, as it is pretty much impossible to attribute responsibility for external content. Even the new Spam reporting system isn’t very clear. Matt Cuts encourages Webmasters to report sites that are selling and buying links by adding the “transaction” trace in the report form.

But how exactly does this prove anything except that site A is selling links? What prevents anyone from buying a bunch of cheap links with his competitors URL and then sending a nice tidy report via WebMaster Central? Additionally, before selling links, many directories add sites without asking the owners for permission, making it impossible to know if a purchase was done or not. So it is obvious to me that Google is going after the source of the problem rather then those who are taking advantage of this loophole in Google’s Algorithm concept. If the Anti-Spam team finds an effective way of neutralizing the sites that are selling links, spending money in buying them will be useless.