I was at a marketing meetup in Boise when a guy told me he spent $50k on Google Ads without a single conversion.

That story made me finally set a hard rule to never run a campaign without a proper landing page test first, so what's the dumbest budget burn you've heard of that actually taught you something?

3 comments

3 Comments

lewis.troy13d ago

Oh man, that's brutal. I once helped a friend who basically lit a grand on fire for Facebook ads pushing his new t-shirt design. The ad looked cool, but it just sent people to his general Instagram page. Who's going to scroll through fifty posts to maybe find the one shirt? It was a total dead end. That was my wake-up call to always check where the click actually goes before spending a dime. You can have the best ad in the world, but if it dumps people in the wrong spot, you're just paying to watch money disappear.

gavin_hill276d agoTop Commenter

Ugh, that's so rough. My buddy did something similar with a Google ad for his lawn care side gig. The ad said "Get a free quote" but the link went to his contact page that just had his email address, no form or anything. Who's gonna type out an email? It's like @lewis.troy said, you're just burning cash if the landing spot doesn't match the promise. He got zero leads from a couple hundred bucks.

the_adam13d ago

I once saw a company blow about 30 grand on a huge billboard right off the highway. The problem was the website link on it was impossible to type while driving, and the name was hard to remember. It taught me that sometimes the fanciest, most expensive ad is useless if the path to you is broken. I mean, you have to make it stupid easy for people, or they just won't bother. That lesson stuck with me way more than any marketing book. Now I always ask how a customer would actually find me from an ad, step by step.