Staples found an easy way to lose money - AdSense

My first post was supposed to be about my positive experience with Comcast, and I even have the post drafted, but I couldn’t let this one go just like that. Yesterday I was looking for TV stand for our living room and did search on Google for the terms “tv stands”. I browsed here and there in the organic results and decided to try the links from the paid ads on the right. Everything was fine until I clicked on one from Staples. It linked to… an error page. Initially I though this is just an intermittent issue with their server and I went back, searched again and clicked on the link to Staples… again (this time it was ranked differently, and title and description were different but the URL was still pointing to staples). Guess what? Generic error… again! Slowly I started getting frustrated. It is not only sending me to an error page but the error message is really stupid:

“Generic Error
A system error has occurred. Please continue to staples.com.”

Hello! I am looking for TV stands. I “continued” to staples.com. The home page had 3 different banners – one rotating for saving on bunch of stuff, another to save $5 on multipurpose paper and third one for 50% on some other paper, long list of categories, list of best sellers, and banner for helping fight breast cancer (I appreciate that one – at least they contribute to good cause). However I wasn’t able to see TV stands anywhere. I typed “tv stands” in the search box and list of about 30 items was presented to me. I didn’t like any of those and went away.

Tonight though, while browsing, I remembered Staples and decided to check whether they fixed the issue. I searched again for the same terms, and again Staples was one of the paid ads on the right. Aaaand… ta-daaa. Generic Error! “This is ridiculous”, I thought. Staples is a publicly traded company with $14B market capitalization, $20B revenue last quarter and gross profit over $5B. They should be able to afford decent web site. It isn’t something I developer alone in my spare time.

I really got curious and started analyzing the case. Here are some questions floating in my head while clicking around to get more information about Staples:

Why the heck Staples pays for ads that target TV stands? For me Staples is office supplies company and not furniture company.
How much they pay for those keywords? According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool “tv stands” is very highly competitive phrase for advertisers. This tells me that bidding can go up to few dollars for this phrase.
What is the search volume for this keyword? According to the same tool “tv stands” search volume is 550K for September while “tv stand” (without the “s”) is 673K for the same month. Staples link appeared only for “tv stands” (with the “s”) phrase, which means they bid only for this phrase. Also their ad is not present on every search, which means they don’t pay the highest bid.
Is TV stands one of their main items they sell? I went back to Staples’ web site and tried to find TV stands in the list of categories. It is under Furniture – Carts, Printer & TV Stands. Duh! I surely want to put my TV on a cart and roll it around. However there was no banner or something on the home page telling me that they want to promote TV stands and the lack of good landing page (the one with Generic Error I don’t consider landing) made me think that they just bid for all keywords matching one of their categories or items. How smart this is?… Hmmm, not smart for me.

For my calculations I decided to use $1 per click and assuming 5% click-through rate here is what I got 550K * 5% = 27.5K * $1 = $27.5K for September. Not so much for $14B company – they can afford it.

However if you are smart here is how you can approach the problem and save yourself $27K.

Make sure your landing page is always up. If you are running campaign for specific item, prepare good landing page showing the user the benefits to buy this item from your web site – lower price, broad selection, fast delivery… you chose. ERROR PAGE AS LANDING PAGE IS UNACCEPTABLE.
Bid only for keywords that describe items you specialize in. I know you sell also mops but you are flooring store, not cleaning supplies store. If you sell something as byproduct don’t bid for keywords describing it – it is just waste of money; you cannot provide such a good selection as a store specializing in cleaning supplies.
If you are running campaign for specific item make sure the landing page for the campaign is linked from the home page (and also other key pages). If you really want to get rid of those mops make sure people browsing your web site know that you sell mops.

And some more tips for the error pages:

Use descriptive error pages. Generic Error is a lame message to show to the user. You should always know what the error is. If your developer is so lazy and doesn’t want to catch every exception at least provide something more engaging like: “Ooops, we screw it up. Please excuse our laziness, but we are really not sure what happened”. At least it will make people laugh.
Give more options to navigate out of the error page. Don’t send the users to the home page only - give them options to search, browse categories, call a phone number etc.
Always provide link to report the problem. Not everybody will report an error but somebody will. If Staples provided this option I would have clicked on it. Always treat those reports with highest priority – you pay money for people to land on this page and if somebody reports error on it you should fix it immediately.

Hope you get the idea. Just one more thing – I clicked 5 times on the Staples’ ad for TV stands and bought nothing. I wonder how many other people did the same.