Don’t waste money on clicks to your website when it isn’t properly functioning.

This afternoon I was looking for tools to help monitor social media traffic. I typed “Twitter Monitoring” in to Google and the top result was for a website, www.sproutsocial.com. It had a pretty decent ad copy, so I decided to click on it and see what the site was about.

Clicking through to the landing page, it was pretty well set-up. Lots of images, the copy was well written, and the landing page was well optimize for someone looking for “Twitter Monitoring.” So far, I was pretty impressed with the site and was intrigued by the software.

Then I went to click on the link for “Features” and a giant FAIL occurred. When clicking on the link, I received a message saying that the Page wasn’t actually there, and I must have reached that URL in error. After clicking on a few more links, in fact, every link on the page, it seemed as though the only page that was working was the landing page for the ad.

Not only does that instantly lose the interest of potential customer, it also just cost Sprout Social however much money they were paying for me to click on the ad, which was the top search result in Google. Knowing the popularity of a term like “Twitter” along with how difficult it is to get to the top spot, even with a well designed page, it must have cost Sprout Social at least $5.00 if not more to pay for me to click on their ad.

I understand that websites sometimes face technical problems, maybe a server went down, or the site was moved and links weren’t updated, but please make sure to suspend your Google campaigns, otherwise you will inevitably pay for clicks to your site that will result in a high bounce rate, which will ultimately result in no customers, high advertising costs, and a poorly optimized Google campaign which will result in future higher costs for ads across your campaign.