British Airways – work for free – fail at PPC

As you all know my team and I manage Search  and as a result of this we have to keep track of what people are doing online. You will no doubt have heard about the recent British Airways disputes over pay freezes, job losses, staff cuts and the rest of it either in the news or here on the inter-webs, we have been keeping a close eye on the developments too and genuinely feel for what their staff must be going through right now.

In an industry (an industry I am incredibly new to) where I have found staff to be intensley loyal to their employer, and really care about the service offered and how well customers are taken care of it must be unfathomably frustrating to be asked to make such extreme personal sacrifices such as taking three months paid leave, or freezing your salary for up to three years while still ensuring that you are doing your all to maintain genuine pride in your work and making sure your customers are taken care of as well as they always have been.

It is because of these reasons that I decided to write this post.

last week British Airways began offering summer sale prices on their website to generate as much revenue as possible during what is sure to be a couple of hard months for them.

 I set about checking up on the British Airways offer and found something quite startling.

Try this search on Google (don’t be scared of the phantom mouse):

“BA summer sale”

Now click on the sponsored link at the top (the British Airways one)

As you will now no doubt be aware of, British Airways are sending traffic through to an expired landing page, and have been doing so since the start of their sale.

In a genuine effort to save them money and improve their campaign I tweeted about this at www.twitter.com/callumadamson the day after I discovered it (British Airways follow me on Twitter) and gave them a day to realise their mistake and correct it. Well folks it has been three days since then and they still haven’t fixed it.

I can’t realisticly predict how much money they have spent on traffic to send customers to an expired landing page, but what I can say for sure is that if you are asking your staff to work for free, freeze their pay, or any other measure that will help them bring the company back into profitability, the least you can do is ensure that every penny spent is going towards revenue generation.

What can we learn from this?

When you launch a new PPC campaign check it by hand on live search engines – don’t trust the Google ad-preview tool, sure it will be laborious and slightly boring, but you’ll reap the rewards, and if it is a short run campaign (our summer offers end on the 14th July) then it is doubly important to ensure that your campaign is running at full speed from day 1.

I’m not saying that all of our campaigns are 100% unbelievably the most amazing bestest campaigns ever run (we still have a lot of work to do to get there) but we’re careful with our spends and targeting because we know that in this industry every penny counts at the moment, and we’re doing our best.

Love,

Callum

*Caveat

This post is an entirely personal viewpoint and in to way constitues the views, opinions or thoughts of my employer or anyone connected with me. It is merely an observation and is in no way slanderous in it’s intent.