My First Google Search Campaign: Why it Failed

This blog post will cover

• What my first campaign was
• The results
• Why I believe it failed

What My FIRST Campaign Was

So after doing my market research and analysing the sales data from previous months on the e-commerce store, I settled on my first ever product to run a campaign for: the Wonder Workshop Dash Robot. Priced at 288 Singaporean Dollars, this thing was pretty expensive. It was a good product; I’ve played with it myself in primary school, and it’s a globally recognised and award-winning toy, so I had high hopes for this one. I got my campaign details ready, launched it, and…

The Results

Cough-cough. Not great. And the 0.80 sale wasn’t even for the Dash Robot too, the customer bought something else from my ad. ($87.24 purchase of other products) While I managed to partially hit my ‘first-campaign-targets’ of matching historical metrics, the numbers from this month’s campaign were just disappointing. Less than half of the average CTR for unbranded search ads, and a far far way away from branded search averages (20%). Looks like we have a lot of work to do.

Why I Believe I failed

After I ended the campaign, in disappointment, I analysed the data to figure out WHY the campaign had been such a flop. Even as a beginner digital marketer, I knew that letting emotions control your actions rather than the numbers was deadly, and that the answers were in the numbers, so I HAD to stay analytical. Here is what I concluded.

1. All previous sales had come from direct traffic

The nature of this STEM Toys store is this: the owner has a main business that teaches coding and robotics to schools and organisations across Singapore. From my limited knowledge, these sales have come from HIS direct involvement in getting people to go to his website to buy these toys. When I had seen high sales from historical data, I was seeing the result of personal selling rather than ads being at play. In my defence, it’s quite hard to analyse any ad-related historical data as the owner had not seen much success from ads when he ran it himself in the past. Most of his total sales (~$3000-$6000/month) are a direct result of his own main business and the sheer number of people he personally sends to his website.

2. High Ticket Item

Another conclusion that I came to is that I was selling something that was a pretty high-ticket item. For a generally unknown company to be selling a $288 toy, selling that would be pretty hard when customers can easily buy cheaper from the original company and producers of the toy. I feel that I had just dived into the deep end with this campaign, trying to sell an expensive toy to pretty low volumes of low-interest audiences.

Conclusion and Next Steps:

Considering ads have accounted for $61.93 from January 2025 to October 2025 when the owner was doing them himself, a $87.24 order (even if it wasn’t what I was marketing) is not bad. A win is a win. (😭)

Looking forward, there’s definitely a lot to learn from this first experience. I’ve learnt to: dive deeper into sales data, not just the numbers but the reason something sold so well. Properly and really evaluate if an item is the right one to be sold.

I’ve applied these learnings into launching the next product campaign, so stay tuned for that post!

Follow along the journey