Case Study: Winning With Search Engine Marketing
An illustrative small mail-order business's first three months running Overture and Google AdWords campaigns, and what moved the numbers.
The following is a composite scenario, built from the kind of small business search campaigns that were common in 2002, not an account of one specific company. It’s useful precisely because the pattern shows up again and again.
The starting point
Picture a small mail-order gardening supply business, family-run, selling specialty seeds and tools through a catalog and a basic website. Word of mouth and the print catalog carry most of their sales, and their entire online marketing budget so far has been a listing in a couple of directories. A slow winter season leaves them looking for a way to reach new customers without a large upfront ad spend.
The first move: Overture
They start with Overture, since its pay-per-click auction model means they’re not committing to a large budget up front, only paying when someone clicks. Their first mistake is an obvious one: they bid on broad terms like “gardening supplies,” a phrase national retailers with far bigger budgets are also bidding on. Clicks come in, but at a cost per click they can’t sustain, and the traffic doesn’t convert well because it’s too generic.
The correction
After a few weeks reviewing which clicks turned into orders, they narrow their bidding to specific product terms, like the names of particular seed varieties they carry that bigger retailers don’t stock. The cost per click drops because there’s less competition for these narrower terms, and the traffic converts far better because someone searching for a specific variety is close to ready to buy.
Adding Google AdWords
They add a small AdWords campaign alongside Overture, using Google’s newer cost-per-click bidding option, and route both campaigns to specific product pages rather than the homepage, so a visitor lands exactly where their search term suggested they’d land. That relevance between the ad and the landing page turns out to matter as much as the bid itself.
What the numbers show after three months
By the end of the test period, the narrowed campaigns are producing a meaningfully lower cost per order than their previous print advertising, and the business has a repeatable process: watch which terms convert, cut the ones that don’t and reinvest in what works. Nothing about the tactics is exotic. The advantage comes entirely from measuring honestly and adjusting quickly, something their bigger competitors, still running broad campaigns without close tracking, aren’t doing.
The takeaway
Search engine marketing in 2002 rewards specificity over reach. A small, focused campaign built around narrow, high-intent terms and a matching landing page will consistently outperform a broad campaign with a bigger budget but no discipline behind it. That’s true whether you’re a two-person mail-order business or a company twenty times the size.
More from 2002: browse the SEO archive or see everything published this year.
