There are so many bad online advertising opportunities out there it drives me crazy. If you’re selling a product online, and you don’t know the cost per conversion of your online advertising expenditures, there’s something wrong.

I’ve noticed that TV stations are joining the ranks of content providers trying to exploit businesses with bad online advertising options. After talking with one, I discovered they don’t even collect the data needed to give their customers a truthful representation.

There are great options out there. Google AdWords isn’t that bad. With the powerful data they give you, they also give you the power to shoot yourself in the foot if you like. But there is an extreme opportunity there, as with other several other providers.

Here’s a great AdWords case study that demonstrates five huge problems advertisers can run into, as well as a before and after comparison.

So with the same budget, a more organized and tightly themed account, and a strong smart phone bidding strategy we saw an increase in clicks of 181%, while reducing cost by 3.3%. As expected, when you remove statewide GEO and the content network, we saw a drop in overall impressions of 93.6% but the quality of the traffic was so much better that our Click Through Rate increased 45x, from .21% to 9.47%. This increase in CTR also improved our Quality Score, so our AVG CPC dropped 65.6%. The conversion rate increased 75x from .49% to 36.88%, and the cost per conversion dropped 99.5% from $184.03 to $0.84. From 19 conversions for the period before we took over, to 4,036 in the period after we took over.

Read the full story: Paid Search success story from Online Performance Marketing