Papa John's Gets Killer ROI With Free Pizza Offer

The chain ran an image ad on the Google PPC system offering a free medium cheese pizza for people who register to get their emails.

You may be surprised to hear the promotion "worked" - Papa John's display ads on the Google network resulted in a 15-20% increase in weekend sales.

Earlier, the pizza chain went to 152,000 friends on Facebook from about 10,000 in two days, offering a two-for-one for anyone who befriends them.

Aparently, mobile ads are the next frontier - Papa John's Pizza plans a flash promotion around New Year 2008.

How not to SEO if you are selling Pizza

Image via WikipediaPillsbury of the Dough Boy fame apparently advertises on Adwords. Seems like someone at Pillsbury or an agency used on of the automated keyword tools to generate a list of keyword phrases containing pizza. A little playing around with the dynamic keyword insertion function and voila:
you have an ad for Gluten Free Pizza Crust landing at the Pillsbury Pizza Crust page. The problem of course is that the key ingredient in the pizza crust is wheat flour and that is definitely not free of gluten.
Now if you like SEOMoz member Mike Piper suffer from celiac disease, eating anything with gluten will make you violently ill. Moreover, you will get mighty pissed off if someone's advertising misleads you, getting your hopes up that you have found something you can actually eat.
The lesson, of course, is to insist that your PPC clients prune the auto-generated keyword lists to make sure their ads don't show up for keywords where they could offend and to be double careful if you use dynamic keyword insertion.
Oh and one more thing: memetics is all good and nice but it won't make you a rapper.