Comments on: When PPC Doesn’t Work (and yes, I have the ads turned on)

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 03:31:05 +0000

Looks like i am at the end of this thread, but i thought i would add my two cents:)

To answer your first question, I’ve encountered many paid search campaigns that don’t perform up to par. I think its fair to say that internet is not “one size fits all” solution for every business model.

However, i believe that PPC advertising is a powerful too to test the business model’s validity. If you are already having issues, then im not sure all the analytics in the world is going to help because they are probably experiencing similar conversion issues throughout the whole site. Otherwise, why would they hired you in the first place right?

In my experience, poor conversion is usually tied to the landing page/website and not the advertising. Here are a few items i would check:

1. Make sure you have a unique phone number on the landing page (a lot of visitors call instead of filling out a form, especially when its a high ticket item)
2. Look at the landing page… is it compelling? have you looked at their competitors?
3. Review the contact form. Does it have too many fields? I’ve seen a lot of forms that look like you need an engineering degree to fill them out:)

Lastly, ask the client lots of questions like: whats your sales cycle like? How much is your cost per lead in other mediums? whats your close rate, ect. The point is that what you are experiencing might just be in the cards.

And when all else fails, don’t be afraid to call it quits and move on. There are plenty of other workable models out there that need attention too!

Christian

By: Judith 'deCabbit' Lewis

Judith 'deCabbit' Lewis — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:54:01 +0000

Wow… this is going to be a tough nut to crack. Without enough analytics I also would have given up.

I hope you succeed or figure out a way to track. I like the skype number suggestion

By: bernard

bernard — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:39:22 +0000

Good luck, I would have given up on such a client… they obey by the rules of analytics or I don’t even start

By: Julie Joyce

Julie Joyce — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:59:21 +0000

@Dave…good suggestion actually. I’ll speak to them about that one. They’re certainly willing to work with me as long as I stay within their parameters haha.

@Bernard: the Google conversion code is on there for PPC BUT we don’t have anything set up for Google analytics. I’ll suggest that. They run Urchin and don’t like to do anything that requires putting code into the site. You can see I’m working with very little here haha but your suggestion is good stuff and I’ll definitely try that one on them.

Thanks for the link! I am going to go listen to Dominion now.

By: bernard

bernard — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:46:28 +0000

Might seem idiot, but what would prevent them from using the google conversion analytics?

For sisters of mercy news, check this, I update it as much as I can: http://www.side-line.com/news_comments.php?id=26769_0_2_0_C

By: Dave Davis

Dave Davis — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:48:37 +0000

If you can get granular analytics data, even once off try segmenting users and creating personas for those converting segments. I know it’s time consuming but probably will pay off.

By: Julie Joyce

Julie Joyce — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:35:41 +0000

Bernard! I do have data on incoming links and all that. The client tends to rank very well on a lot of terms and, overall, they do really well. It’s just that we cannot qualify the PPC numbers. We’ve had issues with conversion tracking not working as well. We are spending the budget, getting a decent clickthrough rate, but we’re not showing conversions (and we do have the tracking code working now!)

You have definitely given me a new idea to try though…I will see if they can give me a list of referring links from their web metrics. Actually, maybe I’ll overwhelm them with report requests and just go through all of it to see if I’m missing any critical keyphrases.

Any Sisters of Mercy news?

By: bernard

bernard — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:05:13 +0000

I suppose you have done this already: get a list of incoming links to their website including search terms and check the search data for both the incoming links as well as the search terms for the website itself. That should give you some relevant info.

By: Julie Joyce

Julie Joyce — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:56:00 +0000

It’s logistics actually…transportation. Not too glamorous but quite profitable.

By: Dave Davis

Dave Davis — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:30:30 +0000

And worst case scenario, you only wasted a few dollars for teh 3 month skypein number.

If you could give more details on the category of product, it might generate some more ideas?