Online, you have to have quality leads (PPC stuff)

[Dan Furman]

Wrote this in my blog - figured it might make for some discussion.

I recall some website writing I did for this one company. They advertised on Google adwords, and had a budget of $2 a day. For their business, that meant 2 clicks. 2 clicks a day, and they were done. And they complained after 3 days that my writing wasn’t bringing in business… well, it’s kinda hard to judge from 6 visits (to be fair, I didn’t know their PPC budget when starting the job - I just assumed they would deliver eyeballs.)

I told them they had to get more interested people to the site. So they changed their keywords to some less popular ones, and made it so their $2 budget would bring in 10 people a day. No effect - now the problem was the keywords were awful. Yea, they were cheap keywords… and they were useless. The client actually expected the web copy I wrote him to “make up” for the fact that the leads were lousy. That’s not going to happen.

On the internet, you have to have quality visitors. Period.

You can’t fool around on the fringes with your Pay Per Click keywords. The fringes are great for filling out your marketing, but you cannot expect copy to make up for bad leads. If you are a local carpet cleaner, you need to have “{your city} carpet cleaning” as a keyphrase if you are counting on PPC searches/your website to deliver leads. I don’t care how much it costs. If you design websites for florists, you need to have “web design for florists” as a keyphrase. You can’t omit these in favor of, say, “flower seller internet design” because the latter is cheaper. You won’t get the same quality visitor.

It’s this simple: No writing, no expensive design, no nothing will help you until your site is actually visited by people who want/need what you have/do. Otherwise, your website is just an online brochure that will be visited by people who know you (which may or may not be a terrible thing, but that's for another post - this post is for people who are going to count on the web and PPC for new leads.)

Great web copy (and great design) can work magic with the right visitors. I prove it every single day. Give me people who are interested in your product and service, and I’ll sell them. But you do have to deliver those eyeballs for your copy/design to work.

[Patrysha]

Very true...though lead quality does apply to offline too. Funny how people expect magic on a tight budget and don't do the little things that may have a big impact.

I could rant on the little things for hours, but I won't...I'll save it for the luncheon presentation on Tuesday.

[vangogh]

Great points Dan.


On the internet, you have to have quality visitors. Period.

Absolutely 100% agree. I've been seeing the opposite when it comes to SEO and social media where people looking at the quantity of visitors as the end goal metric when it's really the quality of visitors that's important. People are now looking to something like Twitter and think the goal is to have more followers than everyone else, without considering how many of those followers are actually listening to anything you have to say.

I think this is a major reason why so many people fail to see the value in online marketing, seo, ppc, etc. They focus on the quantity of traffic over the quality and come to the conclusion online won't work.

[billbenson]

It's kind of a chicken and egg thing to. In this case quantity of qualified visitors vs page quality. Usually you can have a well written page which is also a good page SEO wise. Thats not always true though. Say for a page where an image really is what closes the deal or for some reason Flash is the best medium for the page.

One of the problems today is marketing managers, executives, owners, etc rarely have any knowledge of internet marketing. I'm not sure, but I doubt there is much emphasis on it in an MBA program. Most web designers don't know a lot about web marketing either. Most of the designers on this forum do, but I don't consider that to be the norm. I'm also including corporate webmasters in that grouping. Their boss may tell them to put up a sight that does X, but SEO and other types of marketing frequently aren't part of the equation.

So it doesn't really surprise me Dan, when you or VG or others have clients who don't have realistic expectations from your services. Your clients (I suspect) don't really have a good web marketing knowledge base and have unrealistic expectations. In a way they are very similar to the guy that thinks you can just put up a web site and make millions.

On your first comment Dan, about the Adwords budget. I think the budget fits into G's overall Adwords algorithm. When I was first starting with adwords, I started with a $5 daily budget. After reading some strategies I upped the daily budget to $50. My placement went up, CPC went down, and my orders went up. In other words I made more money with the higher budget and my actual monthly adwords cost didn't change much.

Having said that, Adwords really is a place where you want to go in baby steps or you can spend a lot with little return if any.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

[Dan Furman]

On your first comment Dan, about the Adwords budget. I think the budget fits into G's overall Adwords algorithm. When I was first starting with adwords, I started with a $5 daily budget. After reading some strategies I upped the daily budget to $50. My placement went up, CPC went down, and my orders went up. In other words I made more money with the higher budget and my actual monthly adwords cost didn't change much.

Having said that, Adwords really is a place where you want to go in baby steps or you can spend a lot with little return if any.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

well, the thing with this particular client was his clicks cost $1 each. That's how much a placement for his competitive keywords was. The downside, though, is you really couldn't "fake it". You had to have variations of the phrase "<your city> capret cleaning" or you may as well not be there.

The problem was, he had no ad budget. I realize everyone has to start somewhere, but this guy wasn't tiny. He had 4 vans with the equipment (which must cost 50-70k each). He just couldn't fathom spending more than $60 a month on google advertising.

He's OOB now.

[KristineS]

What Dan says is so true, the traffic that comes to your site has to be targeted and quality or you might as well close up and go home. That's why I get so angry when I see people or sites that promise millions of visitors. Sure I may get millions of visitors to my site, but if none of them wants what I'm selling, what does it matter? It isn't the quantity, it's the quality. If that's not there, you can have five million people visiting your site every day and not make a dime.

[billbenson]

I agree with everything Dan said, I was just branching off a little bit as he posted it for discussion.

Do the ads have to cost that much Dan? Just seems high. There can only be a handful of Adwords advertisers for city carpet cleaning even in major cities. Seems like there would be a fair number of other good keywords like city stain removal etc. My CPC runs about 15 cents, but my max is usually set at about 50 cents.

I can think of a bunch of ways to do this probably lowering your CPC, they would require writing a lot of ads and pages. Pay for the ad or pay for the site? Sounds like your guy is exactly what I was referring to in my post above. Owners that don't understand web marketing.

[vangogh]

It wouldn't be a surprise for the clicks to be $1. It doesn't take a lot of competition to drive up the price. It could also be how generic the keywords are. Even with the location added 'carpet cleaner' is still pretty generic.

[billbenson]

I did a quick search for city carpet cleaners for my town of about 100k people and for a large suburb an hour away from. It's just outside of Tampa. The only results I found for city carpet cleaners were large franchises with a local franchisee, national chains, and yellow page types of sites. Not one, even in a search for Tampa showed up for a local private carpet cleaning business. I really suspect that google would like to give local business results there, but didn't have any. The national company's are probably paying quite a bit per click, but the landing page has little or no local information. One adwords ad had city carpet cleaning for the first line (and only the first line) in the ad.The city wasn't even mentioned on the landing page. I suspect they are just thowing up a adwords ad for every city the want to in the country and using the same landing page for all of them.

I strongly suspect you could write a campaign that would cost a fraction of what these guys are paying per click.