Me : So why are you thinking of starting an online advertising campaign?
Potential New Client : To get more visits to my website.
Me : How many are you currently getting?
Potential New Client : About 100 a week.
Me : And how is that working for you?
Potential New Client : It’s not – that’s why I need more…
I don’t know how close to deja-vu this might sound to some of you – but it’s all too familiar to me.
Let’s suppose that instead of online advertising you were running a mail shot campaign. Let’s imagine you have sent your mail shot out to three different address groupings (you were careful to stagger the mailings so that you wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the response if you were to send them out all at once) – and you have had not a single inquiry.
At which point would you stop? After four mailings? Five? Ten?
Ridiculous right? You’d stop really quickly – in fact, chances are you wouldn’t even get to the third wave… and yet, with online traffic many businesses persevere with techniques – often costly techniques – to drive more and more traffic to their website – that fails to convert into business.
Anyone can drive traffic to a website. Give me more money – I’ll send you more traffic – simple.
But here’s the thing – it’s not about clicks. It’s about conversions.
Your website visitors need to do something that is meaningful to you and your bottom line. This might be as simple as signing up to receive updates from you. It might be buying something from you. Or downloading your helpful guide. Or simply making contact either by telephone or via your online form. Something.
Something that you can measure. And it could, of course, be a bunch of somethings – some of which have a higher “value” to you than others..
And once you establish that – everything else starts to fall into place. Instead of clicks you start to think in terms of clicks that convert. Rather than your home page, you start to develop landing pages that help to convert. And ad campaigns, and keywords, and calls to action.
Without a way to measure the conversions none of these considerations make sense.
And throwing bigger and bigger chunks of your marketing budget at simply getting more of those clicks that don’t convert suddenly seems like a waste.
Why? Because it is.
