In the digital world of marketing Pay Per Click (PPC) is often seen as cost effective marketing and with good reason. You can target your potential customer with pin point accuracy using all sorts of demographic, geographic and statistical information. You can use keywords to generate ads that the customer clicks on and drive traffic to your web site, for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Using analytical data you can track your Cost Per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rate (CTR) to measure your results and continually tweak and improve them to get the best value out of your daily budget.
For many businesses, that is where PPC advertising stops. They use it to get traffic to their web site only, and then produce enormous amounts of statistical data, which makes it look worthwhile, and it is, but there is more.
One of the basic principles of marketing revolves around TARGETING your customer. First you identify a particular product you want to sell, then you define who your ideal customer is. You figure out which channel is best used to target them and then you create a targeted campaign for that customer. The final part of any marketing campaign is measuring it’s effectiveness and most importantly in today’s market when advertising dollars are scarce, you need to monitor your Return On Investment (ROI).
ROI is simple a measure of how much you spend on your marketing campaign compared to how much you spend on it. For example if you spend $300 on a PPC campaign and you get $600 worth of sales, your ROI is 200%. Depending on your profit margin, this may or may not be profitable.
With Conversion Marketing, the ROI becomes the starting point for your campaign. For instance if a business has a budget of $500 for a campaign with a goal of getting $2000 worth of sales of Product X, then conversion marketing looks at what channel will provide the business with the best chance of achieving the ROI required. It may be a PPC campaign OR it may be something else such as an email blast or a social media campaign. Conversion marketing focuses on the goal of the campaign and finding the most cost effective channel to deliver the ROI required.
Conversion marketing is a relatively new idea for most businesses and it can be hard to find a marketing business that can provide them with the service. A lot of digital marketing agencies tend to specialize in one area or another. For instance there are a lot of agencies that specialize just in PPC and become Google Adwords partners and believe that PPC can provide the best results in every situation. There are also thousand of companies that offer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which focus on getting organic search results. They use a range of methods to build trust in the domain and to drive traffic to the web site. SEO programs can run for years and cost thousands of dollars, depending on how competitive the search terms are. The main goal for an SEO agency is to get a first page position in search engine rankings so that it can drive traffic to the web site, but traffic alone does not always convert to sales.
These days most businesses are focusing their attention on social media, with an emphasis on building a fan base on their Facebook pages. There are plenty of agencies out there that will promise to drive big numbers to your FB page which gives you an impressive Fan Base, but may not increase sales at all, and cost you a pretty penny as well.
So how does conversion marketing work? Well Nigel Ayling from Solutions 4 Biz is a specialist in conversion marketing and he says, “It’s about getting results, that’s what my clients want.”
Here are a few case studies of clients I have worked with.
CASE STUDY ONE – SNOW SKI RETAILER
This client has a retail store in Sydney and a web site with a comprehensive online shop. The client was spending $2200 per month with a large Adwords Agency. The price included their management fee which accounted for about 30% of the spend. For the money, they received about 750 click throughs to their web site per month and an automated report at the end of the month showing the keywords, and click through rates.
In the first 2 months of us taking over this (same) budget we were able to achieve the following results;
• Invested about 25% into SEO, which got them raking organically on page 2 for a range of search terms. This increased web traffic by a whopping 50%
• Ran a targeted competition on their Facebook page which grew their Fan Base from 300 to over 1900 fans. At the peak of the competition the page had viral sharing of over 5000 people per week.
• Delivered over 1500 click in PPC campaigns which is more than double they were getting from the specialist Adwords agency
Read the testimonial from our client here.
CASE STUDY 2 – MOTEL
This client has a comprehensive web site, with online booking facilities and utilizes a channel manger to push it’s inventory out to resellers like Wotif and Booking.com. They have an email database and good social media presence.
Over the past 18 months working with this client, we have been able to achieve the following results;
• Used SEO to achieve Page 1 rankings for popular generic search terms around “accommodation”
• Increased FB fan base to over 2000 using a competitions and FB ads
• Increased online bookings from an average of 2 per week to 15-20 per week
We are now using conversion tracking on the Adwords campaign for this client and can put an exact figure on the ROI for the campaigns. We have been able to show that we can generate up to $400 worth of bookings from a spend of just $4 on PPC. This is an ROI of 1000%. We have been able to do this by excluding popular generic search terms and focusing on keywords that are used by buyers, not browsers. This means we are wasting less money on Adwords and getting real conversions as results.
Read the testimonial from our client here.