How much would you pay to have a visitor on your website? 10p, 50p, £1, £10, £100?
It’s a hard question to answer, and all depends on the likelihood that your website will convert a visitor in to a sale, and how much a sale is worth to you. Plus of course, certain visitors will be worth more than others.
If you use pay per click (PPC) advertising such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads you can bid for clicks, usually a couple of pounds each, but some industries are much higher.
At the time of writing, “personal injury solicitor” costs a staggering £106 per click/visit! So why would solicitors pay so much? They obviously have a high chance of converting a visitor in to a sale, and can make huge amounts of money from each client.
For the rest of us it’s much harder to make a sale, and we probably have much tighter profit margins, and so our budget will be less, far less.
The trick is to find keywords that are not as expensive and more niche, for example “personal injury solicitors London” is currently £30, still a lot, and “personal injury London” has less searches, but costs just £13, which is 88% cheaper than the first keywords.
Once you’ve identified the niche for your keywords you need to ensure that your advert attracts the right kind of clients. For example a higher-end car dealership wouldn’t have an advert “second hand cars”, and certainly wouldn’t say “cheap used cars” because it is likely to attract visitors who don’t have the budget, and of course they will be paying for each visitor to their website, whether they buy a car or not. “Luxury one-owner used cars from £20,000”would be far better as anyone with under £20,000 to spend probably won’t click. With Google AdWords and Facebook Ads you can also filter the audience for example by their location or what device they are using.
If you own an online shop, or website that can easily follow a customer from enquiry to sale, you can add special code that will allow you to track your cost per conversion (sale) rather than a click. This is fantastic as you can calculate the profit for a sale along with the cost to make that sale, and can therefore immediately see how successful your PPC campaigns are. For example, if a product makes you £100 profit, and it costs you £10 in advertising to make the sale, you’re doing well. If the same sale costs £100 in advertising then you’re not making any money, and if it costs £120 you’re losing money! Believe it or now we’ve seen this with clients that have asked us to review their PPC campaigns, we saved one over £7,000 a year by simply pausing a few of his non-profitable campaigns.
Of course there is far more to it than that, for example you need to target different adverts to different markets; in the example above a solicitor may have different adverts for each of their specialities, such as personal injury, family law, or litigation, and each of their adverts would need to forward users to the correct page; there is no point in sending a personal injury enquiry to the commercial property department as the user is less likely to convert in to a sale.
Then you need to look closely at your website and determine if it is converting as many leads as you’d like, and if not, why not? Does it give the correct representation of your business? Does it look professional? Does it tell the client what they need to know? Does it entice them in to clicking or getting in touch?
Then of course, to throw a massive spanner in the works, PPC may not be the right form of advertising for you! It certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Depending on the market it may be cheaper in the long term to concentrate on organic search engine optimisation (SEO) i.e. ranking number one in Google, or in some instances to forget search engines all together and use social media or email marketing, for example.
The issue is that every website and every underlying business is different. What works for others may not work for you. In fact, even within your own business you may have to market each department in a different way. A pub for example would market a dance/club evening differently to corporate Christmas events, and different to a real ale festival, because they all attract a different audience.
The purpose of this article is to encourage businesses to take a step back and look at their marketing as a whole, look at their sales-funnel, and try to refine it so that is more successful.
Of course, in many instances business owners may not have the in-house skills, or time or inclination to manage such projects, and that is where we come in.
We are Webbed Feet UK, and we well as website design we also specialise in online marketing, whether it be pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimisation, social media or online newsletters. Unlike many web designers, we will also happily work on websites built by others, and in the first instance can produce a report in to your current marketing and where we think you should focus your energy. We can then either implement the changes for you, or train you on how to do it yourself.
So if you have a website that isn’t as successful as you’d like, or if you would like help with your marketing and generating more leads, then please get in touch.