Does PPC work for everyone?

[fRAiLtY-]

I've just taken on a new role and part of this role is appraising the company's website(s). There's 1 main one in question that sells canvases and personalised calendars - basically you upload photo's and away you go. They're getting approximately 30-50 unique visitors a day as it's very new, so I was thinking of an AdWords campaign as I've had success with this in the past in a similar market, however I wondered what people's opinions were on this market and whether it's viable.

The company is happy to invest initially £50 or so a day into AdWords just to see if it will work, and I'm confident they'd pile in considerably more if it got results. The question is, isn't this just part of the gig, as it's all well and good driving traffic but I'm dubious over the quality of the site and getting conversions. Where do you guys draw a line and say that driving traffic isn't the problem - it's something else like user experience?

The site has quite significant buying power and as such has quite a bit of margin in the products and I've no doubt they'll invest further if PPC gives them results.

Opinions appreciated.

 

[AllUpHere]

I'd get rid of the company name from your post if I were you. The company employing you isn't going to be pleased if they find out you don't know what you are doing and are on a forum asking for ideas.

 

[fRAiLtY-]

Hi,

I have removed the name as you suggest, however I'm not concerned about that particularly as I've stressed to them I'm a web developer/programmer - not a saleperson/marketer but agreed to take a look as a new pair of eyes and give a "fresh" opinion. That said I do agree with your point regarding "don't know what you're doing" in terms of PPC marketing hence asking for ideas and advice - much like fellow developers do with each other.

Thanks.

 

[Jac_Morton]

It is hard to say where you would draw the line, the main job of PPC is drive traffic and if it's doing that then you've done your job.

If traffic is high on the site but the sales are bad, this is something out of your control and is due to the an issue on the site itself. That can be a couple of issues;

Poor user experience
Product pricing
Postage
Poor products

It is difficult to pinpoint which could be the cause with viewing the analysis of when people leave the site.

I would just make sure your client is aware that you are attempting to increase traffic which MAY increase sales.

 

[exigio]

Getting right to your question - PPC works for everyone, period.
There are people who may try to convince you that PPC is not for everyone, or not for your product, etc... etc..

But you can sell everything online via PPC, if you know how. Even toilet paper

It's completely another question whether AdWords or another traffic source may be the best solution - for various reasons. And also how you are approaching your potential leads/clients when they arrive on your website.

This is where your marketing strategy can lead you to success, or to nowhere.
Note that if you don't have online marketing know-how and experience your chances are significantly lower.

 

[arjan]

PPC gives results if you have chosen right landing page,a conversion form and high quality text ad to attract visitors & convert it into customer.Like you are running a ad for product1 and web page is to be abc dot com/product1.The text ad contain the same keywords as in your title by just tweaking it then it would be good for high adrank and low cpc.


If sales is to be increased then your company would invest naturally.

 

[Elliottc26]

Hi,

A big part of it is ensuring you target the potential buyers for your product. If you know who they are, then you can write an ad that will entice them, know which keywords to target (short, long-tail, negatives, and local - broad, exact, and/or phrase), and with your budget know how much to spend on each click.

Once that's done, it's a case of using your websites' analytics to see how the site is performing, who is actually visiting, and what they are doing.

Then with this data, you can tweak your ads and website. The process starts again...

I may be simplifying it somewhat; but at the end of the day, you're unlikely to hit a home run on your first outing.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

PPC does not work for everyone.

Where do you guys draw a line and say that driving traffic isn't the problem - it's something else like user experience?

Before you use any paid marketing you will, of course, first work out how much you can afford to spend to get a conversion.

From there, you have a cost per visitor and conversion rate.

If you know how much a visitor will cost (e.g. with PPC), then you can know how high the conversion rate needs to be.

So the answer to that question is, assuming you're happy with the quality of the visitors, you can know it's not a traffic problem when the conversion rate is too low for you to achieve your allowable cost per conversion.

Hope this helps.

Steve

 

[Peter Bowen]

I'm with Steve on this one. PPC may well not work for your particular market.

I did a quick search and see that there are a bunch of ads offering calendars for about a tenner. My experience has been that it's very difficult to run profitable PPC campaigns where the sale value is low. I no longer take on clients unless they're selling big ticket items.

If you're feeling masochistic you can wander through some thoughts on the subject here:

http://www.pete-bowen.com/google-adwords/things-you-should-never-advertise-on-google

 

[Nita Teoh]

once you have driven relevant traffic to the landing page.

what conversions do you get?

what is the user experience on the landing page?

what kind of traffic are you driving?

There may be a variety of reasons that are contributing to the results you are getting from the AdWords campaign and whether it profitable or not:

quality and relevancy of traffic (good vs bad) being driven to the landing pages

optimisation issues with the landing pages

at the end of the day, your client will be wanting a ROI on his adwords spend, and someone will need to work on all the different aspects of the lead generation.

It is important to tweak and test, to refine and improve the campaign, to achieve cost per conversions that are profitable for your client.

 

[fisicx]

Yes it does as long as its properly initiated and managed by experts.

Not it doesn't. Read Steve's post above.

 

[exigio]

In short - it will work if you're an expert and you really know what you're doing.

There is a much higher risk if you're not prepared.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Yes it does as long as its properly initiated and managed by experts.

In short - it will work if you're an expert and you really know what you're doing.

There is a much higher risk if you're not prepared.

This is just not correct. It's terrible advice.

PPC only works in fields where the cost of acquiring a customer is lower than the value of that customer. Paying more to find a new customer than you make from them is never a valid business model - whether it's implemented by bumblers or experts.

 

[exigio]

This is just not correct. It's terrible advice.

PPC only works in fields where the cost of acquiring a customer is lower than the value of that customer. Paying more to find a new customer than you make from them is never a valid business model - whether it's implemented by bumblers or experts.

Thank you. I totally 100% agree with you Peter Bowen
You know better.

 

[exigio]

It seems what everyone is trying to say is that:
Inflow - Expenses = Cash Balance

I'll be overly simplistic but:
Inflow is how much you make (and a few other things)
Expenses is how much you spend on PPC (and a few other things)

So apparently to stay afloat you need to have your Inflow > Expenses.
The job of an agency is to keep your Inflow as large as possible and your Expenses as low as possible.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Yes it does as long as its properly initiated and managed by experts.

If your business model means 11 of your competitors make far more from a visitor than you do, PPC won't work for you - because they can simply outbid you.

Steve

 

[fRAiLtY-]

Ok, so after 3 days of running my AdWords campaign I can report the following. Every day I've been checking the "Matched Search Terms" in Analytics and adding negative keywords where necessary, this appears to have refined the traffic somewhat as the bounce rate has gone from near 80% to 50%, so much so it's the "least bouncy" of all traffic now at 10% below the site average - currently organic is bouncing at +60%.

I adjusted my match types yesterday as well as I had a lot of broads that I believe were bringing in irrelevant traffic. I've switched to mainly modified broads and a few exacts. I've also calculated what margin we have in our products to ensure we're not buying sales unnecessarily. Our £40 per day budget running from midday to midnight, Monday to Friday, is generating approximately 30-40 clicks per day with a CTR of 1.6% (this started at 0.4% before I started tweaking ads and match types) and I have average positions across all my keywords/ads of 2.5 - with only one outside the top 3.

All this said and after significant calculations I can confirm that it has equated to 0 sales. Absolutely 0. I know this because the site hasn't taken an order so it's not even a case of attributing it to AdWords, absolutely nothing. Am I being impatient or should I have seen at least something by now? If traffic was converting given the above statistics we'd still have significant margin in our products. So, is it a case of waiting and tweaking each day (I enjoy doing this part as it shows immediate gains) or increasing my schedule etc? I can't see it being budgetry as although we're exhausting our daily budget I've got no warnings about being below first page bids and all the positions seem good.

Any pointers appreciated.

 

[fisicx]

Where are they landing on the site? Have you got optimised adwords landing pages?

The fact that your average bounce is 60% means the site needs fixing. You should be aiming to get this down to well under 50% with a people stying on the site to assess the products. So stop adwords for now and get a website review (free for full members) and find out why people aren't buying.

 

[StevePoster]

Most of the time traffic is increasing in the website but there are no conversions which means it will really depend on the website's capability to convince its targeted visitors.

 

[fRAiLtY-]

That's kinda what I thought (and hoped for) as being a web developer I'm better placed to fix that side of things than market the site - I can't say I'm surprised either!

Thanks everyone.

 

[makeusvisible]

It sounds as though you may already have an idea about the answer to your question.... you can have the best PPC campaign in the world, but if your website doesn't perform it is dead money.

The short term answer is to create highly targeted landing pages within your campaigns, so that you can give the visitors exactly what they want, as well as improving your quality score. It sounds as though you are going to be working on redeveloping the website, so if you have a PPC campaign up and running fairly soon, you should be able to make informed decisions about the design based on what works and what doesn't work about the existing site.

 

[Elliottc26]

The good thing about having quality traffic to your site from Adwords is that you can use Analytics to see what people are doing on your site - where they drop off, how long they spend, where they come from, etc.,.

For conversions, you need to look at your advert copy and your landing page copy, calls to action, offers, and test, test, test. Make sure you know exactly who you are targeting to ensure you can hit all the right notes with these people.

Also, there are additional things you can do in Adwords to help conversions like extensions. It all helps build trust in you.

I'd be happy to take a look and give you some free recommendations for improvements if you'd like - just PM me. (unless you're a competitor of my company!).

 

[ecommerceguy]

I look after paid search accounts with budgets anywhere between £3k per month to £45k per month. Paid search and paid social work, but you need to know your numbers and you need to think strategically.

The name of the game is - who can spend the most money to acquire a customer - and this means that you've got to think long term. Instead of trying to make a profit on the first initial sale, you need to think long term, you need to know your average value of a client and realise that making a loss of £10 on day one might mean 10x return in less than a year.

 

[whoisvisiting.com]

It's really important when incurring costs on marketing that you're not just optimising the performance of your paid marketing campaign but also exploiting all angles of the traffic that's currently on your site.

In very simple terms you would not allow a customer to walk into your shop and allow them to walk out without even talking to them or finding out information.

In practice, this is the same with your online shop. There are tools such as Live Chat, Heat Mapping and A/B testing that will enable you to improve your experience and improve conversions.

If you're a B2B business, Whoisvisiting.com will identify the companies 'walking around your shop' and provide details on what companies these are and provide insights around this.

We offer a 14 day free trial (zero obligation) so if this is of interest do give it a try.

 

[drdialeruk]

This is where your marketing strategy can lead you to success, or to nowhere.
Note that if you don't have online marketing know-how and experience your chances are significantly lower. It is difficult to pinpoint which could be the cause with viewing the analysis of when people leave the site.

 

[Banksbroo]

To follow from the excellent advice of Peter Bowen, are you selling a generic commodity item? If so are your prices lower than your competitors? If they're not, you are paying for the priviledge of people visiting you rsite before buying from a cheaper competitor.

That said, three days isn't a long time, but what else could you acheive with your time and £120?

 

[wesley parker]

HI,

This is how we work out if it will be profitable for our customers at toprankdigital

It depends on your sites conversion rate and the average order value.

From what I understand personalized calendars cost around 10 pounds. so with a reasonable margin you would need to have a cost per conversion of around 2.50 possibly slighty more more.

If you look at their average website conversion rate, then you need to work out exactly how much you can spend per click. For example if their conversion rate is 2% then you would have a maximum of 5p per click to spend to hit your goal of 2.50. which will probably not get you much traffic.

With very small margins like these it would be difficult to make a profit. your best bet might be long tail keywords which will convert at much higher rates around 10-25% even though you will get less traffic.

 

[Deleted member 184921]

Make sure you use goal tracking to ensure that Adwords is targeting the correct audience.

 

[Uzair Kharawala]

Some great feedback & thoughts on this thread. My experience is that many businesses who are new to Adwords don't allow the campaigns to be Tested >> Optimised >> Scaled. If they don't get instant results i.e leads or new clients, then they stop/pause the campaigns.

Secondly, very few accept constructive feedback on their website / landing page and are not prepared in investing for decent copy & design of the page.

Lastly, very few under the LTV (Life-time Value) of a client. You may make a loss on the first sale or order, however, if you have set your sales funnel properly, then you will keep that client and make a positive ROI.

Hope this helps.
Oz