Great Leads - The Paid Search Sales Funnel
I wish there was one rule for paid search return on investment
(ROI), but there are so many business types, strategies and
plans out there that it is hard to justify a general benchmark.
One thing I have found very eye opening though is to track ROI
down to the keyword level. For every conversion, we want to know
exactly which keyword, campaign, and ad group caused it, and
whether it came from the Google site, search network, or content
network.
All you need to implement this is a good web stats software and
special tracking urls.
I have one free generator tool that covers some basic stuff up
at: http://vortex.successvideo.net/quick/qt.php that can get you
started and I also have an article that tells you how to make
them yourself at:
http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org/node/15
You will find some keywords bring about a lot more conversions
than others.
In the beginning if you are having real ROI problems you can
just put more emphasis on the keywords that are bringing you the
best results, and once you have an ROI that is acceptable, you
can bring other keywords in, and test different sales copy on
your landing page, or split test different landing pages.
There's lots of ways to tweak ROI but usually what I do is:
1) Make sure you have tracking for everything and use it
2) Plug the leaks- dump the keywords that bring no conversions
over a long period of time, like 90 days or so.
3) Next, try some different landing page copy, and look for
changes either up or down with your stats. Hire a real
professional copywriter here, don't be cheap.
4) While monitoring your webstats on every change, tweak the
design of your web site. If you aren't sure what to do, leave
the website alone and just change the copy.
5) Often this is enough to double your ROI, but there is one
other thing you can do depending on your business. This has
often been described as a "sales funnel".
THE SALES FUNNEL:
Any business has to attract new customers somehow, get them
excited, and get them to buy, to be crude about it. The bigger
the dollar amount you are asking people to spend, the more work
you have to do to get them into the buying mood. For a lot of
businesses, just getting them to be able to call a salesperson
is a huge step. So whatever your business is, break your sales
process down into the following actions as appropriate:
1)Newsletter signup 2)Free download (You DO have something
people can download free right?) 3)Leads with presales questions
4)Qualified leads either by a qualifyer or salesperson 5)Phone
calls completed 6)Proposals 7)Closed Deals
Again this is hard to generalize like this, because if you had a
simple site that sold CD's, you would not need to hire
salespeople to close a 14 dollar sale, but the key here is to
look at each step of the sales process and your website and look
at the actual cost and efficiency of each part.
Now here is where the sales funnel comes in: Your website should
get people to respond enough to get you newsletter signups and
freebie seekers, but the key thing you need to know is what your
average percentages are for conversion of each part to the next
level, and how much it costs you.
Sometimes you want as many people responding as possible, so you
offer something free, a free download, a free white paper, a
free shareware, whatever the case may be.
If this gets you so many unqualified leads that it is wasting
the time of your salespeople you fine tune your Adwords campaign
and your website to get less quantity, but higher quality, and
even to the point of putting the price in your Adwords ads
themselves.
This makes far less people click, but prequalifies that they are
more serious buyers, and your conversion ratio and ROI will be
higher. So the point here is you can have a big funnel at one
end, getting smaller as you go, or you can start with a smaller
funnel and make it efficient. And each step in the funnel can be
tweaked according to your business, if you can figure out what
each of those numbers are on average.
Its another way to look at ROI than most people do, but having
owned many businesses, I have found that if you can take things
and break them down into parts you can fix the part that
actually may have a problem, and leave the parts that actually
are working, so you don't end up throwing out the baby with the
bathwater on occasion.
Well, there's my 2 cents.
Steve Blom Publisher Adwordstraining.org www.adwordstraining.org