The Sheep, The Shepherd and an Internet Marketing Fleece-Job
You have a site that's just returning on investment; nothing
more or perhaps a lot less. You believe in professional services
as they're the experts. You have little knowledge in their
field, nor the time and resources for private research or
independent consult.
Perhaps its Internet promotion and advertising this time round
and your parting with $1000's a month for ho hum returns on your
Web site investment.
BANNERS BABY!! Your net marketing agent says over and over...
"We're going to expand the banner campaign." When this advice
hits your desk, another $500 a month gets released to the
professional coffers.
Next week, how are those sales stats going?
Some Internet promotion 'professional' may be fleecing you
$1000's a month in worthless banner advertising. Fortunately for
you, this expenditure imbalance is exposed with the help of a
text log on your Web site's server, raw website statistics. GOLD
BABY!!
I recently submitted a proposal to a new client for, you guessed
it, website promotion and advertising. The first request to the
client was for their website stat logs, secondly their tentative
figures on banner and other forms of advertising on the Internet.
Web site stat logs are black gold. Each hit to your site is
recorded by the Web server in a text file. Much information
about those individual hits is recorded too; among that array
are all your hit 'Referrers'. A referrer is the site page from
which a link was used to land on one of your Web site pages.
For my new client, I found a big, fat gold nugget worth $4477.05
in these web stats. The client's banner campaign was restricted
to one site, one domain, one referrer. There was no evidence of
an acceptable conversion to sales by visitors from this site.
Unique visits from these banners also generated .004% of total
traffic.
This client released equal money to that of banners for a major
search engine campaign. Without tallying up all the
miscellaneous referrals from 3rd party sites that used the same
search engine and ads, 57% of total unique traffic was being
referred by the major search engine.
The search engine campaign bought in 150 visitors for every 1
from banners. Please keep in mind here that banner visitors were
also not notable sales converts either. The cash spent on
banners in this case is nothing more than gold leaf dunny paper.
The "Sponsored Links" you see next to your favourite search
engine's results are usually priced by the key terms used for
your search. A successful bid on the ad's account for those
terms determines the cost of a click through to the ad's
destination site. After a quick enquiry using one such ad
account, I found a low bidding term which related to the
client's needs and delivered 30% more visitors. All this for the
princely sum of $22.95.
In other words, the client could have the $4500.00 banner visits
delivered for $22.95. For how many years has this banner
campaign been going?
Scenarios such as this indicate one of 2 things; your getting
fleeced or gross negligence on your trusted professional's
behalf. Black gold is not Texas Tea these days. It's also not
newspaper classified ink. Black gold is currently your Web site
statistics logs.
Always ask your prospective advertising agency or promotion
agent whether they can back up campaign decisions with
statistics. Assign someone within your company the task of
analysing site statistics against ad methods. If there is nobody
suitable, then you could save $1000's by paying for an
independent 3rd party assessment of your Web site statistics
logs.