Are you making this crucial mistake with your ads?

12 replies
Years ago I was working for a company selling a service to businesses. We were in a really good position because we had backing from a multi-millionaire who was the founder's good friend. We had built the company advertising on Craigslist but we realized that we could never scale and break through our income limits if we didn't expand.

The largest competitors in the industry were very heavy into paid search. We decided not to reinvent the wheel. It was working for them so we felt that paid search would be the best and fastest way to continue growing.

This was before Facebook ads were big and Adsense was really the only and best game in town. Since we had cash we hired the supposed best search experts in our area to help with SEO and also run our pay-per-click campaigns.

Their strategy was to cast a wide net by targeting many keywords, see what had the best value, and then focus in on them as we moved forward. We initially invested $10,000 of our backer's money and waited for the leads to roll in.

We were excited.

Crickets.

We were optimistic.

Crickets.

We were nervous.

Crickets.

We blew through $10,000.

The venture into pay-per-click ads was a complete failure. No contacts, no sales, no money. This added to other things that were going on and the founder was forced to close the business. A proven business model with a large backer failed.

So what went wrong?

Well a lot of things added to the business closing but I had to do a lot of thinking about that pay-per-click campaign to see where we went wrong. We had the money. We brought in a top company. We optimized our ads. We bought the targeted keywords. We got our clicks...

So it had to be a failure after people clicked on our ad. Then it hit me.

We were sending our traffic directly to our homepage!

Our home page looked pretty cool, but it was too busy. We should have been sending people to a landing page.

A landing page has a strong call to action and less options and distractions.

A landing page can be split tested and tweaked to see what gets better conversions.

We also could have created different landing pages to match different ads to see if that got us better results.

Even right now for my leadership website I give away a free e-book and when I do any promotion for the site not directed to a particular post I send people to my simple landing page.

It was an expensive lesson but hopefully you can learn from it and not make the same mistake. Don't be the fools that we were and make sure that you create landing pages for all of your inbound marketing.
#ads #crucial #making #mistake
  • Profile picture of the author Steve B
    Chris,

    Thank you - nice share. Besides the lesson on where to send your traffic, I think another "take-away" from your story is the fact that you can't assume an SEO company understands Internet marketing. You would hope so, but obviously they were paid on the assumption that they would grow revenue for the company and their service didn't do that. Why employ anyone to do something for your company if it doesn't pay for itself in higher revenues?

    Steve
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    • Profile picture of the author cshilling22
      Originally Posted by Steve B View Post

      Chris,

      Thank you - nice share. Besides the lesson on where to send your traffic, I think another "take-away" from your story is the fact that you can't assume an SEO company understands Internet marketing. You would hope so, but obviously they were paid on the assumption that they would grow revenue for the company and their service didn't do that. Why employ anyone to do something for your company if it doesn't pay for itself in higher revenues?

      Steve
      I wanted to add that but then I was pretty sure that someone else would bring it up. You are 100% correct. And this was the top agency in our county. They worked with all the big companies at the time and their CEO rolled up in a pretty expensive sports car to sign the final deal. I guess they knew how to get people traffic, but had no idea how to optimize it. Without conversions or engagement the traffic is pretty worthless.
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  • Profile picture of the author craigsposterpro
    Appreciate the lesson. I was going to ask if you felt you scaled up your PPC ads prematurely before optimizing your marketing campaign on a smaller level.

    What are you using to setup optimized landing pages? Any particular WP themes you suggest?
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    • Profile picture of the author cshilling22
      Originally Posted by craigsposterpro View Post

      Appreciate the lesson. I was going to ask if you felt you scaled up your PPC ads prematurely before optimizing your marketing campaign on a smaller level.

      What are you using to setup optimized landing pages? Any particular WP themes you suggest?
      Well at the time we were advised to start with a huge list of broad keywords and then scale down from there. So yes I think we actually should have started smaller and tested. We put our trust in the firm and our competitors were spending tens of thousands in paid search so we thought we were going to get great results. Had we started smaller we might have been able to see our mistakes and correct them so that we weren't continuing to throw good money after bad in such a short period of time.

      For my current leadership site I am using the Genesis framework so I am just using the landing page template that is included. I know that there are some paid options out there that are pretty good and easy to set up and test as well and that will give you a lot more options and tracking information.
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      • Profile picture of the author craigsposterpro
        I know that there are some paid options out there that are pretty good and easy to set up and test as well and that will give you a lot more options and tracking information.
        Any chance you can elaborate on what those paid options are?
        Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author ronrule
    You are exactly right, I am constantly telling people this. Your home page is for people who don't know what they want and should only be marketed in Print/Radio/TV.

    Internet campaigns should always direct visitors to a landing page specific to the campaign goals.
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    Ron Rule
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    • Profile picture of the author cshilling22
      Originally Posted by ronrule View Post

      You are exactly right, I am constantly telling people this. Your home page is for people who don't know what they want and should only be marketed in Print/Radio/TV.

      Internet campaigns should always direct visitors to a landing page specific to the campaign goals.
      I wish you could have told us back then!
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  • Profile picture of the author ronrule
    I would take this a step further and have different keyword groups going to completely different landing pages.

    Here's an example ... if your product was a Polisher/Sander like the Makita 9227 or the Dualtools PS7000, there are two different audiences for that product. These are most commonly marketed as power sanders, but there are just as many buyers out there who would use them for waxing their cars.

    The best way to market that product would be to create two landing pages; One that's slanted to its uses as a sander, the other slanted to its uses as a buffer, and both with their own separate images focusing on that feature with only a casual mention of the "secondary" feature.

    Then, segment those search campaigns - people searching for "high speed buffer" should never be sent to a page about a sander, and vice versa.
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    Ron Rule
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    • Profile picture of the author cshilling22
      Originally Posted by ronrule View Post

      I would take this a step further and have different keyword groups going to completely different landing pages.

      Here's an example ... if your product was a Polisher/Sander like the Makita 9227 or the Dualtools PS7000, there are two different audiences for that product. These are most commonly marketed as power sanders, but there are just as many buyers out there who would use them for waxing their cars.

      The best way to market that product would be to create two landing pages; One that's slanted to its uses as a sander, the other slanted to its uses as a buffer, and both with their own separate images focusing on that feature with only a casual mention of the "secondary" feature.

      Then, segment those search campaigns - people searching for "high speed buffer" should never be sent to a page about a sander, and vice versa.
      This is great advice. At the time we were also moving towards offering a few different packages for people with different needs. So it would have been very easy to target those needs through the ads and then send them to a landing page specific to their package. I bet that would have gotten great results.
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    Chris,

    So your lesson has been learned. That is a big benefit.

    Now, if you are going to use pay per click again, I would suggest that you offer people to opt into your newsletter and then send offers from there to make consistent sales every single month.
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    • Profile picture of the author cshilling22
      Originally Posted by talfighel View Post

      Chris,

      So your lesson has been learned. That is a big benefit.

      Now, if you are going to use pay per click again, I would suggest that you offer people to opt into your newsletter and then send offers from there to make consistent sales every single month.
      Yes, that is the whole point of my current leadership site. Give away a free book in exchange for an email address so I can continue to connect with my visitors. At the company I am talking about in this thread our main goal was to get people to call and if they emailed we would email them back a few times asking for a sale but never to educate them or help them with information. Oh the lessons you learn!
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