[UPDATE] Mr. Business owner, if you aren't tracking you might as well be wiping your ass...

I don't see this mentioned on our section of the forums often if ever so I wanted to talk about it a little more.

I know most of us offer stuff like web site design and its probably the main core service we offer however...

One thing that I talk to business owners about is tracking and how tracking is a foundational principle to understanding the effectiveness of any online marketing they are doing.

I explain that truth be told they are potentially wasting money if they aren't tracking and testing.

For example I picked up a client just a couple of weeks ago by not even trying!

Here's the scenario:

I was reviewing a landing page for a client of mine and on this occasion I decided to compare my clients landing page to ppc landing pages of his competitors.

So here I am on Google checking out landing pages and I have to tell you small businesses need some understanding in this area yesterday!

The client I just picked up had a landing page that broke so many rules I had to pick up the phone and call!

Here's sort of how it went down so you get the gist of it.

I called up and of course I got the gate keeper. When she asked me what it was about I said, you guys have a MAJOR issues with your Google ad. Who's the person to talk to, I'd just like to point out a couple of things he can consider changing, "ON HIS OWN".

I get put through to the owner and I just say, I was working on a landing page for my one of my clients and decided to do some comparisons to other current landing pages and I came across yours, when I watched you in the video you came across very sincere and professional so I thought I should help you out by letting you know that you've got serious issues with your PPC landing page design so you are throwing away a lot of your PPC budget.

I'd like to give you a couple of changes you can make on your own to get better conversions. I'd like to show you using screen share, its private and secure. Just have something to take notes with, that's it's. Its up to you to take the advice or not, its not my ad budget being wasted.

The owner asked me how long would it take and I said, give me 15 minutes. He responded by saying he was about to go into a meeting with the sales force and asked if he could call me back afterwards.

Normally if I were trying to actually sell him something I would have responded differently but in this case because I didn't give a shit about actually selling him something I said, sure call me back!

He called me back and we did a screen share and I pointed out some things that are obvious to folks like us, such as page bleed and his video was showing related videos when it finished and a few other things.

By now you might be asking what does this have to do with tracking?

Well once I gave him the suggested changes I asked him if they SCREEN every call coming in, and if they know which calls came directly from the PPC ad. I already know they don't because, well we all know they don't!

So I explained to him the power of #1 call tracking and #2 analytics, and since these types of tools and services are available because of technology it only makes sense to use them to increase the performance of every single ad dollar spent.

The next words out of his mouth were. How do I get that stuff?

My next words were, well truth be told I can help you with that but I wasn't calling to try and sell it to you. Personally I don't need your business I was only calling to just give you a couple of pointers on your landing page.

The owner then just point blank asked me, well if you set it up for me how much do you charge.

I replied that I charge set up fee of $500 and monthly after that $60 per month and it included a private log in where he can get seo data, PPC data and listen to all the calls coming in as they are recorded.

So what happened next?

I faxed over the agreement with a credit card authorization form and we did the deal.

Now here's the kicker about this whole thing!

8 weeks ago he hired an in house employee to do the seo and online marketing because he felt he'd been ripped off by other SEO providers. NOT by the money he was paying but because of a lack of results!

When he told me about hiring his SEO guy I praised him on such a wise decision and that if he has any questions to just call me and I'd consult for him at my hourly rate at $250 an hour but that it was up to him and his seo guy to decide to follow the advice or not.

Well he didn't seem phased by my hourly consulting fee but didn't express any interest either so I just left it at that.

So it's a couple of days later and I've got them all set up, tested the call tracking, made sure the seo guy got it put on the PPC landing page, etc. etc.

Out of the blue the employee says, by the way the owner has authorized two hours of consulting time with you and I wanted to go over our Wordpress site with you for that time is that cool?

Of course that's cool! So we are doing it this Monday after the 4th!

The moral of this story is that I was truly wanting to help by taking a few minutes away from my existing work to just help him out. And educate him on one of the first and very important things he should be doing and that was analytics and tracking.