We keep running into businesses who are spending huge amounts of money in search advertising. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just as an Iowa web-design company, we find horrible amounts of waste. Recently, one particular company we found was spending in excess of $20,000 per month in search marketing. Sure, it’s a highly competitive market they are in, but every single one of the ads sent users to their homepage. And the homepage looked like it was designed in the 1990’s.
When we at Maudience manage a search marketing campaign for our clients, our first consideration is user experience…and by that, we mean the consumer. When a consumer goes to Google, Yahoo or Bing and types in their search terms, they expect a good result. Google and the other search engines maintain user loyalty by providing the most accurate results they can. They’re constantly changing their search algorithms, so they provide good relevant results. Not only in the organic search listings, but in their search advertisements as well.
So when Maudience creates a search advertising campaign for our clients, we create specific landing pages for each and every form of the ad…relevant to the search term the user is likely to use in finding our customer.
Think of it this way…you want to find some pink roses to deliver to your sweetie. So you go to Google and type in “pink roses delivered” and up come the results. Over on the side of the listings, you see an advertisement for “Pink Roses Delivered Just $19.99” and you think that’s a pretty fair deal…so you click. It just so happens to be Spring and you are sent to the homepage of a major local florist who just started displaying their tulips for the season. They like tulips and have some great photos they want to put all over the homepage. So you see a bunch of tulips. As a user, you’re wondering where those “Pink Roses Delivered Just $19.99” went. Like most people, you’re impatient, so you leave and go back to your search results.
The business owner paid for a click that didn’t convert. In addition, they probably paid more for the click than somebody else.
The world of search advertising isn’t that difficult to understand. But a lot of local businesses and so-called “internet marketing companies” think they can just flood the zone buying up a bunch of keywords…set the budget…and watch the customers flock to the site. But often, they only care about “impressions” (the number of times your search ad shows up) and “clicks” sent to your website. They forget to monitor whether or not it’s actually leading to sales.
On average, the click-through rate of a search ad is less than 10%…less than 1% in most cases. If your ad shows up 10,000 times, you get 100 people to visit your website. If that’s all that matters to you, great…spend away and flood the zone.
When we manage search advertising campaigns, Maudience is more interested in bounce rate, average cost per click, the sales copy on the landing page, conversion rate, and analytical data to make regular changes as we see fit. This is a weekly and sometimes even daily monitoring concern of ours.
Take that same 10,000 impressions for your text ad and the 1% click-through rate…if your bounce rate is 80%, you’ve reduced those 100 visitors to just 20 total. 80% of visitors are leaving your site within seconds because they didn’t find what they wanted.
Search advertising is a highly effective way to reach consumers who are in the market for what you sell and do. It is the ultimate in transparent, trackable marketing. If your business would like to learn how best to deploy this powerful marketing tool…contact us today. Your local Iowa advertising agency is here to help. Start with a search.
