This client runs a global B2B specialist Fiber business with average orders in the tens of thousands of pounds per sale. The company had been working with another agency for both Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) but the relationship had broken down hence talking to us.
The client objectives of both campaigns were to drive email or phone enquiries to the respective country office. The sales process after the initial call is a technical one and orders tend to be of a bespoke nature.
So our objective from both an SEO perspective was to increase quality visitors to the website. The client realised SEO was a longer term investment but the goal was to shift more visitors from PPC (which costs money per click) to organic visitors (which is free).
Before signing any contracts with the client we spent 2.5 hours with the client to make sure we had a good enough understanding of the products, customers and markets operated in to ensure we thought we could help.
Armed with our objective and industry knowledge we started to look at the website performance. On the face of it the client was getting 3k organic (so free visits coming from SEO) visitors per month and further 6k visitors per month from paid traffic (at a cost).
On the face of it things were looking ok…… but then we started to look for the conversion tracking to see how many of these collective 9k visitors per month were making sales enquiries. To our shock (but unfortunately not surprise) there was no tracking in place so the customer could not calculate their return on investment (ROI) for the SEO agency spend, Click spend and PPC agency spend.
Here I would like to pause and remind of the golden rule of investing in your website…… One of the major benefits of digital marketing is that you can track the ROI. If you don’t know how many sales leads you get for your money then how do you know if your campaign is successful, and ultimately if an agency/employee is doing a good job? Golden Rule No 1 is make sure you know how many sales leads you are getting for your SEO investment.
This was immediately fed back to the client and work put in place to implement conversion tracking so we could start to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns.
Whilst the conversion tracking was being implemented we looked further into the traffic. One of the reasons the relationship broke down with the previous agency was because the traffic numbers were increasing but the client didn’t think they were getting sales. Here is Golden Rule No 2…. it’s about enquiries and sales not headline traffic.
The investigation continued…. next we uncovered that 48% of the traffic being generated was coming from India which was a country that represented a tiny fraction of their business.
The final big piece of the puzzle was all down to keywords. Our client specialised in industrial cables but a large part of the traffic was coming from home broadband, laser eye surgery and other consumer related products which has no relevance to what the company did. This all had to change.
Final Outcome
We are still working with the client to build up a good trend of what is driving conversion but our open approach has built a strong relationship with the client and now the campaign is focusing on what they actually do plus we can show the cost per sales enquiry enabling them to plan their marketing budget between all their activities.
We’d love to show the before/after ROIs for this client but as there was no conversion tracking we can only give the verbal story of us getting the customer on the right path.
I’m sure you will conclude from the above that being sold a package of delivering more traffic to your website is not always the best approach as its needs to be quality/measurable traffic.
If you’d like to talk to us about an existing campaign you are running or perhaps how we can help you improve quality leads to your website then please contact us now.