PPC Advertising worked, now what?
So you’ve setup a pay per click advertising program, a successful one hopefully, and your customers are coming to you business and purchasing services or products. Now what? A recent post at More about PPC advertisingJohn Scott ’s blog compared customers gathered by AdWords to customers gathered by referrals of existing customers.
Running an Adwords campaign has brought in a few customers, but the number is minuscule in comparison to our #1 source of new customers: Referral by existing customers.
That post inspired me to write about a technique that we use to track AdWords ROI. Once an Adwords or most other Pay Per Click advertising systems are setup and started, they will likely require ongoing maintenance ( optimization ). If all goes well, you will actually do business ( convert into sale ) with some of these customers.
The point I’m trying to make is that it takes time and money to bring in customers, whether its a brick and mortar or Internet business. So you may want to consider capturing that customers email address so that you have a method to contact them after they leave your site. After all, that click did cost you something.
Something as simple as a newsletter sign-up link on the Pay Per Click landing page or the homepage of the website, could hep with this issue. It should be short and request no more than an email and maybe a full name. This is not a new technique but can be very effective if used properly.
Use Case:
We implemented this method for one of our clients that sells products online. The goal was to capture email addresses for the customers that came to the site via AdWords but did not make a purchase.
We maintain the AdWords pay per click campaigns for this same client. In addition to product purchases, we also use AdWords conversion tracking to track customers that sign up for the newsletter by placing the conversion tracking code on the newsletter sign-up confirmation page.
We now have 2 separate conversion reports. We have the number of customers that found the site via AdWords and signed up for the newsletter without purchasing a product, as well as, the those customers that did purchase a product. This client publishes a weekly newsletter to all (both sets) of these customers.
These newsletters promote discounts and specials that are happening on the website. This translates into a weekly conversion opportunity with these customers that did not buy a product initially. As long as the customer remains on the mailing list, our client has a chance to convert them into one or several sales.
To go one step further, we performed an analysis on the number of customers that signed up for the newsletter against the number of sales following a newsletter promotion. We found that 20% of the newsletter subscribers make a purchase following a promotion.
Obviously, some of these customers click on AdWords Ads and don’t make a purchase or sign up for the newsletter. These customers don’t convert at all but by implementing this newsletter technique for our client, they now we have a relationship with these customers as long as they are subscribers of the newsletter.
