I was recently reviewing a PPC Marketing campaign by trying to compare the cost of recruiting customers to our main database via three of our branded websites.   I compared three  separate PPC campaigns, each with different objectives and each that ran over different time frames.  The results were fascinating.

Campaign 1: Involved having a dedicated  email database marketing campaign to sign consumers up to their database. In this scenario the user had a strong call to action with a chance to win a $200 gift voucher and was directed straight to a sign up page.

Campaign 2: This search engine marketing campaign focused on branding awareness, product information and product uses.  The website’s homepage had a three column layout and a flash rotating banner at the top with 1 out of the 3 rotations focused on acquisition. The acquisition component again involved the chance to win a $200 gift voucher. The user was directed to different pages depending on search terms. There was no call to action on the other pages.

Campaign 3: This search engine marketing campaign also focused on awareness not acquisition. The website had a two column layout and a small call to action with a chance to win a $200 gift voucher in the top right corner of the website which was repeated throughout the site. The website had a lot of things happening so the user could be tempted to navigate to lots of different pages within the site.

Interestingly the cost of acquisition varied significantly for each of the campaigns?

Which campaign was the most effective? Which campaign was the cheapest?

Without a doubt Campaign 1 was the cheapest. At a cost of $2.50 per sign up it was very inexpensive.    Campaign 2 and 3 were very expensive if you compare them with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Priceline’s costs as reported in the Entrepreneur. Campaign 2 cost just over $54 per acquisition and campaign 3 cost $81. Pretty expensive when you consider these products are high volume, low margin products sold in supermarkets with no upsells!

Whilst Campaign 1 had the lowest cost per acquisition, the audience was not very targeted. It is likely that more people signed up because of the strong call to action and a chance to win rather than being engaged with the product.

People who signed up from campaigns 2 and 3, were more likely to be loyal and engaged with the products but the cost for acquisition was significantly higher. Both campaigns had lot of waste and will need to be reworked and split into two separate areas.

Upon analysis, it is also believed that the keywords recommended by the media agency were not well targeted. A more focused campaign would reduce wastage and the cost per acquisition costs.

Future Directions:

Whilst buying a list was the fastest method of attracting users, there is some doubt as to how loyal users will these will be in the long term.  What was probably more effective in this example was the fact that the user had no distractions and a strong call to action that motivated them to sign up.

When using a search engine marketing campaign, it is a good idea to develop separate landing pages aimed at recruiting people to your database – particularly if your website is cluttered.  It is also extremely important that you scrutinize your keyword list to ensure the search terms are targeted and specific to the products and / or services you provide.

Other tactics worth looking at to maximize your return on investment are:

• Focusing on generic branded keywords with the advertising copy focusing on enter to win (giving loyal users a chance to win)
• Have some terms listed as negative terms if the search term has a double meaning and could be misinterpreted as something else
• Ensure that there are actually people searching for the keyword terms.

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1. Is Your Media Agency Ripping Your Off? Our media agency recently gave me a big long list...

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Our media agency recently gave me a big long list of keywords so we could start a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign to drive traffic to our site. The list was long, very very long.  It took about 6 A3 pages to print the list off and the search terms were related to our brand, food products that we sell as well as recipes for those products.

The problem was that the list proposed that we use the following search terms:

• our brand name
• a ton of keywords relating to the products we sell as well as some terms that were less related to the products we sell
• spelling errors on those search terms
• lists of one word search terms
• copy that promised recipes and meal ideas for the products

Now this may not seem that ununusal  but after looking at the list of search terms, there were a number of flaws with in the list. The issues were:

• The terms were very broad
• They were not very targeted
• Some keyphrases contained negative keywords
• The destination URL did not provide the information promised in the ad copy
• The recipes that we had on the site had been moved to another site and therefore would not be relevant to the searcher if they clicked on the ad

What surprised me the most is that the keyword list essentially showed a fundamental lack of understanding of our business and our objectives.  Funny as the agency we deal with is a top notch agency, is one of the biggest media agencies in town and has dealt with our business for over 10 years. It seemed that they were more interested in using the money that they saved us from our television campaign on our online campaign.

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