Having recently posted on my Facebook fan page that the Return On Investment to aim for with web marketing is 5 times your marketing spend, I received requests to explain further how this might be achieved.  So I’ve written a quick guide to point you in the right direction:

• Invest in your website design.  Don’t expect an AdWords campaign to deliver ROI unless you have a professionally designed website.   There is no excuse for a poorly designed website – I had my AdWords training website www.HelpWithPPC.com designed for just £170 by an excellent company I sourced via www.freelancer.com
• Create landing pages for each product or service you are trying to sell via AdWords.  These pages should be highly focused on just one product or service.  Ideally ensure the vistor’s questions are answered, and make sure you include full contact details including an online form to collect visitor details and allow them to ask you to call
• Ask for a second opinion on your website, and all of your landing pages.  What questions would visitors have?  Do they know where to go next?  Do visitors know what how to make a purchase or leave their details?  The worst website owners are those who have designed the website themselves – ideally you should be asking for a third opinion too!
• Track your online form submissions via AdWords as a conversion and also Google Analytics as a goal
• Set your AdWords campaign up carefully with one ad group per service.  Make sure your keywords appear in the advert heading and ideally elsewhere within the advert as well.  Use some broad match keywords to start with.  Make sure you send the visitor to the correct page on your website, NOT the homepage!
• Check quality scores for your keywords after a short while – how are they performing?  Good quality scores can hugely decrease Costs Per Click
• Track visitors via Google Analytics and possibly other tracking packages such as Get Clicky, which allows you to watch visitors in real time on your website
• Monitor conversions carefully.  Identify new keywords by checking which keywords resulted in conversions.  Increase spending on these keywords if appropriate
• Keep an eye on Cost Per Conversion – work out your profit levels.  Are you making 5 x your marketing spend in new turnover?  If not, continue to work on getting your conversion costs down
• Still struggling?  Try using the Google website optimiser to split test your landing pages.  Test different marketing messages to see if Cost Per Conversion improves
• ROI still too low?  Work on increasing customer value to make more from each customer.  Consider using email marketing to newly acquired customers to increase lifetime customer value.  Or use cross-sell and up-sell existing customers to new products and services, especially where the customer acquisition cost is high.   I have have worked with clients in the flower market who sell 1 bouquet of flowers for £30, the cost to acquire that customer can be as high as £12.  This means they MUST focus on increasing the lifetime value of that customer by using email marketing.
• Bear in mind that for some markets, just one lead per week might deliver ROI.  For example, working with a solicitor where a new client is worth £4000 – if 1 in 4 leads results in a new client, each lead is technically worth £1000.  This means a monthly spend of £4000/5 = £800 will deliver ROI even if just delivering 1 lead per week.

Questions?  Do ask!

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