So I am employed by company A to do webdesign and just recently started doing SEO-related things for company A's clients. One of their clients (company B) has a website that has been around for a while but essentially looked like something from the early days of the internet before anyone knew what to do. Their website has a pagerank 0. My budget as far as adwords go is $2000/month. That's $66.66 a day. The keywords have plenty of competition but it's not too bad. I have great CTRs. Here's the problem. While Company B sells "things" they don't have a cart system and their clientelle is mostly for people between the ages of 40-70 or so. The website directs people to call them or email if they want to "order". I'm frustrated with them because the communication isn't great as far as how many calls they get per day and how many people actually pull through the website and order something. What are my options? They want to have adwords going, but I can't even properly track conversions. What can I do for them? How can I help them get some "noticability" on a $2000/month budget? Thanks guys, you're awesome.
start with a couple of forms.. make sure the ads go to a page that has info with a form and track the calls and conversion so you can provide evidence of lead generation.. then ask for more ad dollars and money for your hard work. Make sure everybody that is employed asks the callers how they found company abc.. should be very easy.
I hate to sound like a douche bag, but if you're getting paid to do this, shouldn't you already know what do? And if you don't know what to do, why would you accept the job, and is now seeking help on forums? Sounds a little dishonest to me on your part.
Before I took a job on (which aint going to happen now since I am retired) I would have a plan. The poster must not have a plan if only ideas from a forum will get him going. But since he asked, contact company b at once and discuss their terrible website and how to get it updated to 2006 and beyond.
I'm a webdesigner. I work for a company that asked me to design a client's website. No problem there. The client asked me to manage their Adwords account. I never led them to believe I know what I'm doing as far as SEO. I'm learning as I go. I'm trying to help them out and I'm not getting paid anything extra from my employer or the client. Didn't know it was a crime to ask for help. Cheers.
Eh, whatever. If you couldn't handle the job you shouldn't have taken it, that's all I'm saying. Cheers.
It sounds like they are going to be happy if business improves - but one problem with that mentality is that if you don't have the statistics, you don't know what works. An important part of adwords advertising - as you know - is ad copy. Another important thing is being able to calculate ROI on various keywords. The more information you can get, the better able you are to ensure that your expenditures are returning optimal value. Whether or not the call came from the web is one question, but further - which ad, what were they searching for, which pages did they surf before they called are all important questions - and not questions that someone is likely to answer over the phone if they were willing to go that far. Explain to them that the investment in a shopping cart would be returned with a more effective expenditure on advertising. If the problem is that the clientelle is not comfortable with internet shopping, then they are resolved to only understanding if their ad revenue is effective is a gut feeling - and that's likely not going to be accurate. One option that you have is that you could put a different phone number in place and use distinctive ringing to track where the call came from. They don't sound like a place that would have a PBX and an IVR system. If you are shooting blind, it's very likely that a small amount of the advertising money is responsible for a large part of the revenue. It's the nature of the beast - small business owners invariably spend advertising dollars ineffectively. And unless you have another customer in the same exact target market - you have no idea what really works. That and advertising for conversion is really only one goal. If people are going to ignore things like brand recognition, familiarity, and loyalty it should be a conscious decision to do so. Long term, advertising with those goals in mind is always a better path to be on. Short term, the conversions pay the bills, but when you stop the ads the customers stop coming too. Another idea is to give discount codes on the page with the phone number, and change the code according to the source of the click. Not too difficult of a progamming job in php, perl, or (heaven forbid) asp. The discounts would pay for themselves by handing over valuable data.
why only adwords... i did some experiments with both adwords and overture and found overture easy going and reflecting results in return... what say?