Back in September I wrote about the paradox of testing vs. granularization and got some great insights from my readers. Today I would like to hear how you PPC managers & companies with PPC management deals handle the paradox of PPC vs. Conversion Optimization/Landing Page Optimization.
The Paradox
Tell me if this story feels familiar:
You take over management of a PPC account and make a lot of changes that quickly improves CTR, lowers CPC and brings up the overall QS of the account. All these indicate that you’re doing a good job of improving their account. However, the client isn’t very happy because they’re paying you a lot of money but haven’t seen a bunch more sales.
Herein lies the paradox. PPC management in it’s purest form involves choosing relevant keywords, setting appropriate bids, writing compelling ad copy, sending that traffic to designated pages and testing constantly. You’ll notice this definition doesn’t put you in a position to directly affect the number you’re being judged by: sales. At the end of the day, to justify yourself you need to show that your efforts are contributing to the bottom line, but your efforts are getting filtered through their conversion funnel and/or sales process. So what do you do?
Solutions?
At my last gig we attacked the paradox by helping design better landing pages and providing conversion optimization consulting as part of the package. We did this to protect the contract and add value, but unfortunately we were probably leaving money on the table by not seeking additional compensation for our additional efforts. Yes this created some very loyal customers (who wouldn’t be happy about a 20% increase in their conversion rate and thousands more in revenue each month or twice as many leads from the same click budget?) So how do you deal with this situation?
About Robert
It is a frustrating obstacle, to be sure.
My hope is that as the buzz of post-click optimization continues to grow, PPC and other online marketing providers will simply be able to add conversion rate optimization services to their product offering and clients will be savvy enough to understand the huge impact that CRO has on their ability to profitably utilize PPC, email, social media and other traffic harvesting channels.
It seems like enterprise-type companies are latching onto CRO, but it’s only just trickling down to the SMB, which is where the revolution really needs to take hold.
As for now, I am constantly feeding my clients suggestions for tweaking their landing pages and other web pages in a way that doesn’t suck up my time but still helps remove obvious conversion roadblocks.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is going to be huge this year and I think that Landing Page Optimization (LPO) and post-click marketing will also see a lot of attention, from enterprise level sites as well as smaller sites. Tim Ash has even put together a whole conference on the topic, Conversion Conference in May (I’m already signed up). CRO helps PPC, email and SEO efforts, so it’s kind of a no-brainer (and I wonder why it’s taken so long to get the recognition).
Robert,
I think the paradox you referred to is something every PPC manager is dealing with. For me, the landing page optimization part is fun and although it’s not part of PPC management by definition, I still provide this service as part of the package. You are right when you said that this is leaving money on the table but I think that only when this topic will get more recognition you could more easily sell it to your clients as a different service than PPC.