You Can’t Blame Me!
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Pointing fingers…
When I’m responsible for a bad outcome, I own it. If the responsibility is mine, I take full blame. But this one isn’t mine, and I hate feeling like I am taking the heat for it. I’ll be the one investigated by a third party, to find what I did wrong. I don’t like to point fingers, so I’m just holding up a figurative mirror.
We have a client who has been unhappy with the results of their PPC campaign. Their account was created Apr 4, 2007 and I came on board with Pole Position Marketing mid-May. I spent June editing the ad text to reflect the landing page text. Conversion Rates increased, Cost per Conversion fell … everything we work for was working in our favor. (imagine that!)
Until July …
In July, the client complained that they hadn’t made a single sale from their roughly 140 AdWords conversions. Their landing pages, being lead generation, depend on them to contact the leads and convert them to sales. But somehow, the client felt it was our fault — that their ads were to blame. The problem, and we told them (gently), was that their ads and landing pages were giving away a FREE BOOK. The client not following up with their leads in effort to sell their services, was not our fault. The ads didn’t suggest the visitors had to buy anything, and the landing pages didn’t either. The visitors got what they wanted when they clicked on the ad (perfectly created to match the landing page I might add) - a FREE BOOK!
Try as we might to convince the client to change their tactic they insisted they wanted to keep their landing pages as they were. They wanted to give away the free book. They wanted the ad text changed to reflect their services, not the free book. So what more could we do, but create new ad text that does not sell what is on the landing pages –
— and watch their cost per conversion climb as their conversions sank :
I think they wanted me to wave the “Magic Wand” and miraculously have customers begging to buy their service. For $2,500/month in ad spend, I can’t blame them for being upset about not having any sales … but it isn’t due to any lack on our part in managing their campaign. As costs climbed and conversions declined, the blame game went into full swing. When they start pointing fingers at me, I just want to hold up the mirror. They’re hiring a third party to analyze their campaigns and determine whether or not they should continue with their PPC campaigns. Hopefully their third party will tell them the same things we tried telling them.
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Tags: Marketing, Pole Position Marketing, PPC, Search & Marketing
Posted in PPC, Search & Marketing
