No Clicks, No Leads

August 28, 2009 Sean Marshall — 0 comments

One of the more obvious things to note, when trying to understand the value of a click, is that if no one clicks on your ad, there is no value to be measured.

When evaluating the performance of the Paid Search portion of the Open Campaign, click volume immediately stood out. We selected generic online marketing terms, generating roughly 10k impressions/day. However, click through rate has hovered close to 0.27%. This could mean one of two things.

• We are targeting the wrong audience or
• We are not engaging the audience properly.

Though Click Through Rate is not typically a metric I consider when assessing the performance of a campaign, it is a strong indicator of whether or not you are speaking to the right audience and whether they care about you have to offer.

In general, paid search ads should not be used for branding purposes. The beauty of paid search it offers more than just eyeballs but instead gives a marketer the ultimate reward – quantifiable ROI. Search marketers ignore CPM when evaluating their campaigns as text ads cannot capture users attention as well as an attractive banner ad. The goal is to attract users to your offer and get them in your sales funnel (and ideally all the way through to conversion) Search marketers have to walk a fine line to capitalize on the impressions they do get. If your message strays too far from what your landing page offers, the clicks you do get will be worthless. If you narrow the scope too much, you may get no traffic at all.

Our current ads are as follows:

The goal was to leverage the power of the Webtrends brand while narrowing our audience down to people that were interested in the inner workings of a marketing campaign. Given the broad terms we were going after (think ecommerce, site analysis, web analytics), we found it essential to have total synergy between our ad and the content of the Open Campaign. In the coming days, I will be working with Rory Trahan from Mullen on better understanding our audience (see her upcoming blog on Keyword selection) and, in turn, tweaking our ad copy to capture their attention and talk about the Open Campaign at the same time…in less than 95 characters of course.