The Quality of Your Quantity

Avoiding Wasteful Internet Advertising

Everyone wants a higher number of visitors to their website, but the fun doesn’t stop there. Do more visitors necessarily mean more business? Pay-per-click advertisements such as Google Adwords is a great way to drive traffic to your site. It puts your business in front of millions and, with a catchy enough tagline, your website can receive thousands of visits (through clicks that you pay for). Are you measuring success to find out the exact dollar amount that those clicks are generating?

Let’s start with the basics by talking about the quality of your quantity. A company I worked with not too long ago, but for confidentiality’s sake I’ll call them XYZ Company, had an Adwords campaign consisting of five ads. Some ads seemed to be of greater success because of the higher click scores. There was a cap of $200 per month for the campaign, and it was being met every month. The question was, “Are the ads justifying business so that we should raise the cap amount or would it only be a larger waste of money?” Essentially, what is our ROI?

Of the five advertisements, two were receiving 80% of the clicks. A quick evaluation showed that not only did these two have more generic wording, but Google Analytics showed that visitors entering through these ads had a much higher bounce rate (left the site on the same page they entered) and a very low average time on site (left in haste). Obviously these were unqualified customers that were looking for something other than what they found, and XYZ Company was paying for it. Not only that but the cap was limiting the number of times the other more targeted ads were able to be seen.

The solution here was simple. Target all ads. Never opt to try out some targeted ads and some generic ads. This is not the stock market. Most every time, your generic ad will generate a negative return on investment. The only thing you will then accomplish by pumping up your marketing dollars will be sinking yourself further down the hole. If you can’t measure the effectiveness of your ad, pull it until you figure out how; you’re wasting money.