Convert Offline

I discovered Mongoose Metrics a few weeks back and I’m surprised by how much I was missing. I was blind and now can see.

On one of the sites I manage, I segmented the traffic sources and used separate phone numbers to track and test the different sources of traffic. So, when the phone rings I can tell if it was from organic or PPC… and for PPC I can tell if a geo-modifier was used. And obviously, when the contact form is used I can get it down to the keyword level.

Because it is a small local site, it is difficult to draw any “significant” conclusions this soon, but even after a short time I have gained some interesting insights.

The site has had a total of 197 visitors since April 2nd, when the test began, so about 22 days.

155 of those visitors came from organic traffic, 30 from PPC Traffic that included a geo-modifier and 12 from PPC containing short keyphrases (1-3 words) that did not include a geo-modifier. During this time we recorded 22 conversions, which I defined as contact by email or phone call.

22 Conversions - 12 were by phone call and 10 used the contact form.
-The contact form was used a higher % of time than one might expect.

The organic traffic converted at a rate of 12%… 19 contacts/155 Visitors.
-If I took out the 17 image searches this conversion rate really starts looking good!

PPC traffic converted at 10% when the geo-modifier was present… 3 contacts/30 visitors.
-The 3 contacts were by phone call… which leads to a developing theory - Adword users may be less likely to use a contact form.

PPC traffic with no geo modifier - 0 contacts / 12 visitors.
-Although the results are not statistically significant it appears that the shorter the keyphrase the more expensive the click and the less likely it is to convert.

The number of words in the keyphrase that led to the 9 email conversions were as follows: 6, 4, 5, 7, 5, 6, 5, 5, 5. All of which contained a geo-modifier. Paying more for a one word phrase, does not seem like a good idea, especially considering a mark up of nearly 40% for some 1-word queries.

There are so many more cool things that I’ve discovered, that I will share in coming posts as the data keeps coming in. And yes, for research sake, I will continue paying for the short keyphrases, at least until the study becomes statistically significant. And no, the client is not paying for them… at least not my client.

What Seth Godin calls ‘advertising’… I call ‘national advertising’ and what he calls ‘clutter’… I call ‘the widespread ability for a small business to effectively and affordably brand their business for the first time in history.’

A couple of examples might help to understand:

• 200 TV channels - Seth Godin calls this clutter. But really it also represents an opportunity for SMBs to engage in television advertising.
• Magazines - The cost of publishing a magazine has dropped so much in the last 10 years that we are starting to see a number of local publications. There are now magazines that a local advertiser can affordably advertise in that are as local as a single county. The cost of ink alone would have made this prohibitively expensive a short time ago. Now, they can choose niche publication or lifestyle… choices like these were strictly in the dominion of the national advertiser a very short time ago. I don’t think of this as clutter… I think of this as progress… and opportunity.
• Radio and Newspaper - The option to advertise in these mediums has been available to local advertisers for a long time… what has changed of course is the ability to purchase this type of advertising from Google and Yahoo, which will either contribute to the ‘clutter’ or enhance the ability of the local business to brand their business; depending on your point of view.

When Mr. Godin refers to advertising being less effective than it was in the past, again, he is referring to national advertising… and claiming that it is less effective than in the past because of the clutter. It could just be that consumers have a natural preference to local information; and since it has become more abundantly available, they are consuming more of it and less of the national stuff. To a traditional advertiser this would indeed appear as a decline in the effectiveness of advertising.

This is not semantic… far from it. The way national advertisers have eliminated local retail businesses like bakers, butchers and hardware stores. Savvy local advertisers who grasp the concept of branding and effectively leverage this new technology will be in a position to do the same thing in local service industries. This is a life and death situation for these local businesses and just like the bakers and hardware stores, who didn’t see it coming, most local service businesses won’t see this coming. The big difference is that the business that gulps down all the market share won’t come from outside, like a Home Depot, but will rather rise up from among them as they adapt the marketing techniques formerly restricted to large corporations.