DMN3 Blog

I am often amazed at how little people understand about marketing on the web. They build a website and think “traffic” is the answer to achieving their goals. They should know better...

I recently was asked to consult about marketing an e-commerce website. The company was spending a lot of money on pay-per-click advertising and they were interested in obtaining organic search engine rankings so as to be able to reduce their pay-per-click budget over time.

Because of my orientation, my first question was to ask how the website was performing with regard to sales. I often confound clients when I say “So What” to increased website traffic as a result of a particular marketing strategy. After all, there are plenty of organizations that will take lots of money to obtain high search engine rankings for their clients. They can show the results of their efforts in graphical terms over time for particular key words.

Clients take on search engine marketing strategies because they equate high rankings with increased traffic and increased actions on the website. The problem is that the client never sees any improvement in the things important to them as a result of obtaining those higher search engine rankings.

They want what greater visibility is supposed to give them….more sales, leads, etc. When that doesn’t happen, the search engine optimization (SEO) company pays the price because they cannot retain their clients. Why? It’s not rocket science. The website must get visitors to take action once they arrive at the website. If that doesn’t happen, why do you need high search engine rankings? So what if you have traffic if the traffic doesn’t take action, i.e., convert once they see the site.

The answer in this particular case was that they were experiencing dismal website sales. In fact most of their sales were coming via the telephone instead of their shopping cart. That was certainly not the objective when they built their e-commerce website.

The telephone sales certainly pointed to the website as opposed to their pay-per-click ads. This was confirmed by the fact that many keywords were for specific products and the pay-per-click adds had continuity of those product keywords and took them to the actual product page for the product keywords searched. This continuity between search string keywords, ads and landing page copy is important as is considered to be “best practice” for such an e-commerce website. The fact that even then the website sales funnel failed to perform indicated to me that the website had a problem.

A quick visit to the website confirmed that the website wasn’t optimized for getting people to buy. In fact, just the opposite was true. The shopping cart presented problems to anyone using it so that the bounce rate must have been very large. Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure because the analytic tags were never placed on the web pages! The only metrics available were from the shopping cart application. The result is that you know something is wrong, but have no real insight into what is actually wrong with the user experience. You can only surmise based upon your own experiences and training.

My first advice was to rethink the strategy of paying for traffic to a website that was not performing. If the telephone sales were generating a good return (ROI) then they might want to continue the strategy. I explained my recommendations for strategies to increase qualified traffic to the website. I also explained that they first had to fix the website itself. Only after the website was meeting business objectives would we undertake the other marketing strategies. If they didn’t redo the website, I couldn’t help them.

It was not what they wanted to hear. Remaking the website would take time. Their mindset was that they wanted sales and marketing was the way to do it. They finally came to recognize that it is all about the website and optimizing it for conversion, i.e., getting visitors to take favored actions. Until that issue is addressed, then you are wasting a lot of money by driving traffic to the site through search engine optimization or any other Internet marketing strategy.