A Simple Advertising Mistake that Could Be Costing You (at least) $1000 a Month
by Jeff Sexton
If there is a disconnect between whatever you are using to drive customers to your website and the website itself, then right now, as you are reading this, you are flushing money down the toilet.
Here are a few examples:
Your radio ad is hyping some super-duper summer special offer and giving people your website address as
the place to go for more info. Yet when listeners head over to your home page, they can't find anything
that talks about your advertised deal.
The same thing can happen with billboards, newspaper ads, and - even more commonly - with PPC Ads. Someone
searches on a keyword, you snag 'em with a PPC ad that directs them to a page with a headline that fails
to include the advertised keyword or phrase.
These examples are both instances of broken scent. You see, people sniff out content online in the same way that animals forage for food, they follow scent trails until either:
-
The scent/trail runs out, forcing them to start over again, or
- They get to the content they want
If people come to your Website following the scent of a special offer, but you kill off that scent trail on your home page by failing to include any information about that offer or any intuitively obvious and visible link to more information on that offer, then most Web visitors will give up. Some will take a stab in the dark by clicking on the most likely navigation element, and then give up if they don't immediately see what they are looking for. And since the visitors had already responded to your offer, chances are good that
every one of those bounced prospects represent a flubbed sale that had been
essentially yours to lose.
Don't believe me? According to Web-wide industry usage statistics,
54% of Website visitors leave
after only 1-2 clicks. Bad scent drove them away.
But you can only put so much stuff on your home page you say?
That's
the beauty of campaign-specific landing pages. This is easy to do with PPC ads, as you can
effectively direct ad click-throughs anywhere you'd like. Granted, it's a little harder with offline
ads in traditional media, but not that much harder. It just requires a little advanced planning.
If you are promoting a new service,
why not get that service it's own landing page under a new url
specific to the service's name? Same thing with a major event. Say a dog grooming business has
a new and special process for sucking out every last bit of loose hair from your dog so that your furry friend will shed no more for a month. Basically, as long as you keep doing this process every month, you'll end shedding. If the groomer was running a radio campaign for this service, wouldn't it make more sense to develope a micro-site or landing page with a URL like www.nomoreshedding.com than to only try to promote this service from the home page of Billy-BobsPetGrooming.com? I'm sure you can also see how the offer-specific URL also makes it easier to remember for the radio listeners, too, right?
And if you can't do get a campaign or offer-specific landing page because the name you want is already
taken (i.e., someone else has already snagged that URL), then think long and hard about how you want to
promote this special from your home page.
Because
if you end up directing traffic to a page with no follow-up scent, you'll be flushing
money down the drain - both the money you spent on the ads AND the money you would have made in sales.
Perhaps now would be a good time to have a complimentary meeting with a Wizard of Ads Partner. Links to their websites and blogs are listed down the right side of The Wizard Times. Hundreds of their articles with free insightful advice can been seen at www.americansmallbusiness.com 2009 would be a great year to attend a class at the Wizard Academy 21st Century Business School in Austin Texas. What is the Wizard Academy?
See you next week.
Clay Campbell
Wizard of Ads
PS. Need help to attract more customers and grow your business?
