A client of mine recently came to me with a request for running some advertising to boost new business inquiries during a peak time of year for him - the winter season and new years. About half of his new business comes in through his website and most of that traffic is coming from Google organic search and a citysearch listing.
Since this is the first time that he's committed an ad budget, we wanted to test several partners/channels to see what would work. $1,500 isn't quite a lot of money to work with especially when spreading that out over maybe 5 channels and then comes the fact that my fee has to come out of that. As an initial budget, I estimated that I would spend $500 worth of my own time, and split the remaining money amongst the 5 channels. Since this was a test, and also the first time running advertising for him, there would be a lot of work to do on my part.
The 5 channels we chose are Google paid search, Yahoo paid search, MSN/adcenter paid search, superpages.com pay-per-click and a premium listing on yellowpages.com.
With any ad campaign, it's important to have tracking measures in place so that you can see what channels are getting what return-on-investment (ROI). I had Google Analytics already set up on this client's site, so we were all set on tracking.
So that I could get some detailed reports on how the campaign was doing, such as which ads or keywords were converting better, I used Google’s URL Builder tool to create unique landing page URLs. You don’t have to use this tool for tracking Google ads because it automatically does it for you if you have the auto-tagging option turned on in account preferences.
For Google, Yahoo and MSN/adcenter, we used a list of about 25 keyword phrases and 3 ad variations and for Google and Yahoo, we included their content networks for broader reach and also as a way to hopefully drive the cost-per-clicks down. MSN/adcenter doesn’t have a content network yet, so obviously we can’t utilize it.
The two internet yellow pages sites (superpages.com and yellowpages.com) have so far been disappointing as far as getting launched on them. I’ve tried to create a campaign on with superpages but it hasn’t been going up, nor does there seem to be any record of my having attempted to create a campaign. Yellowpages.com has a 12-month requirement (at a minimum of $50/month) for their premium listings and once you’ve submitted your request, they won’t allow you to back out of it, so you can’t test their premium listings offering without shelling out $600. We decided to hold off on using Yellowpages.com for now.
As far as the campaign performance goes, we’ve driven about 100 clicks, but so far there have been no conversions – leads in this case, where a prospective customer has to fill out and submit a brief form. We’ll see how this goes and I’ll post an update on this soon.