Need more leads!

[SEM Gal]

Once again we have been asked to increase our website registrations. Fortunately this time our budget has been increased in order to help us attain our goals...driving more traffic to our site and increasing registrations. With that said I'm interested in hearing which search engine advertising channels others have had success with.

We participate in PPC in Google and Overture/Yahoo Search with great success. Our company/industry is not well suited for an affiliate program so that's out. Banner ads can be such a waste but we thought about advertising on blogs with Blog Ads.

Any suggestions? :confused:

I've got the money to spend but need to do it wisely.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[andrewgoodman]

As far as PPC goes, there is probably still stuff you can do.

- Revisit the potential ROI in content targeting, if you haven't already. If done effectively and well tracked it can succeed.

- Continued keyword discovery. For example, play around with broader matches and two word broad matches.

- Check for disabled keywords and rescue them


And of course, doubling your site's conversion rate would double your leads.

[ukgimp]

Have you thought about looking at how easy it is for people to sign up in terms of usability? You may be able to up the percentage signup without increasing traffic and any extra traffic is a bonus.

What other factors may be putting people off, eg can they see a privacy policy, do they trust you?

Are you going to spam them, assure them you wont.

Can you minimise the number of fields (eg combine UN and email)?

more questions than anwers but you get my drift.

cheers

[Marketing Guy]

What sort of % registrations are you getting just now? Is raising your traffic justifiable or raising coversions more realistic? Could you offer some sort of incentive to register?

[SEM Gal]

Thank you Andrew, ukgimp and Marketing Guy! Great ideas and we are currently working on all of them.

I'm always trying to refine and expand our keyword list. Seems like a never ending task but I do find some hidden gems when I do.

Ukgimp, it's funny you should mention sign-up usability. We are testing that right now. We were asking for everything under the sun so we could give our sales people as much information as possible. At this time we are testing a sign-up with just email and password fields. We've also prominently displayed our privacy policy. Before it was a little link at the bottom of the form. It will be interesting to see if registrations increase and if those individuals become customers.

Right now our registration numbers are at 2.81%. We will be testing incentive offers this month and adjusting our ppc ad copy accordingly. Based on our ppc impressions we are only capturing 3% to visit our website. I would certainly like to see that number increase.

My main question is...Are there other search advertising opportunities out there that are as successful as ppc and optimization? I really know the answer to that...no. But I must ask. We are thinking about testing banner ads on blogs and possibly animated banners as well. I just feel like we'll be throwing money out the door. :confused:

Thanks again!

[Marketing Guy]

Depends on the subject area really - affiliate advertising, newsletter advertising, etc can all be good sources of traffic.

[andrewgoodman]

Given the current levels of uptake by publishers, and user behavior generally, I am guessing you won't find a jackpot in banner ads unless you can get a very low price (some would say it isn't search, anyway).

Companies who have money to throw around for branding may find different results, but for direct response, my experiments with trying banners in Google content targeting have yielded very low ROI thus far. The text ads in content targeting seem to do better.

Some of this gets us off track when it comes to "search" marketing, but I think if it's contextual on a platform like AdWords then it is still in the search zone somewhere.

Companies like Quigo are doing interesting things with contextual, but as an advertiser you are going to be asked to bid quite high on this inventory. There are no ten or even twenty-cent clicks on the Quigo network. You're looking at fifty cents and up.

Squeezing more out of your existing channels seems to be the way to go.

This is sort of the problem with search. You reach a ceiling (there is only so much inventory). It takes creativity to push sales higher in this realm.

[SEM Gal]

A very good point Andrew! We've talked about hitting the ceiling but the CEO doesn't believe there is a ceiling within the online survey industry. Thanks again for your input!

And thanks Marketing Guy for the newsletter advertising suggestion. I'll investigate options for us within that arena.

:)

[shorebreak]

[Disclosure - I'm an SEM vendor. I know folks for the most part don't like vendors on the threads, but in this case I think I might have something to say - you judge]

SEMGal,

If you're like 95% of the sophisticated ppc advertisers, you're using rules-based bid management (either internally developed or 3rd party) to manage and optimize your ppc campaigns on Overture & Google.

If that's the case, then you may get more volume of subscriptions, or higher margins with the same volume of subscriptions by applying portfolio optimization techniques (again, either internally or via 3rd party). What I mean by this is, not just making decisions on each keyword based on its own data, but looking at all the yield scenarios *across* keywords in order to best allocate that budget across keywords. If you have 100 keywords running on both Google & Overture, this involves doing a seriously large amount of math calculations to figure out the right way to spend the budget across the keyword set, and is *not* the same thing as simply applying the same business rule(s) to a group of keywords.

Depending on how many keywords you have, you could either do this yourself or hook up with a 3rd party bid management firm who's built this capability into their product. <100 keywords, you can do it yourself; >100 & you need a system that can model the keyword portfolio returns for you.