How to Quantify the ROI of SEO?
How to Quantify the ROI of SEO?
Increasing over the past few weeks, as I made Search Engine Optimization presentation to prospective clients about optimizing their websites, most were impressed with our experience, our professionalism, and our esteemed client list. Most noticeably, they were keen to understand the kind of work that goes into optimizing and promoting a site to the top of search engine result pages.
The proposed quotation amounts weren’t high, specially knowing the amount of dollars these bigger clients spend in print advertising, media and marketing. In fact, I would say the required total spend was a minuscule amount of their overall advertising dollars.
Yet, at the end of the presentation, the marketing manager would often look at me and say - "Well, I understand what you have done in the past, and we would like the same for our site too, but I will have to present this to my senior management, and one of the things they are going to ask is - What is the ROI? What is the "real" benefit? How do I quantify the benefit in dollars and cents?
According to Tom Hopkins, the sales guru, if this happens, it means that I have failed to educate and communicate the value of the proposal to the client. This question won’t pop-up if the client sees enough value in the proposal. I thought about it for some time after it happened the third time in as many months… is it that I am unable to communicate the value, or is it that these decision makers just want to be double sure, to save their backside about spending on something that is difficult to measure.
But the Marketing folks are not completely at fault. After all, most prospects may see your top ranked site and visit you, but the fact that they made initial contact after seeing the Sponsored Ad or the High Organic listing is not captured and quantified. So this leaves the marketing managers to fend for themselves on how to quantify the benefits of spending on getting a high rank in search engines.
Admitted these managers are very new to spending online, on sponsored advertisements or on organic results, banner ads, link building or going to Facebook or social networking.
And the more I think, the more I wonder how they measure returns from their print media - a full page newspaper ad may cost $7,000 to $12,000, and it only lasts a day at the maximum. And if your prospect fails to see it today, you’ve got to spend the money again tomorrow.
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Click Fraud: Can it happen to you?
Beware Advertisers: Click Fraud is For Real
Like most businesses, when I was introduced to Google’s Pay-per-Click advertisement program called Google Adwords, I was overjoyed. No more advertising in costly magazines and journals which hardly generate any leads. Here I only pay when someone is eagerly and actively looking for my product or service.
Too good to be true… only pay for leads that click on your ad. So my ad can show for thousands of impressions a day, but I only pay for the handful of people who click on it and visit my web site.
And it was good too, because my SEO business started getting leads that were hot - literally as soon as I started the ads. So I was happy… and I increased my daily budget on Google and increased my cost-per-click, so that my ad could rank higher up on the search result pages.
Clicks Galore…
And I naturally started getting more hits from this extra exposure. Getting 10-20 clicks and ever 40 clicks a day became the norm. My spending with Google also skyrocketed. As I became happier, I became complacent too… as long as I was getting more visitors to my site, I wasn’t complaining…
Until I got my latest invoice from Google. Boy, I was jolted right out of my seat. It seemed that Google had maxed out my daily budget times the 31 days in the month. I had got new business from Google, but I didn’t know I was getting this many visitors from my ad campaign.
A quick look at my Google AdWords campaign showed me a huge number of clicks over the past several days and weeks. The number wasn’t 20 or 30 clicks anymore. It was in hundreds of clicks a day. Funny, I hadn’t received so many quotation requests or emails from people joining our eMarketing Ideas Newsletter or commenting on our blog . Something funny was going on…
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Understanding Broad Match Ads in Google Adwords
Vinai, since broad match gives me maximum coverage by using all possible combinations of my keywords, why would anyone need a exact match ad? - Sangeeta Kapur, India.
Sangeeta, Thanks for raising a very important topic. There is a lot of confusion about the different match types, and most new Google Adword users arn’t aware of the 4 different types of ads that can be setup within Adwords. They merely start with the default option, which is the broad match.
Broad match is good for starters, when you don’t know what keywords your users are typing when searching for your products or services. This is because broad match ads will trigger for any partial match of your keywords.
Let’s say you offer web design , and you choose this broad term as your keyword. Now your ads will trigger whenever anyone searches for web design. But they will also trigger whenever anyone searches for web or design, in any order, as in spider web, graphic design, web marketing or book cover design. .
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