Still spending on adverts, and getting clicks, but low revenue?

After my last blog series, I had a host of conversations with clients and potential clients about optimising for more sales, or as in quite a few “new client” conversations, optimising for sales. i.e. they were not getting any.

Here’s the thing, you won’t find many advertisers or agencies giving you this good advice, but let me tell you:

 “It is not in the interest of any platform, not Google, Facebook, Pinterest or anyone to worry about whether you are paying for too many clicks.”

A new person who joined the team a few weeks ago was shocked to hear me turning down one potential client after another because they wanted to spend money on gaining likes. We refuse this business because this will not grow into a happy and profitable relationship for us. It will most likely end up in a cancelled advertising account and as you probably know, nobody ever blames themselves, so the risk is simply too high for us

”Facebook, Google and their siblings are geared up to gain as many clicks as possible. They have algorithms specially designed to show your adverts to the people most likely to click, not the people most likely to buy. The rest is down to you. Caveat emptor”

A recent report from Google themselves claimed that for every dollar spent by clients they get back two dollars. That amounts to a spend of 50% of revenue on marketing and very few businesses could survive on that for very long.  Likewise the global average click through  rate of below 2% won’t be feasible for most businesses, but thankfully averages are for average people they don’t tell you very much of value in many scenarios and this is one of those scenarios.

Tens of thousands of businesses generate leads at 10% or lower of revenue and many businesses with global reach rely entirely on PPC advertising.  Many advertisers including yours truly achieve clicks through between 10% and 24%, I’ve heard about higher rates.

While we are doing statistics, this may help explain why there is such a big disparity. For every £72.00 spent on advertising, only £1 is spent on conversions. Sadly there is no mild way to put this, the pros are wining big and the amateurs are paying a big price, the sum of these two makes up the average which as is so often the case, is an utterly useless and misleading statistic.

Of-course there are other reasons too, for example businesses with a strong brand are bound to do better from any advertising campaign. Well written adverts, well placed adverts, better landing pages and a host of other things all have a significant impact, but there is one move you can nearly always make that will start turning more visitors into customers and teach you more about them in the process.

Move your focus up the funnel