This interview with Phil Frost of Main Street ROI, is part of the Convirza Webinar Series. The following is the Q&A portion of the interview.
Phil Frost: With that McKay, let’s open up the Q&A. I apologize for running a little bit over. I had to rush at the end there.
McKay Allen: Oh, no. You’re fine. It’s good information. We got a few questions, I want to take 5-10 minutes to answer a few of these, then the ones we’re not able to get to, I’ll send those over to Phil and he can respond to them individually as he sees fit.
Let’s start here. Linda asked a really good question. She said, “For AdWords campaigns specifically, do you find that B2C campaigns are more successful than B2B campaigns?” I know you guys don’t do a lot of work in the B2B space, but obviously you guys are a B2B company, so I’m curious if you could speak on that.
Phil Frost: Yeah, I actually see a lot of success in both. One of my biggest clients is B2B and we’re advertising about $150,000-200,000 a month just on Google AdWords, so I’ve seen a lot of success B2B. But I’ve seen a lot of success with B2C as well, so I can’t say one works better than the other.
Especially when we’re talking about Google search, it just comes down to whether or not the prospect is going to Google to search for your product or service. So in some cases that is not the case. I have worked with clients on other projects other than Google AdWords just because search marketing was not a good solution; no one was going to Google to find what they had to offer. It was a medical device company.
If no one has heard of your product and it’s not something that they’re going to think to search for, it’s not going to make sense. But if they are searching, and you can find that, again, by going to Google’s keyword tool, just play around with that to see if there’s any search volume for your target keywords. That will tell you right away whether or not it’s going to be a good opportunity.
McKay Allen: That makes sense. The other question here, I’m scrolling through the questions here to find the most useful. You mentioned landing pages. What do you recommend for somebody to set up a landing page? Can you direct businesses as to where they can go to set up landing pages for their PPC campaigns? Do you help with that? Do you recommend a service? What’s the process to go set up a landing page for small businesses?
Phil Frost: Yeah, that’s a great question in terms of do we help businesses. We do in fact help businesses with the set up process and the management in terms of getting that campaign set up, getting the landing pages set up.
If you want to do it yourself there is a great tool out there that I recommend called Unbounce, www.unbounce.com. That’s a great tool that I’ve played around with. I forget what their pricing is, so you’ll have to take a look at that. I don’t think it’s too expensive, but if you’re not tech savvy that’s a great tool.
If you have a webmaster it really comes down to just getting the copy correct on your landing pages. I mentioned it on this webinar, really being focused and try not to get lazy with your landing pages. Don’t reuse a landing page unless it’s really laser-focused on that keyword and that ad. So if you ever change the offer in your ad, you really need to send that traffic to a unique landing page that matches the copy in the ad.
I guess one other key takeaway from this is don’t get too caught up in making your landing page pretty. A lot of times I’ve found that ugly landing pages work perfectly fine, but you need to have the congruency from keyword to ad to landing page. That’s really the most important factor. Get that right and then work on prettying up your landing page.
McKay Allen: Great. Then we’ve had a few people ask this question: if they’re selling maybe a product as opposed to a service or something like that, if they’re selling an ecommerce product, how does the rule change? Or does it for AdWords specifically? Is there any rule change? Or does everything you cover still apply to ecommerce products as they would with any other type of business?
Phil Frost: Yeah, ecommerce is even easier in terms of tracking. You’re going to have so much more data. So the problem with services and offline sales is it happens off of the web page. So tracking, you have to have a mechanism in place to be able to track the sale off of the website.
Now, with ecommerce everything is going to happen online. I love generating sales for ecommerce businesses with Google AdWords because you can actually send the revenue data back into Google AdWords and you’ll see ROI. It’s right there. You’ll see the value per sale and you’ll see the cost per sale. If you have enough sales volume, there are a lot of tools in Google AdWords to automate a lot of the bidding.
You can basically tell Google AdWords, “I want to bid and make sure I have a 20% profit margin based on the revenue and the cost per sale. You’re getting all that because in a typical ecommerce site you can send that data on the thank you page or the receipt page back to Google AdWords. I got a little technical there, I apologize for that, but long story short, nothing changes in terms of the steps I went through, but it gets even better in terms of tracking if you’re an ecommerce site. You get a lot more data. You can automate a lot of that a little bit more easily.
McKay Allen: Sure, the data is obviously going to be a little bit better because you control the whole purchase process from start to finish. One more question and then we’ll be done. There are a lot of great questions, everybody, today. We appreciate the questions.
You mentioned tracking a lot, conversion tracking, you mentioned tracking calls. Just speak generally to the importance of tracking PPC efforts. Then specifically in the local space, we’ve done a lot of research on this, calls are extremely important. Just talk about tracking generally and then maybe specifically the importance of tracking calls from AdWords.
Phil Frost: Sure. That’s a critical component. I just mentioned tracking sales online for ecommerce, definitely a lot easier than tracking sales for a services business, but it is possible and one of the most critical elements you need is call tracking. You’re going to advertise, people are going to click on your ad, they’re going to go to your landing page, and then a lot of them are going to call if you’re a services business, versus they’re not going to make the purchase right on your website.
But you absolutely need to track those calls. It is possible to track those calls, and you can match phone calls back to the keyword or the ad group or the campaign that generated that phone call. Then as long as you have a process internally to intake those calls and document how many turn into sales, that’s how you can then calculate your return on investment.
So as long as you’re tracking the number of calls, you’re tracking those calls through your sales team, and typically you’ll use a CRM system to do that, like a Salesforce, Act!, or Infusionsoft. Those are just customer relationship management systems where you can input the lead that you received, say that it came from Google AdWords, then be able to run reports on a monthly or quarterly basis to see how much money you generated from those ads and how much it costs. That’s how you can calculate your return on investment.
Then one thing I did not touch on was contact forms. You absolutely want to be able to track how many people complete a contact form on your website. Those are really the two primary ways that people are going to contact you. Either they’re going to pick up the phone and call you, in which case you need to have call tracking in place, or they’re going to submit a form and that’s just the same as an ecommerce site. You want to use that Google AdWords conversion tracking and you can see how many leads are being generated from your ad campaign.
McKay Allen: Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. Everybody, we’ve got a lot of good questions. We’ll reach out to you individually with some answers to these as well, so thanks for asking. Everybody thanks for showing up for the webinar today.
Three quick points before we close. First, the webinar, it has been and is being recorded. You’ll be sent the recording tomorrow morning first thing. If you want to access it sometime this afternoon first thing when we actually post it, you can go to Convirza.com and right in the middle of the page there’s a screen that says “Webinar Series”. Click on that. You’ll see this recording in there.
Second, we’re having people ask a couple questions about the webinar series itself, how often we have webinars at Convirza. We have them every week. We have a great webinar next week, for example, on content marketing, so I encourage you to attend that as well. Then finally, Sandra asks a really good question. She says, “Which call tracking software would you recommend?” Well, Convirza, Sandra, for sure. You’ve got to utilize Convirza, absolutely. So with that, any final words, Phil, before we conclude?
Phil Frost: No. On that point, McKay gave me a demo the other day about Convirza and I definitely recommend if you’re looking for a tool, it’s a great tool. If you are questioning whether or not you need call tracking, I want to reiterate the fact that you absolutely do. If you try to run your ads and you’re not an ecommerce site, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to track your return on investment, in which case you don’t know what’s working and you can’t optimize your campaign. So absolutely get some kind of call tracking in place and I want to reiterate McKay’s point that I do recommend Convirza if you need a solution.
McKay Allen: Great, Phil. I appreciate that. Listen everybody. Thank you so much for attending, taking the time out of your day. We appreciate it. I encourage you to sign up for the webinar next week on Convirza.com and then watch for the email tomorrow morning that has the webinar recording. So everybody have a wonderful day, and we’ll see you again soon. Thanks again, Phil.
Phil Frost: Thanks.
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