Hey there,

Thanks for coming by and commenting. I would differ with you on your
opinion the availability of data on the quality of traffic from
Adwords. Generally speaking Adwords traffic, if targeted correctly, is
some of the highest quality traffic available online. There are
thousands of companies that buy Adwords traffic and generate leads or
sale from it day-in and day-out. Google itself is a multi-billion
dollar a year company with their revenue primarily derived from serving
ads for people and companies.

Kurt

Larry, thanks for stopping by and commenting. You are right about if
your KPI is phone calls, you do need some a call tracking solution that
integrates keyword level call tracking data into both Analytics and
Adwords. Manually just doesn’t cut it as you really need the granular
level of detail through keyword level conversion data (in this case
calls) to really know what is driving calls and more importantly high
quality phone calls. Really the next step for you and what it seems you
may need to do is determine how much you are willing to pay for those
high quality phone calls (also known as Cost Per Acquisition). From
there, you can really determine what kinds of bids you should be placing
on each converting keyword.

Hey there,

Thanks for coming by and commenting. I would differ with you on your opinion the availability of data on the quality of traffic from Adwords. Generally speaking Adwords traffic, if targeted correctly, is some of the highest quality traffic available online. There are thousands of companies that buy Adwords traffic and generate leads or sale from it day-in and day-out. Google itself is a multi-billion dollar a year company with their revenue primarily derived from serving ads for people and companies.

Kurt

There seems to be little data out there on the actual quality of the traffic
that arrives from paid results, but it does raise a secondary point – how to
retain those actual, human visitors. We should always point PPC results to
landing pages designed with these kinds of visitors in mind, to keep bounce
rates low and improve what analytics we can.

PPC shouldn’t be an afterthought – I believe this is where many companies
run into problems, that is by pointing paid results at general pages without
integrating PPC into a proper customer journey / marketing strategy.

Larry, thanks for stopping by and commenting. You are right about if your KPI is phone calls, you do need some a call tracking solution that integrates keyword level call tracking data into both Analytics and Adwords. Manually just doesn’t cut it as you really need the granular level of detail through keyword level conversion data (in this case calls) to really know what is driving calls and more importantly high quality phone calls. Really the next step for you and what it seems you may need to do is determine how much you are willing to pay for those high quality phone calls (also known as Cost Per Acquisition). From there, you can really determine what kinds of bids you should be placing on each converting keyword.

Soon, we learned even that wasn’t enough, so we switched call tracking companies to one that had keyword level call tracking so we could see what keywords were driving the higher quality phone leads and what keyword were driving the the lower quality phone leads. With clicks averaging $10-$11 each to maintain our top spot position, I didn’t see any use to bid on keywords that had developed a track record of consistently driving poor quality phone leads.

As far as brand awareness goes, I have no data on that. Our business is akin to a funeral home. You don’t need us till you need us. Because we don’t do general repair, our name does not show up on a SERP for any kind of automotive repair unless it’s related to transmission repair.

I have carefully tracked, experimented, and tried various different methods and strategies over the years with varying degrees of success and our current configuration seems to be working the best. The caveat is that once you get all the search engines tuned in and humming, you build your business around that level of business. If, for whatever reason, you loose your search engines, your business drops so dramatically that you’re going to have to lay people off and scale your operation back dramatically as well. Our current expenditure with search engine PPC is in the high 4-figure range and if it continues to grow as it has over the past 5 years, we will be in the 5-figure numbers in a few short years.

What do you do? You have to have it. I tried scaling back, and it about killed us, so I went back to our current configuration. Maybe that’s why we’re the busiest transmission shop in Salt Lake City.