When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing (Part II)

Looking at Reach and Engagement

In my last post, I talked about how to get your team involved in evaluating your 2009 marketing efforts. In part two of this series of preparing your marketing plans for 2010, I cover how to evaluate “reach” and “engagement.”

“Reach” is the new word for “awareness.” Others call it your “sphere of influence” or “thought leadership.” Basically, you want to measure the tactics you used to make people aware of your company / products / services – and these tactics aren’t limited to social media.  Why?  Because social media, your Website, and offline tactics such as speaking gigs or print ads often influence each other. Some things to consider when measuring “reach” include:

Social media – The number of followers you have on Twitter, fans on Facebook, or connections on LinkedIn.

Website – The increase…

Evaluating Your 2009 Marketing Efforts

Now that 2009 is coming to a close in just a few short weeks, it’s time to develop marketing plans and budgets for the coming year. Before making any plans however, it pays to assess your 2009 marketing efforts – what worked, what didn’t, and what did you want to implement but never had the time or resources to do so.

We here at Yield Software are going through the same process – and it definitely takes more than one staff meeting or a “back of the napkin” approach! Here are some of the strategies we’ve used to help us make plans for 2010 and beyond:

1. Get your entire team involved

Small companies have one advantage big companies don’t have – the ability to hold company-wide meetings and solicit people’s feedback and insights. It’s best if you…

Funnel Vision

What Are the Most Important PPC Metrics?

Our current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite will see a new feature when they log on today: the new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.  This groovy new feature is a very visual way to instantly see how each of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are doing.

We frequently get two key questions from folks regarding their PPC campaigns:

How can I tell if my campaign is doing well?

What are the metrics I should be paying attention to?

Depending on the campaign, the response is often not a simple one. And accurately concluding how your campaign is doing pivots off of what sort of results you want from your campaign.  Our system provides a variety of both simple and more complex reports to gain insight to these questions, but we heard from our customers…

Why the Cost-per-Click Metric Can Be the Wrong Metric to Measure

…and an Argument for Measuring CPA

My co-worker, Jenae, recently sent me this email:

“I can’t tell you how many calls I have with folks who are hung up on cost per click (CPC). It’s the main metric they focus on when they start to dig into their campaigns and what they think they want to use Yield Software to optimize. It takes me a couple of discussions and lots of detailed examples to help them understand that while CPC is a tempting metric, having a low CPC doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful campaign — especially if you want conversions or are more ROI-driven.”

Search engine marketing comprises a number of tactics – online and offline – including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic search, branding, and the various methods used to funnel traffic to your Website landing pages.

Too…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Return-On-Investment (ROI) Measures for SEM

Simply put, return-on-investment (ROI) refers to what is returned in profit as a result of any given investment.  When applied to web marketing, ROI typically refers to the profits generated as a result of your marketing investment.  Within the larger marketing profession, web marketing has been growing in popularity since its introduction in the late 1990’s because of its very precise measurability.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Return-On-Investment (ROI) Measures for SEM

Simply put, return-on-investment (ROI) refers to what is returned in profit as a result of any given investment.  When applied to web marketing, ROI typically refers to the profits generated as a result of your marketing investment.  Within the larger marketing profession, web marketing has been growing in popularity since its introduction in the late 1990’s because of its very precise measurability.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you…