Conversion rates don’t magically improve
I have been testing out a new marketing channel recently because I have been told repeatedly that it is a great alternative to Google, Yahoo and the comparison engines (and no, it’s not Amazon). I won’t mention the channel by name because I know I will upset a lot of people who swear by it.
When I first set up a new campaign I spend quite a bit of time initially watching it. I have heard horror stories of people burning through thousands of dollars before checking the effectiveness of a new campaign to find out that their conversion rate was nil. I don’t want to be lumped into that statistic, so I like to babysit new campaigns. What I found was that I have generated several hundred clicks, but not one conversion. So I email our rep and tell her that I would like to cancel the campaign. Easy enough, right?
Obviously my instructions weren’t very clear - she emails me back quite upset and tells me that if she knew I were only going to test my campaign for four days, she never would have signed me up. I made it very clear when I was initially signing up with her that I was taking a test-drive and if it was an effective marketing channel, I would continue. Otherwise I would cut my losses and walk away.
So she has one of her “optimizers” look at our campaign and trim it down a little bit. This would make sense to me if we had some terms that were converting - we could trim the campaign down to the ones that were effective. But now I am just watching us lose money in slow-motion - it hasn’t changed anything.
What really amazed me was that our rep keeps insisting that if I give the campaign a month, our conversion rates will magically improve because all of our ads will be in syndication. Well, if that’s true, where are my ads running right now and why are they so much less-effective than their syndicated partners? To me syndication means them buying adspace on networks that I could go to directly, but charging me a premium for their services - sounds like a pretty bad deal.
I know that it is tempting to try out some of these second-tier advertisers, but in my experience it has never been successful. Maybe that’s because our industry is different, but either way make sure to keep a close eye on your adspend if you decide to try any of these guys out. And who knows, maybe if you email me I’ll even tell you which company I’m talking about in this post.
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