PPC – the 0.1% vs the 99.9%

June 8, 2009 11:23 am admin Google Adwords, Website Strategy

Winning business from a company website is usually achieved through both of the following together:

1. A website that’s strong enough to encourage visitors to make contact/buy after visiting it.
2. A website that’s well promoted both online and offline.

For 99.9% of companies that’s the situation.  If a website isn’t strong enough then there’s little point in actively sending traffic to that website and because most companies are in competition with others, it becomes a constant battle to not only raise the visibility of products/services but to ensure that people buy when they visit the website.

So it’s quite unusual to see a situation that isn’t ‘the norm’ but that’s what we’ve had for some time with a client.

We started working with this client some time ago and our brief was originally to send PPC traffic to the website, which we did.  Client feedback has always been that good levels of enquiries/business are gained and so in theory, everyone should be happy.  But not us …

Our focus with clients is to ensure that the maximum possible benefit is gained from PPC traffic to the website and if we identify weaknesses within a client website then we will highlight them as opportunitities for improvement.   This is what happened with this particular client because we could see numerous options to expand the PPC campaign but didn’t feel confident that the website was strong enough to convert that extra online visibility into enquiries/business.   After a period of time we had a meeting with the client to discuss further and discovered something very unusual …

This particular client sells a product that is fairly niche but has quite a high potential customer base.  In short, those people looking for the product (or phrases related to the product) are already in a position where they have little choice but to buy the product and so, regardless of the strength of the website, they end up buying anyway.  In normal circumstances, people would land on a website, not like something about it, and would go to the next website in the Google results and so on until a company fully impresses them enough to buy/make contact.   In this situation, what I refer to as the 0.1%, the lack of strength in the website doesn’t have a massively detrimental effect on the amount of business gained because the potential clients have no choice but to buy.

Of course, it’s true that if this client wanted to gain even more from the traffic to their website then through website redevelopment work, that could certainly be achieved.  But for now, being in the very small minority of companies that has no competition for their products, they enjoy that position of being what’s probably 0.1% of all company websites that don’t have to be strong in order for PPC to succeed.

Back in the real world, for the other 99.9% it’s as ever important to ensure that the company website is incredibly strong before spending too much money on advertising such as PPC.