How We Saved a Client $34,000 Per Year

Recently a client of ours reached out to us, lamenting the cost of advertising their products online. After a brief conversation I finally just asked them a few questions that got directly to the point (in a nice way).

Here's a few things that I learned:

Most managers are too busy to deal with getting traffic to their websites, usually they are busy doing other tasks such as managing employees, coordinating vendors, doing sales, the stuff that actually makes business work in other words. They see a problem, "too little traffic" so they set out to address the problem by researching programs that are meant to "drive more traffic" to their website.

Problem solved, well not so fast...

How are you advertising now?

This client was advertising in industry specific directories that they thought were bringing them tons of targeted traffic. After investigating all of the directories and the amount of advertising revenue that was being spent on them, I was shocked to find that the directories were only supplying just north of 2,500 visitors per year! Twenty-freakin-five hundred visitors for $36,000 per year, that's $14.40 per visitor!

HOT TIP:
People are trying their hardest to make the businesss (or their business) work, they don't want to hear 'how terrible' their choices were a year ago, no matter how bad they were, so don't remind them! (note to self). If they made a bad decision tell them, but soften it so they don't reject the message, and be sure to make it known in no uncertain terms that you can do better.

Just For The Fun Of It

Well, I decided to listen in to a call to the salesman when their directory renewal was coming due. Frankly, I was floored when he told us that the price of their 'program' was going up, up to $48,000 per year. In other words, 20 dollars per visitor, OUCH.

My client mentioned that they were disappointed that the directory only sent them 2500 visitors the previous year and then paused to hear the response.

"Well our goal is to send you quality visitors""Well our goal is to send you quality visitors"

When you hear this logic, take your wallet, run to your car, shift it into overdrive and put your foot to the floor. Thankfully, my client gave them the "don't call us, we'll call you..." line and the sales guy was on his way to his next un-profitable call.

"Quality visitors?" Really? Where is the directory getting their traffic?

From Google Adwords, and organic listings. Somehow his traffic, and what he sent our way was 'quality traffic' even though he got it from the same place that my client did (minus the ads). They did nothing to qualify the traffic, they just put links to my clients site on their site, that's it.

Here's How We Saved The Client $34,000 Per Year

It's very simple, we started a very frugal AdWords program for them based on a tight keyword list.

"If I handed you back a dime for every nickel that you gave me, how many nickels would you give me a day?"Pay-per-click management is very crucial and the sad fact is a lot of people don't have the know-how or the time to learn how to use AdWords or MSN AdCenter. I don't blame them, there are tasks that I absolutely hate to do, but fortunately for the client this is one thing that we excel at.

Another barrier to entry for people is: they have tried pay-per-click before and lost a lot of money very quickly without concrete results regarding return on investment. This is easily remedied with a tracking program, if a client knows how much they are making from their ads, and they are confident in the data they are getting, 99.9% of them don't mind paying for advertising.

If I handed you back a dime for every nickel that you gave me, how many nickels would you give me a day?

Within three days I had the clents cost-per click down to 52 cents per click based on a list of keywords that included 6 of their products (that have a very high margin I might add). They were only getting about 9 clicks per day but I had already beat the high priced directory traffic (3285 clicks per year at 52 cents per click $1708.20). Now all we had to do was up their budget and add the 40 other products that they sell to the AdWords campaigns.

For the price of this high cost directory listing I saved them $34,000 per year. However, the client would rather have the traffic than the savings, they want to grow their business.

Here's how much traffic I can get them for the same price that they paid last year (keep in mind that they only got 2500 visitors from this "program" last year).

Total traffic: 69,230 visitors (for a net increase of 66,730 visitors)
Cost increase: none (other than the mere pittance that we charge of course)

One more happy customer! Yay!

Earl Lear is the Chief Technical Officer of TotalInfoTech.com, you can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it