I was doing a review of the marketing activities with a new home improvement client a few years back.
In the previous year, they had spent €15,000 on Google Adwords in the UK bringing the right search traffic to the website of their UK operation.
They weren’t convinced about how successful this investment was and they asked me to review the campaign.
The lack of success was simple to figure out because the €15,000 was being used to drive traffic to their website, which was outdated and made them look like an old fashioned, backwards operation. You could easily understand how this traffic was not converting because, like me, I am fairly sure that the people who looked at the website were not inclined to do business.
Not only were they wasting money but they were damaging their brand – an important and very simple SEO tip is to make sure you have a website that makes people want to do business with you!
My simple recommendation to them was to stop the campaign immediately, upgrade the website and then, and only then, start up the Google campaign again.
I was told that there was no budget for a new website and instead they decided to increase their Google Adwords budget in the hope that bringing, even more traffic would somehow improve the results they were getting from the previous campaign.
Whether it is..
– Advertising when your store is a mess
– Putting a cheap sign over your premises
– Paying for an advert and not designing it properly
– Getting cheap business cards
– Bringing traffic to an outdated website
..the message is always the same.
Never, ever, write a cheque to make yourself look bad.
