Your phone rings and the person on the other end, typically your boss, tells you that expectations are not being met and that conversions, orders, or leads have dropped; They want to know what’s wrong. As a marketing professional, at some point you are going to get this call and what you do next can make a big difference in your career. So let’s explore how we can deal with this as it applies to the search campaigns in your AdWords account.
First thing is to keep your cool and get as much information as you can about the situation. Ask open ended questions like:
- Have you done any research on this issue that might help me get to the bottom of this problem?
- Are there any external events that might be impacting these results?
- Has anything on the site been changed recently?
- What current data are they monitoring that shows the problem?
Drops in performance can happen at any point in the process. The longer the sales cycle, the more difficult researching this becomes. To give this some real world flavor, we are going to use an example of a Plumber. Here are the steps in the process flow:
- Prospect has a want/need.
- Prospect creates a search query and enters it into Google.
- Google produces a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with paid and organic results.
- Prospect clicks on one or more of the links on the SERP.
- Prospect lands on your site and the page loads.
- Prospect goes through a selection process and contacts the businesses on their short list.
- Prospect contacts the business through either the phone or web-form.
- Customer Service proposes services and sets an appointment.
- Service provider goes to customer location and delivers service.
- Customer Reviews
- Customer may become an evangelist with either a positive or negative referral.
Let’s discuss these in detail
- Prospect has a want/need.
The prospect having a want/need is something that is above the pay-grade of AdWords on the search side of the account because search responds to demand, it does not create it. Other types of marketing such as image ads in Display can help create want/need but that is outside the scope of this article. This does not mean that the want/need factor does not count because it certainly does. What you examine here are the factors that create this that may have changed. In the past, we helped a snow removal service with their advertising and there was nothing like a good snow storm to create demand. The question you ask yourself at this point in the process is did the demand change. Is the business going in a slow season like a Tutor business in summer? A great resource here is Google Trends with the customer’s primary keyword. Check the pattern to make sure that the problem is not just a normal seasonal change.
- Prospect creates a search query
The search process starts with a need and how the audience translates that to a search. The one constant here is that you can never overestimate the creativity of a person with a blank search box. How the person performs this process is as complex as language itself. Part of the magic of AdWords is the ability to match to the keywords in the search query. One thing that many overlook is that the keyword is not the same as what the person searched for. This stage is where the person creates the search query and it matches to the keyword but it is not the keyword. Review your search query reports to see that the searches you’re getting are relevant.
- Google produces a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with paid and organic results.
Okay, there is more than a little magic involved in this process but let’s keep the conversation simple for right now. If the SERP changes, and it does all the time, that can and does impact the result. What is created here is the impression and it’s the first level of data that we have to examine for a drop or change in this attribute. If people stop searching for your product of service you will first see this in the impression level and you will have to deal with it there. The simple truth here is you cannot get a click if there was no impression.
- Prospect clicks on one or more of the links on the SERP.
The click is the next thing to examine and this is normally thought about in the context of the CTR (Click through Rate). If this drops there are lots of possible factors to consider:
- Did the SERP results change resulting in fewer clicks?
- Did the ad copy change resulting in fewer clicks?
- Did the mix of the keyword impressions change?
- Did the ad position degrade?
The SERP environment can greatly impact the CTR because of things you did or things others did. A change in ad copy might result in a lower CTR but this can also happen if your competitor put an offer in the market that is better than yours. Another common item is the entry of a new competitor that bids to the top of the page pushing your ad to the side. This can also happen when your competitor adjusts their bids. When the traffic falls from the top to the side, the CTR can drop by a factor of 10x. Make sure that one thing you check for is a shift in volume from the top to side positions (Segment in the AdWords data).
- Prospect lands on your site and the page loads.
Some people are surprised by this but just because they clicked on the ad does not mean they saw the page. Page load speed can be a big factor here and if the page takes too long to load, people will click the back button and go on to the next provider. To isolate this, you want to look at the AdWords clicks and the Analytics page views. A big difference between these two numbers is an early warning indicator of a page load problem. This factor should also be part of your normal account audit function.
- Prospect goes through a selection process and contacts the businesses on their short list.
Let’s start by stating the obvious – the experience the visitor has with your content has more to do with the response rate more than any other factor. There is almost always a compromise on the web content because people can visit for many different reasons. The more reasons they visit for, the more difficult it becomes to have a great conversation with them. A shift in the mix of the search queries can certainly move the needle in unpredictable ways. The questions you need to ask here:
- Did the message change?
- Did the competitive pages change?
- Did the keyword mix change?
You have to remember that the page experience is in the context of a bigger web experience so you may have changed nothing but your competitor might have. Most people selecting a product or service will view several others and then go through a process of selecting the ones that they will interact with. If the decision is low pressure, they may shop for some time going through a short list process but others will go directly to the response because purchase pressure is high. Using our example Plumber, a person with water gushing on their floor will be highly responsive while a person seeking bids for a remodel project will be a much deeper shopper and more influenced by the design elements.
- Prospect contacts the business through either the phone or web-form.
In investigating drops in sales, this area has come up more than once. Have the forms been tested to ensure that they go to the right person and is that right person responding in a timely manner? When both forms of response are available, sometimes you need to bring the data back together. We recently had a situation where the client was watching and responding to the online conversions and they raised an alert when that performance dropped. Our investigation found that the phone volume had increased and the types of conversions had simply changed from one type to another.
- Customer Service proposes services and sets an appointment.
Sales leads are not fine wines and they age poorly and we have found situations where they sit for days or even weeks. The other thing we have observed in this area are customer service challenges. In one case, we had phone tracking and could not explain the drop in appointments until we listened to about 25 calls. We then had to notify that client that they had a rude customer service rep and a group of really good leads was destroyed by bad phone skills.
- Service provider goes to customer location and delivers service.
This step in the process contains more than a little risk and that is the point of delivery. It is also very difficult for the marketing area to reach into this and get any valid data but it is certainly an important step in the process.
- Customer Reviews
Reviews are something that can help detect product or service delivery challenges. If the business gets regular reviews then paying attention to the trend of these becomes important. Bad reviews can cause the entire flow to dry up for those that follow reviews. Yelp can be especially problematic and very difficult to deal with. You have to be on guard to reviews of both your location and your competitors because in most cases, both of these are part of the customer experience. One thing you want to do is keep your eye on the traffic volume from these sources so you do not get surprised by changes in your market.
- Customer may become an evangelist, aka Brand Advocate, with either a positive or negative referral
This one would be very difficult to detect but a bad review may belong to an evangelist and if it does, the impact can go way beyond the review website. An Evangelist is a customer, client, or trusted adviser that will recommend your business to a friend. Not all customers are evangelists because many will never reach the level of recommending your business. In the community, there are connector personalities and this is a normal attribute for an evangelist. As you can see, everything has to go right for a referral to happen. If you have an evangelist that goes negative on you, the damage can be extensive.