the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Yesterday I was developing a proposal for a client entering their 3rd year with us. My bottom line with this client is that they have been successful, but they’ve never really taken any of my onsite advice in terms of building really good, solid landing pages that convert well. In fact, their landing pages are quite poor. I see this quite a bit. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising, but not investing in the landing pages or website. Penny-wise and pound foolish.

I think what the layperson don’t grasp is how inexpensive it can be to have a really talented designer throw together a very nice looking page. I mean, give me $200 and a Sitepoint contest and I’ll have 20 different people begging you to pick their design by the end of the day. 20% of them will be really good designs. I think people are still scared off by those website design proposals they saw in 1997, when everyone was charging $25000 for a 5 page site with rotating gifs and a ‘dynamic’ contact us form.

Anyhow, with said junky landing page, here is a snapshot of 1 month a couple seasons ago:

The top line is actual data. The subsequent lines are the carrot I’m dangling for them. In line 2 you see that if we can increase the conversion rate a measly 4 tenths of 1%, they would have received 14 more leads (12% better) and reduced their cost per lead $8 (11% better).

As it was the following season, by virtue of some PPC kung fu, I knocked that cost per lead down 30%. Still, imagine the numbers with a really good landing page. Obviously, the campaign works as it is running. The numbers make sense for them. Average sale is in the thousands, so if they convert 1 in 5 leads generated from the PPC campaign they are still doing well.

My gut instinct is that if we had a good cache of landing pages I could get the cost per lead down to $12-15.

Anyhow, if you want to use this spreadsheet as a carrot for your clients, you can download it here.