I have a theory that the best place on AdWords is the No.1 position. I call it Skylining. Sure, orders appear in positions 2 and 3 (aka the buy line) but the real sales are generated in the top positions. Advertise on the right and you’ll find orders are cheaper but few and far between.
These days, people appear to be internet savvy but really they’re not. They are more intelligent and more informed; they know how to find answers; they know how to use the web but they don’t understand it. The relationship with your car is very similar; you can drive it but you can’t get a hot lap on a track day without a lot of practice and understanding of vehicle dynamics.
Most people now don’t realise that the top three ads are ads, in fact they don’t know any difference between Paid Search and Organic – it’s just search results. They realise the right hand column of results are ads but that’s as far as it goes. SEO results these days usually start at position 4 (sorry guys, but it’s true) or lower if you factor in Wikipedia and Google Products.
Many SEO and internet types have a dream of creating a site and the orders will flow in. They believe in the affiliate marketing dream, but unless you’re the best of the best, it will remain merely a dream.
Skylining at the top of the page generates the lion’s share of the orders, but you are going to have to have the budget to win. The only way to finance the budget is create a larger profit per visitor than your competitors. You need to make double, triple or more profit than your competitors if you’re going to use Skylining to dominate your market.
But hold on, you’re thinking, you can hold a lower position and still make money. I’ll let you in on a little secret; I’ve been working with a customer in a highly competitive market against large blue chips. We (or rather he) was paying £34 per conversion and obtained 33 conversions in a 10-day period. We modified the ad group to run my Skylining strategy and tripled the Max CPC – yes, we tripled the MAX CPC. Results were unbelievable: conversions increased to 97 and the conversion cost fell to £21 in the next 10 days. Skylining really does work. But don’t just go and increase your Max CPC by 300%; it’s a little bit more complex. I’ll be glad to talk you through it.
But back to the original idea. Skylining is fine but what you need is unlimited Skylining. You need to dominate your market and that is going to require the largest profit per visitor in the industry.
You need to engineer the economics of your business so you can PAY MORE for a lead than everyone else in the market. I know this is odd idea, when we usually try to reduce cost and squeeze the last penny from our campaigns, but think about it; if you can pay more, you’ll dominate the market.
The solution is simple. Currently, revenue is based on the following:
Traffic x Revenue per visitor = Gross Profit
However, most people forget about repeat customers. Yes, REPEAT CUSTOMERS – it’s that important. The internet revolution has thrown away the concept of customer service and relationships. I believe the internet has moved from the early days of just getting new customers and forgetting about the existing customers to a more mature model. AdWords is the ultimate tool for extracting the gross profit from your sales. It used to be cheap and easy sales, but these days, Google is pushing the envelope so they take not only the profit from this sale, but the next repeat sale as well. The days of long tail keywords are gone. Try and enter a few long tail terms today in AdWords today; you’ll get low search volume warnings.
If you don’t, you’re using the wrong match type and you’re a candidate for us to save you 60% on your spend. I know you don’t believe me, but every day I walk past our team delivering demos and I hear shocked and horrified AdWords advertisers find for the first time how bad the truth of AdWords is in their case. At least this year they’ll save the money and can go to the Maldives on holiday. Don’t go in June; the weather isn’t good.
Back to Skylining. You must now view AdWords as a tool to acquire repeat business. You need to sell to your customer time after time after time. You may need to introduce new products, but you must also obtain repeat sales.
Traffic x Revenue per visitor x Repeat = Increased Gross Profit
In fact, to achieve real unlimited Skylining you need to improve the value of the sales. Imagine the above formula with high value ticket items included in the repeat sales. That’s truly an advanced AdWords strategy.
Traffic x Conversion x High Ticket Items x Repeat = FORTUNE
Given a basic proficiency with traffic and conversions, you get a lot more leverage by focusing on the second half of the equation! (High Ticket x Repeat).
Next time we’ll discuss the importance of your title mega tags to your future ads. This is so new that when we contacted Google Ireland, even they didn’t know about it and had to call Google HQ in Mountain View to confirm our findings!
Best wishes,
John Langley
