I just happened to stumble upon this blog entry and thought it warranted a bit of feedback. To begin with, every good salesman knows that it is never a good idea to criticize a customer; if you thought you could add value to our relationship with constructive critique, then you could have contacted me directly instead of letting me accidentally find out that you are trying to promote your own ‘expertise’ by calling me a bad example.

By picking my AdWords ad as a bad example you are actually confusing apples and oranges, because you seem to be under the impression that my only aim is to maximize my CTR, which it is not.

I agree that it might be beneficial if a word or phrase in an AdWords ad appears in bold, especially in the headline, but I always manage to find other activities with a higher pay-off to my business than spending time on writing more ad variations. This is where our agreement ends, because my AdWords ad is intentionally written as short and precise as possible, because the important thing for me is to communicate my key points.

As a lot of website owners are following the crowd by character-spamming their AdWords ads they are providing me a good opportunity to stick out by using reader friendly chunk sizes. When somebody skim down the list of ads, then the brain needs much longer to decode a character-spammed message, especially if the second body line is dependent on the first to make sense. If you read the headline and any one of the two body lines then it may not be good grammar, but it provides the brain sufficient information to get one of my two points; save money by visiting a dentist in Budapest & combine your dental treatment in Budapest with a vacation.

My aim is getting the highest ROI from the money I spend on online marketing, which is why my focus is on conversion rate, not CTR. If I do a good job with my website marketing, then visitors hit the Send-RFI-button when they are ready to discuss whether I should be the one organizing their dental treatment abroad. This is also why spending an hour polishing and improving my website takes priority over fiddling an hour with AdWords ad alternatives. Most of the time I spend on AdWords administration is on adjusting my bidding to make sure that my ad positions stay within my target ranges and that my campaigns do not over-heat with too high CTR.

Since I am selling a service that requires significant consideration and commitment on behalf of my potential clients then quality leads are of high value to me and something I am willing to pay you good money for. A quality lead is a potential client who is as far ahead in the decision making process as possible, because then I have to spend less time educating and qualifying him/her and can focus my time and efforts on differentiating myself from the other providers that may be under consideration and, of course, close the deal.

I signed up as an advertiser on RevaHealth based on a promise of high quality leads, so I have agreed with my account manager that I will try out your service for a while to see whether you provide me a profitable addition to my marketing activities with AdWords.

If your focus has changed from selling me quality leads to attracting visitors in volume and thereby getting as many RFI forms filled out as possible, then you are on your way to bastardize your product for short term profit. If your aim is quantity over quality, then you end up exclusively sending unqualified leads my way which means that I have to spend a lot of extra time on providing shoppers with basic information on what dental travel is about – information they get if they go directly to my website and which they should get on your website before they fill out an RFI form that you send to me at a cost.

The price per RFI from my own website through AdWords is 60% higher than what I pay per RFI from RevaHealth, but my conversion rate and ROI are still significantly higher, the sales cycle (days from RFI to commitment) is about 80% shorter and I spend less than half the time on communicating with a potential client before I get their commitment. If you forget that you are competing against Google for my marketing money, then you are well on your way to loose share of my budget. If you provide me value for my money then I pay, but I don’t need your help to pimp my AdWords and definitely not to attract casual shoppers that I could get much cheaper if I increased my bidding on Google to maximize my CTR.

Best regards,

Thomas Søndergaard
General Manager, Dacadia Ltd.
http://www.dacadia.eu