Marketing Tracking Rescues a Bad Website

Marketing Tracking Rescues a Bad Website

By David Bird

This customer had received some State funding for digital marketing, and they were anxious to strut their stuff on Google AdWords. But before they started spending their advertising grant money, I recommended multiple changes to their site. Their response was, “that’s what the other two guys (my competitors) said too.”
The business owner claimed the website was “good enough” and just wanted to get started before the State withdrew the grant money (which had no chance of expiring for six months).

The budget was $2,000 per month, so away we went with advertising on Google AdWords.

After the first month, there were no leads, and the dashboard showed these indicators:

Key Indicators from the Dashboard

  • 83% bounce rate (ideal bounce rate is between 40% and 60%)
  • 2 pages/session (ideal is 2–5 pages/session)
  • 48 seconds/session (ideal is 120–240 seconds/session, or 2–4 minutes)
  • 0 sales leads

I recommended we stop advertising and fix the site.  The “The site’s good enough” argument persisted.

Each week after the first month, the data was showing no indication of improvement. After four more weeks (2 full months and $4,000 spent) the owner agreed to stop.

We spent the next month rewriting many pages and restructuring some of the top navigation items. When we resumed the advertising after that month, the dashboard indicators changed dramatically:

  • 53% bounce rate (eventually the bounce rate came under 48%)
  • 7 pages/session
  • 189 seconds/session (3:15 minutes)

Lesson

Getting traffic to your website is one thing, but your website has to be able to generate sales leads (or direct sales for ecommerce sites). If it’s not able to do that, fix the site before advertising.

This post is part of the Dashboard Discoveries Series where customers learn from the Bird’s Eye Marketing’s AdWords and Website reporting dashboard.