Imagine how you’d feel if your bank didn’t offer online access to your account, but instead, just sent you a simple statement every month.

And what if that simple statement only showed your balance?

No transactions, no line items.  Nothing.

Just a number. “Here’s how much money you have.”

Would you be okay with that?

Or worse, what if they never sent you… ANYTHING? No statements. No online access. Nothing.

Is it fair to say that you’d find a new bank, immediately?

———

Yet, bafflingly, many remodeling companies continue to put up with terrible PPC reporting month after blessed month.

Many remodelers get no reporting whatsoever.

And those who do often discover that there’s not enough information provided to make intelligent decisions.

“Here’s your cost per click.” Okay, is that cost per click good or bad?

“Here’s how many phone calls you got.” Okay, but how many of those phone calls were actually leads?

“Here’s how much money you spent.” Okay, but how many leads were generated?

At the end of the day, they give you no way to know if your campaign is truly working or where your money is going.

Case in point…

One of our bathroom remodeling clients hired us to build their website, but already had another company running their PPC campaign.

They said at the end of the month, they’d get an email stating the cost per lead and the total number of leads.

When I asked them if the “leads” were actually good LEADS, they shrugged and said they didn’t know.

So I showed them what our WEEKLY reporting looks like—what PPC should look like.

I think I heard the guy fall off his chair over the phone.

Here’s the deal:

When you spend money on PPC, you should always INSIST that you know the following every WEEK:

• How much money was spent, to the penny.
• How many phone calls were generated.
• How many of those phone calls were actual leads—not just some dude trying to sell you copier toner. Or a customer calling in with a question. Or somebody who hung up before you could answer.
• How many real, bonafide LEADS you generated (from calls, web forms, and chat)
• How much each of those actual LEADS cost you to generate.
• How many opportunities you lost because you didn’t handle the calls correctly.

See, all the other numbers are just noise.

Cost per click? Who cares? Number of impressions? Irrelevant. Click through ratio? I couldn’t care less.

The above sentence is sacrilege in the PPC community. All the PPC nerds in the world breathlessly compare CPCs, impressions, and other nerd-crap that ultimately doesn’t matter.

The only thing that does matter is LEADS. And to be hyper-specific:

• How many leads do you get, and at what cost per lead?
• Are the leads high quality; do they convert into sales?

Nothing else matters. Literally nothing.

At the end of the day, you aren’t buying clicks. You’re not even buying leads. You’re buying SALES.

So all the nonsense, BS clicky numbers you might be getting from your PPC provider are just that. BS nonsense.

And if you’re not getting any numbers (reporting) at all—well, all I can say is:

You are a sucker. Sorry, there’s no other way to say it.

You are handing over money every month to somebody who is quite literally screwing you over.

They don’t have your best interest at heart. They’re not maximizing your spend. They’re simply loading their pockets with as much of your money as possible.

And you just let them.

Like a spouse you suspect of having an affair who puts a 10-digit lock code on their phone and refuses to let you check their call or text history.

You just sit there and take it. You hope everything will turn out alright—despite massive evidence to the contrary.

If that sounds harsh—it’s supposed to.

Here’s the good news: it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my next email, I’ll show you a REAL PPC report, and point out some critical elements you should be looking for.

Yes, a real PPC report has some of that nerd-crap on it, too. It will show the cost per click, number of impressions, and all that stuff. Of course. It’s part of running a PPC campaign.

But wait until you see the LEADS.

And the cost per lead.

And the calls that were NOT leads.

And the transcriptions of those calls.

And the leads that came from chat.

And the chats transcriptions that show which chats were leads, and which were not.

And the total number of opportunities you MISSED because you didn’t handle leads properly.

It’s all in there.

I’ll show it to you in my next post.

Until then, happy marketing!

Rich Harshaw

PS. Are you even using chat on your website (for PPC and regular web traffic?) If not, you are losing opportunities—big time. More on that in a future email.

© 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.