…And it could be costing your business tens of thousands of dollars.
Last weekend I went to the Carlsbad Lagoon with some other families that have kids about the same age as my kids. They’re all between the ages of 3 and 11, about 12 of them between 4 families.
It was overcast but fairly warm, about 75* outside so the kids weren’t too in to swimming that day but fortunately my friend brought a kayak, SUP paddle board and a huge inflatable.
There were no waves at the lagoon so the water was pretty calm, and it was a shallow shoreline with plenty of dry sand for beach stuff along with lots of shallow water in front of us.
As I was standing ankle deep in the water, I noticed a particularly large blue crab moving pretty quickly between my feet and the dry sand, so I grabbed one of my friends and a bucket and we scooped him out of the water and onto the sand for a little show and tell for the kids.
The crab quickly nestled himself into a footprint in the sand and stopped moving so everyone could get a good look at his back. But the kids wanted a closer look.
So me, being a dude from the Pacific Northwest, growing up crabbing on the coast (dungeones crab) thought I’d be the cool guy by picking that thing up and showing off his underside to the kids and other adults.
As I picked him up, the little bastard reached UNDERneath himself – in a way the crabs I was used to couldn’t do, and grabbed a hold of my middle finger and pinched the crap out of it as I felt the pressure followed by a POP!
I quickly shook it off my finger but the pincer stayed on so I shook a little more until it fell off.
I was bleeding from both sides of my fingernail. My youngest daughter burst into tears and the other kids started screaming.
What in the world just happened! It wasn’t supposed to go down like that!
Well, I quickly googled “how to pick up a crab” and realized that I grabbed it wrong, and paid the price!
Marketing done wrong is like messing with something you don’t know anything about
I was on the phone with a new client who had spent about $10,000 on Google Ads over the last several months and wasn’t sure if there were any sales or leads because of the ads.
Whaaaa? Yup, it’s true.
How? You ask? No conversion tracking. There could have been sales, leads and a more optimized campaign with that kind of ad spend but it was literally wasted because conversions were not being tracked.
Simply put, when a Googler Googles something, finds an ad and clicks on it, then either makes a purchase or becomes a lead, the owner of that ad account should be able to have 100% visibility.
The visibility with conversion tracking in Google Ads:
- The dashboard will show which keyword generated the click
- Then you’ll see which ad they clicked on
- Then you’ll see all the other competitive metrics like CPC, ad position etc…
- And you should also be seeing another column called “conversions” which is triggered when you have a rule setup in the ads campaign that says:
IF a visitor reaches a certain page (usually a “thank you” page)
THEN count this as a conversion
What you get after collecting enough data is the road to an optimized campaign.
Some Google Ads conversion factors and optimization points:
- Keyword query that resulted in the conversion
- Ad that resulted in the conversion
- State where the user was in
- Time of day
- Day of the week
These are some of the biggest missed opportunities in conversion tracking within ad campaigns that I’ve litterally seen over $1m worth of ad spend on an account that absolutely COULD NOT be optimized … because there is NOTHING to make decisions on if you don’t have conversions tracked.
What I want you to do if you have an account like this and you’re wondering if it’s performing is fill out a form on our website and I will personally jump in there to have a look then give you some recommendations.
Now back to that damn crab…
He won the battle but I won the war because my finger is pretty much healed up but he has to grow a new hand 🙂
THE END
-Corey D. Rose