Clicks, Customers, and Conversions

We had an email from a client recently asking about clicks. We built their website, and in the past year they’d been working with a company that took care of advertising for them. This company was promising 125 “clicks” a month if they re-upped for another year. Was this good, our client was wondering? Should they go for it?

Two things stood out for us immediately. The first — and it’s a red flag — was the guarantee. There are two ways you can guarantee a certain amount of traffic to a website. One is to pay people to click through to the website. There are companies that do this. They are not, however, paying those people to become customers, so this is a complete waste of your money and their time.

The second way is to choose a number so low that you can feel completely confident that the  number of visits will be higher than the number you offer. 125 clicks a month sounds like it’s in that range.

When we checked, though, we found that this company’s ads were actually delivering about a third of that number of visitors to our client. We might not be impressed by that number, but they were offering to triple the results with a re-up for a year.

The second point that caught our attention was that they were offering clicks — not impressions, conversions, or visits.

What’s a click?

Google ads are sold at a cost per click: that is, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad to visit your website, not just when they see your ad. There are other options with Google ads, but pay-per-click is standard for digital ads.

Your goal, however, is not to have large numbers of people clicking on your ad. You pay for each click. You want the right people to click through: the ones who will actually convert and become customers.

Clicks are just people clicking on your ad.

What’s a conversion?

Companies that sell clicks don’t necessarily go on to discuss conversions, but you can define a conversion any way you want in your business. You can configure conversions in many different ways in Google Ads or in Google Analytics if you want to track them.

Here are some things that can count as conversions in analytics:

• Buying something.
• Taking a step toward buying, by downloading information or sending a request for a sales call.
• Behaving in ways that you know are associated with becoming a customer, such as staying on your site for a certain length of time, checking out a store finder page, or visiting a certain number of pages. You must learn these things from your own experience to identify them as conversions.

As you can see, people can convert without becoming customers. If you know that 1% of the people who click through will set up an appointment with you and 67% of those people will actually buy, then a year of 125-clicks-a-month would mean one new customer. Whatever it costs you to get those 125 clicks a month for a year is the cost of one new customer gained by using those ads.

If you have a great landing page and 10% of people who click through to it will make an appointment, and you still sell to 67% of those people, you could have 8 new customers each month. Clearly, the cost per customer is much lower if you have this kind of conversion rate.

Is the price right?

If our client doesn’t know how many of those clicks convert into customers, then he has no idea whether 125 clicks a month will bring him any additional income at all. It’s essential to know your conversion rate at each point in the funnel. Without that information, he can’t determine the ROI of signing up for another year with the advertising company.

Ideally, he should be able to look back over the year and see where his new customers came from. How many arrived at his site through organic search? How many through the ads he’s considering? How many came from social media? If he hasn’t tracked this information over the past year, he won’t be able to find the data he needs — but today is a good day to start tracking the information.

Tracking Offsite Conversions