Normally, a digital agency would only publish a website traffic chart that is skyrocketing, showing just how awesome they are at getting results. However, we are taking a slightly different approach. As you can see above, we have posted one of our client’s traffic chart which from the outset, looks like we haven’t done a good job for them. The traffic went up for a few months and then went down, sometimes there were sharp declines.
Just like a Christopher Nolan movie, there is always a twist at the end! In Inception, we thought that Dom, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, wouldn’t wake up to the real world. Or in the Dark Knight Rises, that Batman would die as a hero in the end. How wrong were we in the end (sorry to spoil the ending if you haven’t watched them).
Similar to the movies above, if you continue reading, you’ll soon be saying “Ooohhhh…” or “Aaaahh…” for the ending. So, let’s start from the beginning.
Background Story
That’s Fencing is a fencing company providing timber fencing installation services to homes located in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Back in July last year we were approached by Heather, the co-owner of the business, for the second time. She was recommended to us by one of our existing clients. She previously used a digital agency whom she said hadn’t delivered any results for her business.
After thorough analysis, we decided to use Google Adwords primarily to help That’s Fencing get more leads and clients for the business.
TL;DR
Since we started the Adwords campaign back in July last year:
- The number of phone calls they receive every day went from 2-5/week to 10-20/day
- They filled up their appointment book from 1 week to 2-3 months in advance
- After we tweaked their website, they now rank no. 1 for Timber Fencing Melbourne
How did we achieve all of the above?
Scene 1
Of course we couldn’t suddenly come up with an amazing campaign without understanding and getting to know our client’s business. First and foremost, we had a discussion with the owners of the business regarding the target of That’s Fencing, and their target area, their core service offerings, etc. They filled out our questionnaire as well which helped us to understand their business and their sales process even more.
Scene 2
The basic foundation of That’s Fencing website was right. The phone number was highly visible on the top right corner. The submission form for quotation was there straight away as soon as visitors arrived at the website… or was it…? We noticed straight away that the website was using moving sliders to showcase images of their recent works.
You may say, “That’s how good websites normally are set up, aren’t they?” Well, if you go to Apple.com, Samsung.com, or Nike.com, you will notice straight away that the image that shows up as soon you arrive, doesn’t move. Yup, it’s only 1 image and text that says clearly “Buy”, “Buy Now”, or “Shop Now”. Do you think those companies don’t have enough products they can showcase? Of course not! They have heaps of product lineups, different models, different categories, etc. What’s the reason behind this?
As a business owner, the thing someone wants when web visitors arrive at their website will be one of the following call to actions:
A. Call me and make an appointment!
B. Book my service online!
C. Buy my products!
D. Submit your details so I can give you a quote!
For That’s Fencing, the owners wanted A and D. A highly visible phone number made it easy for them to get phone calls when visitors arrived at their site. However, the moving sliders didn’t help in getting request-for-quotation submissions from visitors. Human eyes reacts to moving objects and as soon as visitors focus on reading… BAM.. the slider moved and they felt lost.
Notre Dame University did a testing about sliders (also called carousels) and only 1% of total visitors clicked through from the carousel. The majority of these visitors (84%) interacted with only the first slide of the carousel. Back to the big brands websites, those who designed Apple, Samsung, and Nike’s site knew in order to make sure people buy the products they could not deploy sliders because that would hurt the conversion (aka the number of people buying the products from the website/ total number of visitors visiting the website).
So where did That’s Fencing submission form appear then? Yes, you guessed right, it was on the second slide! It was moving as fast as The Flash!
So we stopped the slider and moved the submission form to be the first and only image. What happened to the first image? Well, sadly, it’s been moved to mingling with other files in the digital bin (should we permanently say sayonara to them?)
Scene 3
That’s Fencing offers several types of fencing installations such as paling fencing, picket fencing, merbau fencing, etc. They also have a specialised page for each of these which is great. What wasn’t so great was that each page was just full of text and had something missing from the page. Here’s an image of what it looked like before. Can you guess what was missing?
If you guessed “submission form”, then you are 100% correct. We found that some visitors just wanted to get a quote for some quick jobs rather than call the business. In an industry where customers are used to asking for a quote, by having a submission form, we gave visitors an option to submit an enquiry. Otherwise they would have just left the website without taking any action. We also made sure that the form looked nice when viewed on mobile phones since 40% of their traffic came from mobile visits.
Scene 4
Sometimes, business owners forget to add a “call to action” message after writing service descriptions on their website. What is call-to-action (otherwise known as CTA)? According to Hubspot, CTA is:
An image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.”
For That’s Fencing service pages, we added a small paragraph so visitors who landed on the page could take “action”. What did we want them to do? We wanted them to call the business. Did you just think “But there was a submission form added already so why did you have to add this small paragraph?” The reason for seemingly doubling up here is that some people still prefer making a phone call to submitting to an online quote form. Additionally, since this CTA message was placed at the bottom, visitors who read the service description all the way to the end, could take action straight away without having to scroll back up to find the phone number. We made the phone number clickable which made it easy for mobile visitors to call That’s Fencing in an instant.
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 6CTR is the percentage of people who view your ad (impressions) and then actually go on to click the ad (clicks). (Total Clicks on Ad) / (Total Impressions) = Click Through Rate.
We also tracked actions performed by web visitors such as phone call link clicks and submission form tracking so we could trace the source of the traffic for reporting purpose and further analysis.
Results
Within 3 months of setting up the campaign, the owners of That’s Fencing were such happy campers. They received more phone calls, more submission forms, and more clients for their business. If you think “how could they get more calls, clients, etc because looking at the number of visits graph, it was surely declining? Surely, they can’t be serious?”
So glad that you thought about that, because this is where things get really interesting. Let’s look at another graph below.
As you can see, the orange graph represents the paid traffic and the trajectory is similar to the overall traffic – this means that the majority of visits came from the Google Adwords campaign that we had been running for them.
They had a small organic search traffic result but the major contributor came from Adwords. There were some periods when this campaign stopped completely or was reduced significantly. The reason? We were asked by the owner of That’s Fencing to put a pause on these campaigns! Here are some texts:
There are many more like these but as you can probably see, they were inundated with phone calls and request-for-quotation submissions as a result of the campaign we did. They simply had more clients than they could handle. What a great problem to have!
When they couldn’t keep up with demand, they had to ask us to stop the campaigns for them. In some cases, they were booked up 2-3 months in advance. We must say, it’s pretty impressive, if we say so ourselves.
We have proved that declining web traffic can be a great thing for a business too. If a business is getting 10-20 enquiries/day, is booked 2-3 months in advance, and is no. 1 on Google search under their main keyword, having to slow the pace of web traffic is actually a sign of success – not failure.
If you are a business owner reading this case study, you can implement some or all the methods we did above. Not sure how to do them or you need a friendly and professional team to listen to your business situation? You can call us on 03 9043 4444 or email us at hello@infiniteace.com to discuss about your goals so we can work out a plan for your business.