As a dealer vendor in the online advertising/marketing sector, it is your innate duty to justify the money your dealer gives you. That’s what makes online marketing different - the accountability. It’s easier to take radio or newspaper dollars and chalk up the lack of accountability to “branding”, but with the Internet it all comes down to Cost-Per-Lead and the ability to match leads to vendors.
Yet there are many vendors competing for the same justification of the same existence. An example – my previous company sold SEM/SEO services…but we didn’t provide the actual website. So we built “microsites” in order to segregate our leads and say “look at these great results…we deserve what you pay us for”. No harm done, but in theory why would a dealer want two different websites and who were we really helping by separating SEM visitors from the dealer’s Direct website visitors? That’s right, ourselves. We needed to justify the money our clients spent with us regardless of the TRUE value to the dealer. Allow me to be clear – I’m a huge fan of accountability…but at the end of the day, SEM visitors ARE Website visitors, and with proper analytics a dealer has the ability to track and separate out SEM visitors from their Direct or Organic visitors. But…we felt good about telling our clients they received X many leads because of us, and in the end our dealers wanted to know their ROI specific to Search.
So let’s look at a deeper-routed problem, and the real reason for this post. There are plenty vendors out there that seem to be riding coattails and molding data solely to justify their existence no matter the true value of their product. Online chat, sweepstakes providers, certain media services, talking avatars and even pop-up lead forms are all giving the dealer a report back that says “hey look what I brought you…now pay me”. Frankly some of it is just plain insulting, and below are a couple enlightening examples.
A) There’s one very large SEM provider whose sole responsibility is to manage their clients’ Paid Search campaigns. They mirror the dealer’s website, switch the phone numbers and lead forms and provide reports on clicks, phone calls and email leads. They don’t provide website reports, because that’s the job of the real website provider…and well, its not their website. Yet in their SEM report to the dealer they provide a column for “web events”…or as I like to call “frivolous user behavior”. If it’s not an SEM email lead or a SEM phone call, why is it in your report and why are you taking credit for something you didn’t build?!?
B) I recently had a dealer tell me that the pop-up on his homepage that he pays $250 per month for resulted in 50 leads last month. I had to bite my tongue when I saw his very own website lead form was sitting directly behind his $250 pop-up lead form. Not to mention his lead form actually looked better and required less information, which is proven to increase lead submissions. So I carefully explained that the 50 people who filled out the $250 pop-up would have filled out his own lead form just the same (if not more) if the pop-up wasn’t there…oh and the $3,000 he could save on his pop-up could deliver over 3,000 more people to his website on an annual basis.
My point? For once, I’m not certain. But I will say this – the environment is quickly changing, and in the near future I believe a vendor’s true value won’t be weighed by his bag of leads.
