Learn how a new client turned an expensive SEO marketing campaign from a high-traffic low-conversion situation into a profitable marketing strategy.

The Challenge
Just prior to becoming an XModus-client, one of our customers retained the services of an online marketing firm that guaranteed to send more "traffic" to their shopping site using their expertise in search engine optimization (SEO). Their sales pitch was that by driving more traffic to the shopping site, that the client would see more sales -- simple: more traffic equals more sales. Their fee to the client was a small charge for each page-hit, calculated by the SEO-firm. This seemed reasonable and the client agreed to try them out for a few months on a trial basis. Sales did increase and although they were paying only a few thousand dollars a month it seemed like a good investment but the customer wasn't totally convinced that the campaign was truly successful.

The Solution
When XModus converted the client's shopping site to Rebus, the first marketing campaign they began to track was the seemingly successful SEO campaign. Immediately something was wrong though, as the numbers that Rebus was reporting showed that indeed there was a great deal of traffic being generated by the SEO campaign but the resulting visitors mostly hit the home page and then immediately left the website without even looking around. As well, the number of visitors recorded by Rebus differed substantially from the counts provided by the search firm -- they were counting all individual page hits as visits, instead of a single visitor possibly visiting multiple pages on the site.

Our client was shocked. Their seemingly successful SEO campaign was in fact costing them more money then was being generated and the traffic being sent to the site was completely untargeted. Our client sent the results of the Rebus campaign performance report to the search engine firm -- they were not pleased either. To their credit, the search engine firm agreed to change their billing to visitor-based and agreed to send more targeted traffic to the site. Within a few days the volume of the traffic dropped but the quality of the traffic increased substantially.

The Results
From an initial conversion rate of 0.29% to a more respectably 1.1% visitor to order conversion percentage. Our new client was able to save a few thousand dollars per month on this single marketing campaign as well as generate more revenue from the campaign. Coupled with better repeat visitor mechanisms included with Rebus, our customer has not only reduced their customer acquisition costs using the SEO campaigns but they have also turned an expensive and money-losing part of their business into a successful money-generating situation.

Keywords: SEO campaign control, lower marketing expenses, controlling marketing expenses, marketing campaign tracking