Potential Client Email Template

Also note that there are no Conversions being triggered inside your Analytics account (until I set up a test in March). I simply set up a goal of those that come to this page: http://potentialclienturl.com/contact-us/

However, I am not that confident that it is tracking the right way. It’s clearly tracking something, but inside your account, things look a bit odd. So, I think our marching orders are pretty clear.

Goal #1: Clean Up Tracking

• We want your Analytics accounts and AdWords accounts to talk to each other
• We would want to identify the real goals of the site, and set up accurate tracking of those goals.
• We want to make sure that the same goals are triggering on both the Analytics side and the AdWords side
• We want to estimate some value of each of the goals. Clearly, Get the Facts, Request Financial Aid, Free Consultation / Tour, and a Phone Call are all potentially worth different things to you.

I would suggest that Sebo works on this and tries to have everything in place by the end of this month. Normally we would charge a few hundred bucks to do this, but since I took much longer than I expected to get back to you, I want to do this for free for you 🙂

Goal #2: Gather Data

Fortunately, your site gets enough traffic that if we get the tracking issues sorted out by the end of the month, we will have enough data by around April 10.

Goal #3: Meet and Discuss the Data

At that point, we can decide if there are additional things that we could do to help you guys out. It might mean that we help improve conversion rates. It might mean that we adjust your PPC account. You are spending about $6 per click. It costs about $22 to get a lead. Once we really are tracking things correctly, we’ll see if the PPC spend makes sense.

Next Steps?

Interestingly, about 30 seconds ago, Kendall just said “Bruce! They don’t have Analytics code on all their pages! That’s one of the reasons why PPC and Analytics aren’t talking to each other.”

This is assuming that you will let us fix all the tracking issues for you for free:

• You give us FTP access to your site
• We clean up all the Analytics / AdWords Conversion Tracking / Tag Manager Code issues
• We discuss the primary goals, and we talk through some estimated conversion values.
• We set up all the goals and make sure Analytics and AdWords are on the same page
• We set up a follow up time to meet in person (your place or mine), and we discuss the data
• Then we discuss if and how it would make sense for Sebo to be involved.

Questions?

What Happened Next?

• The potential client called and said “You’ll really fix all those issues for free?” “Yep, without those things in place, we really won’t know if we can really move your needle and make your site more effective.” “Awesome! I’ll get you everything you need!”
• We fixed all the issues. He was thrilled. We proposed essentially 1.5 services per month on a rotational basis, plus some reporting and communication. They now pay us $1,000 per month.

• We checked all the standard items that should be configured in an Analytics account.
• Your Demographics tracking is working, and you’re hitting your target demographic well, with 47% of your visits all time coming from those over 65, and an additional 21% coming from the 55-64 age group
• Your Acquisition tracking seems to be working correctly. However, your traffic has been on a pretty steady decline since this Analytics account got running last October.

• You don’t have any Filters in place. This essentially means that any visits that your team makes to your site is being counted in your Analytics. I checked all views of your site, and you need to get these filters in place. In addition, you are counting visits from Google and other known bots. You are also counting visits from the bad non-human visitors, although fortunately, your site hasn’t been hit hard by those sites. Still, it’s a good idea to create some additional filters to protect your data.
• In addition to E-Commerce, you have 2 Goals in place. The Contact Us Lead Submission appears to be working correctly. The Marketo one doesn’t appear to be working, so I’m not sure what the thought process is there.

Best Practices

• Best Practice #1 with goals would be that you have different goal types set up. You have 3 different Goal URL’s, but they are all triggering the same goal. You could pretty easily gain some additional insights by splitting them out a bit.
• Best Practice #2 would be to estimate some goal values. You can gain lots of insights when you attach an estimated value to different types of goals.
• For example, you have a form on the Contact Page, and then you also have the Get Help Now form. Those should be set up with different goals, and they should be assigned different goal values. We know from your events that there are 19,087 people that clicked on the Get Help Now Widget, and I would love to know how many of those people submitted the form.
• As you know, the E-Commerce tracking isn’t working
• We also would love to help you get phone leads tracking
• You have Google Tag Manager in place, and it is triggering some events. It looks like it’s in pretty decent shape.
• Also, you guys really are relying heavily on PPC (67% of all your traffic is coming from PPC), and that makes me a a bit nervous. If Google ever decided to put some PPC constraints in place, it could cause major issues really quickly. I think that SEO should be a higher priority. And since you don’t have any filters in place, your traffic data is artificially high, which means that PPC actually represents more than 67% of your visits.

I also assume that you are aware that PPC has been paused since Sep 2.

From an SEO perspective, you have a huge opportunity here. We like to see sites get 50% or more of their traffic from SEO. You get 4% of your total visitors from SEO. When PPC drops, you just don’t have enough other sources of traffic. Too many eggs in one basket.

I ran a link profile for you guys. Good and bad news:

The Good Stuff:

• Your Link Profile is 21/100 which is better than it sounds
• You have over 28,000 links pointing to your site, which is great
• Our 3rd party believes that your “site has a good looking link profile” which is great

The Bad Stuff:

• Your Links to Domain ratio is awful. We want to see an average of about 10 links per domain. So since you 172 sites linking to you, you should have around 1,720 total links. You are getting about 173 links per domain. That’s way too many links from way too few domains. I can explain later.
• You have a number of funny looking links.
• You have 61 links with the text “cabochon rings – unique silver – designer silver rings”
• You have another link from “seniorpeoplemeet.com – #1 dating community for seniors – best 5 online senior dating sites”
• These aren’t causing problems yet, but it makes me very nervous, especially with trying hard to be honest and straightforward with everything you are doing.
• See the SEO Worksheet for more details

Lastly, see the PPC Metrics sheet

• Obviously you guys have greatly adjusted PPC strategies over the years, spending as much as $281k 1 year ago in October, to only $25k last month.
• Just to get an idea of approximate PPC profits, I assigned a value of $10 per lead, and then calculated your profits month by month since 2013. See column P of this worksheet.

Sebo’s Suggestions

What Happened Next?

• We set up a time to meet. We discussed the 4 options, and they asked us to take care of everything (item #4).
• They are now an Elite Sebo client, and have seen some great progress in many areas