Smashing revenue goals
Went to Cairns last week where I presented on revenue. It was very well received and I’ll be teaching again at this year’s Retail Global on the Gold Coast. I’ll be showing off some new revenue techniques that I won’t be doing in public. This week I’m talking about a client that was getting a poor return on his ad spend. The Google AI wasn’t working well with his site. I gave him three things to fix and his ad revenue is up 48,000 percent!
What I learned
- Get your tickets for Retail Global on the Gold Coast in May
- Google’s AI ad products need strong site structure
- 3 things that’ll be saving for the Retail Global workshop that increased ad revenue 48,000 percent
- Why the revenue model doesn’t suit all retailers
- Why we don’t bow to Google
Transcript
Hi! Welcome back Rankers. If you came out and saw me in Cairns last week thank you very much. I had an absolute ball, met a saltwater crocodile named Sugar and she was lovely and a carpet python and a whole bunch of wonderful people. I hope to be back soon. That was a lot of fun. I wanted to carry on from last week, about our revenue model. Because I developed a couple of techniques recently that I will be teaching at the Gold Coast Retail Global workshop only; I’m not going to be doing these publicly.
But what I will be telling you today, is that it isn’t anything different to what we’ve been talking about in the past. Right? So, all of these things, it’s in my videos, how I’m putting it together now is a little bit different and that’s proprietary in nature. But, essentially, you can do this at home. Now, this is what I showed you last week. I’ve just extended the date range. I’m recording this on March 30 and it is March 30. So we can see now it’s 93 percent up on the previous year. Our Google revenue is up 151 percent. Interestingly, once again, our organic traffic is still down 32 percent because we’re buying a lot of that. However, the organic traffic is down, but the revenue is up 29 percent.
That’s because of these other changes that we’ve been doing. You might say, “Well Jim, how much did you spend on ads?” Well, good question. Our return on spend, including Google Ad spend and our fee for that client, is 1600 percent this month. That’s including our fee. That’s hard to do. This is the ad spend, it is up $3100 from last March and that has produced an extra $82,000 or there about. So that’s pretty good, that’s a pretty good return.
3 magic tips
Then I went ahead and looked at another client, because this client, they only sell one to two dollar items, 50 cent items, and little things. Sometimes they only sell one and they lose money on the transaction. But, we just set a small ad campaign up for him because we set down that you should be able to do some ads. Because it’s very cost prohibitive to market this sort of stuff, right? We set that up for him, but he rang earlier in the month and said, “It’s just not working.” We had a look at the return on ad spend and it just wasn’t getting it. It was down at three or four hundred percent, which is not great for what he’s selling. Especially because we like to get up around a thousand percent.
Now the products … the ad products we were using on his site were the AI products within Google. They rely, as I’ve said in the past, a lot on the structure of your site and how well it’s structured. Do you have structured data? Are your merchant feeds all up to date? For the dynamic search ads, they don’t require a merchant feed, so where is all your content? Can we scan it? Can we get in there? All those sorts of things. And then your normal speed, everything else.
We hadn’t done any of those sorts of things to his site cause it’s essentially, they’re kind of SEO. I just said look, just go do this, this, this, and this. And I gave him three things. Those three things is what I’m going to be teaching in the workshop. And he went and did it himself. Now, he’s not a technical person, and these weren’t necessarily that technical for him to do. But the results were that his traffic this year is up 66 percent and as you can see 70 percent of his paid traffic is right up. So we’ve bought a lot of traffic for him. The result of that, the traffic he was buying last year basically didn’t give him any, well it gave him one sale for ten dollars. This year he’s had 48,000 percent increase on his revenue.
Sorry, there’s flies in the studio. This year, we’ve got a 48,000 percent increase on Google ad revenue. That’s pretty cool. Organic is more inside, you can see here. We’re only slightly up on organic. Organic’s only a little bit up, and we’re not doing any organic for him. Keep that in mind, no organic. And his sales are up 77,421 percent. And this has only happened since we made these changes on the seventh of March, right.
That’s 33,000 percent up for his direct traffic. A whole range of just ridiculously awesome numbers. Month on month it’s more than doubled. I think overall the site is up nearly 600 percent on revenue. It’s just crazy right? And these are simple things to do. If you are interested in finding out how we do this, it does not work for every retailer. Let me emphasise and stress that.
If it ain’t broke!
The reason it doesn’t work for every retailer, is that some retailers just can’t handle it. Case in point, the one I showed you last week, their revenue is now tanking because someone decided, in this organisation, which is a larger organisation, that they were going to change the Hero page that was generating all the revenue. That’s an internal decision. It’s a bit soul destroying if you’re working on it when you’re seeing these sorts of numbers. That’s why it just doesn’t work for everyone.
If you are coming to the workshop, keep that in mind. You’ve got to be a fairly agile organisation, fairly aware and focused on the lead measures and the metrics that you need to be. When I talk about lead measures, I’m talking about, you know just the things we’ve always talked about. Speed, ease of use, errors, up-time, everything, all the SEO stuff. I had a client, not a client recently, say, I can’t see any SEO in this proposal. I said everything’s SEO. Everything’s SEO because all that Google is trying to do is provide the most relevant result for the user, that’s a really great experience.
Our job is to make your website a really great experience for the user and get stuff Googled. We’ll use your ad products and if you want to send us organic traffic, cause we’re awesome, do it. Because we’re gonna make more money from it. But we’re not going to go and try to bow to the algorithm, or you know, try to trick the algorithm. Because at the end of the day we can make more money doing three simple things.
Hope to see you at the workshop. End of May 2019, tell your friends, share the video. Subscribe if you like it. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
