Validation to maximise your SEO and PPC spend

Original article by Simon Wise

An awful lot is made of the amount companies should spend on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising online, especially if they are ecommerce companies, with digital marketers needing to know what their AdWords spend is and how to increase their page rankings with the various search engines. This has in turn spawned a generation of experts in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

So what are the typical costs for SEO? Some of the figures in a recent blog point to some of the costs charged by various agencies and consultants being as following:

• Monthly retainer - £500 - £5,000
• Contract service with fixed price – Variable dependent on services used
• Project pricing – anywhere from £1,000 to £30,000
• Hourly consultant rate – £100 - £300 per hour

The alternative way of making sure you are prominent on the pages of the various search engines is to obviously pay for an advert that appears either above or to the right of the natural listings but how much is the right amount to spend, how do you calculate the right Cost-Per-Click (CPC)?

Searchenginepeople.com have a calculation that might help –

Step-by-Step Calculation

Let's assume the Google Traffic Estimator projected a £5 average CPC.

Cost per visitor (Average CPC): £5

Your website converts at 10%.

1 lead / 10 visitors = 10% conversion rate

Since you will still have to pay for the 10 visitors, it will cost £50 per lead.

£5 per visit x 10 visitors = £50 per lead

Let's assume your sales conversion is 100 leads per month. Your online advertising budget should be £5,000 per month.

100 leads x £50 per lead = £5,000 budget

Now that you have your budget, plug in your average closing rate and calculate how many leads you could turn into sales.

100 leads @ 25% closing rate = 25 sales

Finally, calculate how much revenue you could make. Let's assume each sale is worth £1,000.

£1,000 x 25 sales = £25,000 in revenue

There you have it, a step-by-step guide to calculating a profitable PPC budget

So you have potentially spent a small fortune trying to attract people to your site in the hope that they will purchase your goods, therefore in order to maximise that expenditure, and increase your conversion rates, you really want to make the process of checking out as simple as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to introduce automation to the process and Postcode lookup is one of the simplest forms of automation available.

Address validation predicts addresses as users type - meaning less keystrokes and therefore less chance of abandoned carts. Addresses can be pulled using just a postcode and on top of this, the fields are auto-populated in the correct formats too - so no more road names in city fields and vice versa.

Address Validation from Data8 can be added simply and easily to your existing webform and we have developed a number of specific shopping cart solutions that can be integrated in to an ecommerce platform such as Magento or OpenCart.