Whether to Advertise at All Yet

What advertising actually does

It buys visits. That is the whole of it.

What happens to those visits is decided by the site they arrive at, which is the same site your existing visitors use.

Which means advertising multiplies whatever your current conversion looks like, in both directions.

A page that turns one visitor in twenty into an enquiry will do the same with paid visitors. A page that turns none into enquiries will continue doing that, at a cost per visit.

The three prerequisites

• The site converts the traffic it already receives.
• You can measure enquiries, at least by counting them.
• You have capacity to take on more work.

All three, and the third is the one businesses skip because it feels like a good problem to have.

Advertising into a full diary means paying for enquiries you decline, which annoys the people declined and wastes the money entirely.

Testing the first one

Before spending anything, establish whether the site works.

Count enquiries against sessions over three months. That ratio is your conversion rate, roughly, and it is what advertising will inherit.

If a hundred visitors produce two enquiries, then buying four hundred visitors should produce about eight, and you can work out whether eight enquiries is worth what four hundred visits cost.

If a hundred visitors produce none, advertising will produce none more expensively.

That calculation takes ten minutes and it is the one nobody does before starting.

A worked example

A business that started advertising with a monthly budget, on the advice that it would grow enquiries.

After three months the spend had produced a reasonable number of visits and two enquiries, neither of which converted.

Their existing organic traffic was converting at a similar rate, which nobody had checked beforehand.

They stopped, spent the equivalent of two months of budget improving three service pages with prices, timescales and a clearer phone number, and restarted six months later.

The same spend then produced considerably more enquiries, because it was buying visits to pages that answered the questions people arrived with.

The advertising had not been the problem either time. It had faithfully reflected the site at both ends.

What to fix first

The things that determine what happens after somebody arrives.

A tappable phone number visible without scrolling.

Prices, or a range, on the pages advertising would send people to.

A form asking for three things rather than nine.

The service area named plainly, so out-of-area clicks are self-selecting out before they cost you.

And a page for each service you would advertise, rather than sending everybody to the homepage.

Where the traffic would come from anyway

A specific waste worth knowing about before starting.

Advertising on searches where you already rank first organically buys clicks you would have received free.

The effect is not total, since some people click the ad who would have clicked the listing and some would have scrolled past both, and it is real.

Which means the searches worth advertising on are the ones where you do not already appear, rather than the ones you already win.

Checking your own ranking for the terms you plan to bid on is a ten-minute exercise and it frequently removes several from the list.

The counter-case

Where advertising early is justified.

A brand new business with no organic visibility at all, where advertising is the only way to get any traffic and the alternative is waiting months for search to produce anything.

A genuinely time-limited opportunity, such as a seasonal service with a short window.

Testing whether demand exists for something new, where a small spend answers a question faster than any amount of speculation.

And a business with capacity now and a pipeline that will not fill in time by other means.

In each of those the site still needs to work, and the argument is about timing rather than about skipping the prerequisites.

What it costs to find out

Worth being realistic, since this is where budgets are set badly.

Learning whether advertising works for your business takes enough clicks to produce a meaningful number of enquiries, which for most trades means several hundred clicks.

At typical local costs that is a real sum, spent before knowing anything.

Which means the decision is not whether to try a small amount. It is whether you can afford the amount required to get an answer.

Spending less than that produces a number too small to interpret and a conclusion drawn from noise.

The alternative uses of the money

Worth comparing honestly, since advertising is rarely the highest-return option for a small business that has not done the basics.

Collecting thirty reviews, which costs nothing but effort and affects every future search result.

Writing three proper service pages, which is a one-off cost that keeps producing.

Photographing a year of work properly.

Fixing whatever is stopping the current traffic from converting.

All of those compound and advertising does not: it produces visits while you pay and stops when you stop.

What an enquiry is worth

The figure the whole decision rests on, and most businesses have never worked it out.

Take your average job value, multiply by the proportion of quotes that become jobs, and that is roughly what an enquiry is worth to you.

A business with an average job of two thousand dollars converting one quote in three has enquiries worth something in the region of six hundred and change, before costs.

Which sets the ceiling: paying more than that per enquiry loses money, and paying close to it leaves nothing.

Then divide by the proportion of clicks that become enquiries, and you have the maximum you can pay per click.

That number is what tells you whether advertising is viable in your market before you have spent anything, and it is a five-minute calculation.

Deciding

1. Count enquiries against sessions for three months.
2. Check you have capacity for more work.
3. Fix the phone number, prices and form.
4. Work out what an enquiry is worth to you.
5. Work out what you can afford to pay for one.
6. Only then consider a budget.

The fourth and fifth together are the whole decision, and a business that cannot answer them is not ready to spend regardless of how good the campaign is.

Anybody selling you a campaign should be able to walk through that arithmetic with you, and one who will not is worth being cautious about.

How to establish that conversion figure is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.