Sign up today for FREE to become
a part of the fastest going business franchise network.
Posted by Matthew in Articles on 30.11.2008 2:34:56 am | 110 views
There are now many companies in my industry dealing with lead generation for franchisors. They are all after the same thing, a share of this very lucrative market. With more and more new franchise directories popping up every year, the market share is fast getting divided and the costs of generating leads is going up and up. These costs are rising through peoples brute force use of pay per click advertising (PPC) (Google Adwords and others).
When I first started out I delved into this style of advertising and soon found out I would go bust if I carried it on too long, at up to £2.50 per click and a few hundred clicks per day if you set you budget as unlimited it soon adds up. So I stopped. The problem lies in 4 areas.
1. Franchise advertising companies are competing against each other and bumping the average cost per click up. The more new companies, the higher the CPC (cost per click)
2. Franchise advertising companies are competing against their clients who also use PPC.
3. Franchisors are competing against other franchisors and again driving the average CPC up.
4. New franchise advertising companies are going in head first and not developing their site in any unique ways.
Now - this is all good news for Google but not good news for franchisors or franchise advertising companies, the market is now so saturated that anyone using PPC is really finding it to be a strain on their resources which is why that as fast as new companies are arriving on the scene, others are dropping out. There are literally dozens and dozens of skeleton sites out there that tried to get into the market and failed, making up a graveyard of unused sites that lie dormant, abandoned.
The internet may seem like an easy buc but the BUCK stops there, 10 years ago anyone with a good idea could make a killing but now it's like a real world business. Competition is tough and overheads are not so minimal any more.
The Conflict
The conflict comes when a franchisor who uses PPC advertising decided they want to also advertise with X franchise lead generation web site. X charges them £3000 a year and starts up a brute force PPC campaign for them, the franchisor then decides to really boost their web presence by advertising with 6 X websites, all costing from £1,500 to £5,500 a year and all 6 start PPC campaigns. They are now all competing against each other for the top spot in the sponsored listings, driving the CPC up. Including the franchisors own PPC campaign which used to run at £150 per day for 100 clicks. But now runs at £150 per day for 60 clicks due to his presence on other sites. The conflict comes when everyone is using the same form of advertising and creating competition circles.
This is all great news for Google but bad news for everyone else.
This article was about the conflict and the problems that arise with too much use of PPC and not about the solution. The solution lies with intelligent marketing but this is something that is a business strategy and the key to success. The key to success lies somewhere over there ====>X Find that key and the conflict goes away.