I encountered a nasty situation recently with an offline business who was spending a ton of money on Google Adwords to drive traffic to her site.
Despite getting record level of clicks on her Google ads, she was getting virtually no phone calls and her business was suffering as a result. She blamed the person who was doing her adwords for screwing things up, but it turned out that was not the problem.
Now what actually was happening was she in an effort to grow her business decided to hook up with a sweepstakes vendor and put a banner on her site offering people a chance to win free services for signing up.
This was very prominent and not surprisingly, people did as the site directed and signed up for the free services. Once they did, they were taken to a page where they were encouraged to send emails to there friends to get them to sign up for the drawing as well. If they did or didn’t they were taken to a page where they could sign up for 22 other contests or freebies.
The net result was that this contest diverted people away from the task at hand, which was to convince them to call to get a quote on her business services.
I have long been an advocate of getting people to set up list building opt ins, but in this case we see a tragic example of it actually being counter productive and doing real damage to the business in the short term.
Now there may have been ways to mitigate the damage, had they had an immediate follow-up sequence of emails to recapture the attention of the people who signed up for the contest, but they did not.
If you are paying money to drive people to a site, your focus should be on getting them to take action that pays. Not getting them to sign up on a list. This is particularly true when you are paying in excess of $10 a click on many of the keywords.
If on the other hand you are driving free traffic to a site, getting those names may well be the best way to capitalize in the long run, particularly if you have set up a site to offer free information that leads to a longer sales funnel.
[tags]internet marketing mistakes, When not to list build, list building errors[/tags]