Serendipity, movement of the clouds, barometric pressure,

whim, chance, Ichee, tea leaves…

I’m not meaning to make light of this situation, but the buyer is an extremely fickle beast. They must be wooed, encouraged, drawn in, provoked, facts pressed upon them, and who knows the exact right thing to do at the exact right time.

I would like to use a fishing metaphor to illustrate the process:

We are like the old fisherman, we are out on the river in our little boats. The sky is clear, the sun is warm, the breeze is just right, the water is running cold, clear and gentle, and it’s a great day to go fishin’. We have our favorite tackle box with all of our sure fire fish getters just waiting to be tested to see which one is going to be the best one for the catchin’ today…

Now the fish, they are cruising with the current or against it, but in any event they are not staying still. So our job is to entice the little critters to bite on what we are presenting them.

Unbeknown to us the fish are all busy swimming up the river under us. We are anchored to our location and they are free to go as they please. The result is that we are getting a constantly different set of fish from moment to moment, we are changing our bait, (sure fire fish getters), often, trying to come up with the right combination of events to entice them onto our line.

Does this seem to you that it’s pretty serendipitous? It sure does to me. Every so often we get one of the little things to bite. We say to ourselves, Aha! I’ve got you now. My red wiggler must be the right bait. But the group of fish that were interested in the red wiggler have moved on, and the new batch doesn’t want anything to do with our red wiggler, so we keep changing baits till we get another bite.

The moral here is perhaps we should get a hundred poles, and attach all of our best enticers to them and throw them all in at the same time. Then leave them alone for a while. If you get curious it’s OK to draw one of them in to make sure the darn thing is still attached, but leave them alone! Let them do their work. Catchin’!!

This is how this analogy fits while trying to get buyers:

There are all kinds of ways to describe the process, but we are working with an extremely large and diverse group of potential buyers. They are all individuals, very seldom are their wants the same as the other individuals in the group. We need to test them and tease them into clicking on our ads. Once they click, we need to get them to do a series of events that will eventually get money in our pockets, and we do all of this without ever seeing them or knowing whom they are!

So the hundred poles, (100 Ads), is the best way to get the largest amount of potential buyers to click on our ads. If you are changing the material in the ads every day you will never know if the ad would work or not. Be patient, let things rock along for a while, if you aren’t getting any clicks, well, change your bait.

When making changes to your ads DO NOT make multiple changes to the same ad at the same time. You are trying to find the BEST combination of words and characters to entice the viewer to click. If you change the title line of your ad to a question by adding a question mark, test it. Maybe that was all the ad needed to make it draw in the potential customers better.

Small verifiable changes are the only way to be sure that you are headed in the right direction. The most important part of this process is to diary each step, (I use an Excel spread sheet), and the effect each step has on all of the different criteria.

- Did the impressions go up or down?
- Did the CTR (Click Through Rate) go up or down?
- Did the cost from Google or Yahoo go up or down?
- What happened to the Quality Score in Google?
- Did you get more or less CTB’s (Conversions To Buyers)?

Relax a bit, enjoy the sunshine, and keep an eye on all them poles…