He had put together a sweet little landing site. He had 20 keyword groups running about 10,000 unique visitors a month. He was spending $5,000 per month on pay per click on sales of $6,000. He was collecting email addresses at a rate of 100/day through an opt-in form. He had placed his Google tracking data on confirmation page of his subscription form. He had great data he collected daily over past 4 months. He had calculated his visitor value based on commissions divided by clicks and was bidding accordingly. He was a dream client.

Could I help him?

I was drooling over this one. In this case I was 100% sure I could at least double his profits, and likely triple or quadruple. Why was I so sure?

1) He was tracking sign-ups, not conversions 2) He was selling 22 different items off of one landing page 3) He was calculating his visitor value incorrectly

The first thing I did was turn off his keyword groups one at a time. When I got to his top keyword group, one with highest conversion rate, we prepared for a massive drop in commissions. There was only a slight dip.

He was stunned. He had made a simple assumption – that there would be a correlation between signups and sales. That is, a keyword that produces twice as many signups would likewise produce twice as many sales. But that wasn’t true. We had seen vividly that there were keywords that produced lots of signups but few sales, and visa versa. He was bidding based on wrong data. His finely-tuned Ferrari of a website was, in fact, a peddler’s cart of clanking pots and pans strapped on with little thought to efficiency.

I had him write letters to each of his advertisers, requesting they place his Google tracking code on their Thank You page. That way he could track sales directly. (Important: Place code in an attachment; email programs can scramble code.) For a sample letter, click here.

Below are his answers to questions we put to him on June 3rd, 2005.

What is philosophy of your organisation?

The main goal for Article Depot is to provide a two-pronged resource for webmasters. The first is a place where they can distribute their articles and gain SEO benefit of links contained within. The second is to provide them with related and useful content to supplement their site and gain greater exposure. We combine these two things with a "Keep It Simple" philosophy. There are no confusing signups or new code to learn. Most article submissions take less than 20 seconds from start to finish.

What are organisation's plans and goals?

Our goal is to become a leading article distribution site by constantly adding new features that benefit people that make Article Depot what it is, webmasters.

What do you consider to your site's strengths and weaknesses?

Our strength is our ability to adapt. We always have features in development. Our biggest one right now is to have an RSS feed which webmasters can put on their site and display articles in their chosen category as they are submitted. This would mean they could have fresh content and wouldn't even have to come to site. Our weakness may be our passion for this type of site. We are always trying to see things through webmasters eyes which can be difficult when you have level of involvement with a site that we do.

What made you decide to run an article site?

I am a webmaster myself and I saw a need for a certain kind of article site. I struggled to find it so at first decided to build one to meet my own needs. It has now taken off with over 2,000 submissions every two weeks and unique visitors increasing 10% a day. I believe in it and feel it's future of SEO. Content will always be important and can often help protect you from Algo shifts.

As owner of ArticleDepot, what do you find to be some of your biggest challenges?

By far biggest challenge we face is SPAM. With any distribution site, most times you are judged on value of your site by quality of articles. This is why each article is viewed by a human reviewer before being added. This ensures quality of our database and ensures you are getting quality you expect when you come to Article Depot.

Do you think that content is still king?