PANICWARE: SAVE PPC DOLLARS, EASE SUPPORT CALL VOLUME
Panicware is a leader in privacy software and creator of the top-selling ad-blocking software, Pop-Up Stopper. Called 'a virtual godsend' by USA Today, and 'a simple pleasure' by Time magazine, Pop-Up Stopper is part of a larger collection of tools and resources offered by Panicware on their web site, www.panicware.com.
Before ClickTracks
Kyla Carrigan, web analyst at Panicware, had an issue on her hands. Because customers knew they could count on fast, thorough answers from Panicware's support department, many of them began asking questions not only about pop-ups, but also and . Panicware's support department was being virtually overwhelmed. Even though they didn't have a current product offering in the / space, Panicware didn't want to leave customers hanging. How could they give customers the answers they needed without tying up valuable tech support staff?
Another concern related to the company's PPC campaigns: because of their strict 'no cookies' policy, Panicware was having difficulty ascertaining how much revenue a particular PPC advertisement was generating. They weren't certain that they needed to be spending the money on pay per click campaigns. Kyla turned to ClickTracks Professional to help solve the mystery.
After ClickTracks
The first thing Kyla did after installing ClickTracks was to perform a 'benchmark' analysis. "We hadn't looked at usage data with any granularity before, and needed to know how our web site changes affected our visitors," noted Kyla. "Because of our interest in decreasing our support incidents about , we paid special attention to the 'top entry pages' on the Site Overview report."
"Our goal was to find an already-popular entry spot and add a big link to a -focused page with answers to typical / questions and removal advice. The Site Overview report showed us two pages that definitely needed the link: the home page, and an informational page that's accessed from within the Pop-Up Stopper product. We wrote up the info, created the page and then instituted the links."
And the result? "We saw a 20% decrease in support incidents, as well as a decrease in the amount of time spent on -related questions," noted Kyla. Additionally, monitoring the site in ClickTracks' Navigation report ensured that the addition of the link wasn't damaging successful conversion rates of other pre-existing links.
Another ClickTracks insight came in the area of pay-per-click advertising. "We were spending a pretty decent amount of money every month on pay-per-click advertising, but had our suspicions that the ads weren't generating as many sales as we'd like," said Kyla.
Within ClickTracks Search Engine report, Kyla used the label wizard to separate PPC visitors from organic visitors. Then she looked at several factors, like sales by keyword and average time on site, and came to an unmistakable conclusion: Panicware was performing extremely well in natural search results on the keywords most important to them. Their search engine optimization efforts were working; in fact, in most cases, visitor conversions were much higher from natural search results than PPC campaigns.
As a result, Kyla cancelled 100% of the costly PPC campaigns. Since cancelling, savings have been significant, but site traffic has not suffered. And while Kyla admits that a new product offering may necessitate future PPC campaigns, the money Panicware is saving now can be better spent in the future.
"The way that ClickTracks presents the info makes it easy for us to immediately spot areas we need to look at more closely," concluded Kyla. "I'm excited to have a way to better understand visitor behavior."
