ItsTheROI

BACKGROUND

Could you provide a brief description of your company?

Our company is TicketPrinting.com and Ticket River, and we are an event e-commerce company with two offerings. The first offering involves event products from printed tickets, security tickets, wristbands, posters, flyers, event badges, and programs. The second offering is online event management and online ticketing.

What is your role and responsibilities?

CEO and co-owner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges you were trying to address?

Our goal is to work with a recognized SEO [search engine optimization] expert. We have been working with Jonah [Stein, found of ItsTheROI] now for six and a half years and was referred to Jonah through a couple of people. We really needed an injection of expertise and ItsTheROI certainly provided that. We wanted Jonah to do a full audit of all six of our sites. He did full audits of all those sites. He points out what we’re doing right and what we need to improve upon and really comes up with a very actionable list of things we need to do to improve our SEO.

SOLUTION

Can you describe the scope of work in more detail?

They did full audits of all six sites. They pointed out what we’re doing right and what we needed to improve upon and really came up with a very actionable list of things we need to do to improve our SEO.

Out of those audits, they clearly improved our position with Google. Once he was done with that, ItsTheROI was very good at understanding conversion and why people convert, purchase, and why they don’t. We went through a number of tactical projects to improve conversion. Now, our conversion rate is more than 4 percent, which is very good for e-commerce.

ItsTheROI is also a good marketer. They certainly did not limit or constrain themselves with SEO only. They give out ideas that materially improve our business. ItsTheROI was very good at pressing us to do sample kits. We can send that sample to prospective customers who are evaluating our products. He has helped us send out sample kits and follow up with a call to take a more proactive approach to the whole process. That’s just one example of many of how ItsTheROI has helped materially improve our company.

Is this an ongoing engagement?

Yes, we have continuously contracted and worked with them every single month for six and a half years. ItsTheROI is truly that valuable to us.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms or work-hour figure?

It’s about 20 hours per month.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share other statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

They have been great at helping us with our pay-per-click firm. Largely because of their conversion efforts, our return on ad spend has gone up around 80 percent. We continue to improve and increase our revenue. Year on year, we consistently enjoy double-digit revenue growth.

Is there anything else you’d consider unique or special about them that distinguishes them from other vendors you’ve used?

Jonah is persistent and relentless in pushing through changes. He does not give up. A lot of times, a consultant will give his advice and then sit back. Jonah pushes it and he makes sure that we implement it. He has no problems telling you that he thinks you’re wrong. He uses a ton of data to help make decisions and inform his decisions on our business.

Is there any area that they could improve on or that you would do differently?

When I look at what could be improved, it’s really been on our side. Jonah has been giving us advice and we just haven’t had time and resources to get it done.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your role and responsibilities.

I am the VP of marketing for a large education nonprofit. This is a national, top 300 website. The goal of the website is to help families get a great education for their kids. That includes a school directory that profiles every PK-12 [pre-kindergart through 12th grade] school in the country. It includes a lot of reviews that have been written by parents and other members of the school community.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with ItsTheROI?

I’ve been working with ItsTheROI for about eight years, and I’ve had them on retainer as a permanent advisor. This was both for the six years I’ve been with this organization and a couple of years prior, when I worked for another company. ItsTheROI is primarily a strategic advisor for everything relating to search marketing. Over the years, it has changed a lot. One of the most significant projects that they helped us with was a recovery from Panda, which was a big algorithm change for Google a few years ago.

At the time, as a national nonprofit, the traffic dip that we experienced was alarming to us because we are an ad-supported website. They helped us understand what we could do to get some reconsideration from Google. They went in deep with the analysis and made great recommendations for us to address some things about our website that, for a long time, we had wanted to get to. But, the collateral damage of Panda accelerated some product management work that we wanted to do. In short order, we were back where we wanted to be’ in fact, we were doing better than we had done before.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

ItsTheROI holds a primarily advisory role for us. We don’t use them for execution or day-to-day campaign management for paid search. I know they do that for some clients. We have a lot of in-house expertise to do day-to-day work. I use ItsTheROI as a very high level strategic advisor. They have their fingers on the pulse of what is going on within the search engine optimization industry as a whole. They go to all the right conferences, and they serve as a thought leader in the space. I don’t have time to stay current the way they do. I rely on them for that. With a website like ours that gets 70 percent of its traffic from organic search, he's a vital part of my digital marketing team.

What was your process for selecting ItsTheROI to work with?

I interviewed four different firms, and some of them were very slick and polished. They were very cookie cutter and strongly oriented toward e-commerce. That is not what we do at my nonprofit. I learned that the pay-per-click focus of some of the firms we brought in was not what I was looking for.

What impressed me most about ItsTheROI, and the reason I chose them over the other firms, was that they really get it. It became very clear in our conversations that not only would they advise me on a deep level about search, they were thinking about our website holistically, and they have never hesitated to make recommendations about usability, user experience, speed, and responsiveness, the things that stay even while doing mobile.

They pushed us to consider the things that are ranking factors. The other firms were primarily interested in the margin that they were going to get from our paid campaign.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

I don’t pay them on a time and materials basis. We pay them on a fixed fee, because some months it's very light and sometimes there is something big going on, like when we do a major overhaul of a landing page on our site. Then, we'll need more time. For budgeting purposes, I like to keep them on a flat rate.

In terms of my overall budget, I manage a department that has a million-dollar budget. Their fees represent around $24,000, or $2,000 a month.

Is the work ongoing?

Every year, we take a look at it. Currently, I have no plans to stop the work. Search has become something I've tried to embed throughout our organization. It's a broader understanding and facility with the principles that underlie a very positive search program. ItsTheROI is there when we need them, and they're worth their weight in gold.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

When we were hit with Panda, it was the day before I was going on a monthlong leave for my second child. We felt it immediately. Between 15 to 20 percent of our traffic went away. It reverberated throughout the organization, and even though I was on a temporary leave, within 24 hours, ItsTheROI had some concrete, clear recommendations for us to respond. It is not an understatement to say that they probably saved our organization hundreds of thousands of dollars that year, if not upwards of a million, depending on how we monetize the website.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

They are real. They are articulate, extremely smart, and down to earth. They are flexible and have adapted through the years. There has been a lot of talk that SEO is dead. It is definitely not dead. They have diversified their offerings with some very big clients, like backing up sites and hosting them in the cloud. They are solid as well as adapting to the times.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

The only thing would be if I wanted more of that day-to-day execution, they have a full client roster. Depending on the demand, they are very selective about the clients they take on. If the demand was very high, they would have to add capacity.