BT has seen the future – it’s called BT Web Clicks!

A good friend of mine forwarded me a BT email on Thursday announcing a new product that ‘will carry BT's advertising portfolio forward in the next few years’.


BT, apparently, aims to move its marketing packages away from paper, to much more interactive methods of generating business leads. I wonder if this is part of it’s 21C initiative?

They’ve realised that:-

• 86% of the UK’s population visited a search engine in February 2006!


• That the UK Paid Search market grew by 65% during 2006


• And that paid search marketing is by far the most popular online advertising format, accounting for 57.9% of all online ad spend in 2006.

BT says that Search marketing is a proven way of generating leads directly from both major and local search engines, however getting it right and running a search campaign to generate quality leads can be both time consuming and costly. That’s spot on, BT!

They say that it takes 30 hours to set up your campaign and 10 hours a month to maintain your campaign. Only that much, I must be going wrong somewhere!

BT Offers (and I quote):-

• A Fixed budget – you can choose the budget so you know exactly what you will spend each month.


• Guaranteed leads – for the package you choose they will send you the agreed number of leads


• Advertising text – BT use professional (mmm… I wonder if they really do - see later) online copywriters to create a text ad for your website to attract customers


• Keyword generation – their team of experts analyse your website and current usage on search engines to choose the keywords that are going to generate you relevant leads to your site


• Leads direct to your door – when a customer clicks your sponsored link they go straight through to your website, wooooarh! (I wonder how much they paid their advertising & marketing consultants for coming up with this)


• No admin – their automated systems connect directly with the search engines to bid on keywords and upload your sponsored links

Well, they don’t say BT is at the cutting edge of what’s happening for nothing. Just how long have they been thinking up this devilishly clever new scheme?

Oh yes, and they’re so confident in the product that they ‘will guarantee the number of clicks your website will receive in twelve months and give you your money back if the agreed figure is not reached’. Sensational, eh?

But it gets better!

For only £80 per month they will guarantee 480 clicks per year and for just £200 per month you can have 1200 clicks per annum (I suppose there must be a volume discount in there somewhere).

Now, before you rush off to sign up, there’s one thing they’ve forgotten to mention in their very attractive presentation. Yep, Quality of clicks. And as you know that’s the only thing that I think is important. Any idiot can get traffic to your website, what matters is the quality not the quantity.

Now, much as I’d love people to pay me £200 per month to deliver 200 clicks to their website (in fact I’d even do it for half that), if you’re focussing on just clicks you’re missing the point, and the huge potential of targeted search marketing.

A lot of people can set up a PPC campaign (though, admittedly, quite a few can’t), many people can even ‘professionally’ write Ad Copy, some people can even research & develop a keyword list, but the point is that BEFORE you do any of that you have to develop a proper marketing plan (I’ll omit the phrase strategy if it sounds too pompous but hopefully you get my drift) and, with respect to BT, you can’t do that for £80 per month. Even if you paid them £400 per month, I doubt BT would have the calibre of people, at this level, to develop a proper marketing plan for your business.

Once you’ve properly crafted your marketing plan (and I use the word carefully and deliberately), developed your keyword list, written your copy and developed your landing pages (something BT forgot to mention in their presentation and probably one of the most important factors), then you have to properly and actively MANAGE the campaign, test out different approaches & strategies, find out what works and what doesn’t and develop a proven viable model.

Even if you’d paid BT £2,400, would you really be able to say you’d developed a proven formula based on just 1,200 clicks (that’s 23 clicks a week or just over 3 a day)?

Ah yes, one more thing on the BT bashing front. As BT acknowledge, it does take at least 30 hours to set up a campaign and 10 hours per month to manage it. I make that 150 hours per year. Now if BT are going to charge you £80 per month and promises to deliver 480 clicks into the bargain using PPC routes, one presumes they’re going to have to pay Messrs Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, et al something for those clicks. Now my simple maths works out that would mean you were paying BT less than the national minimum hourly wage rate, so either they were subsidising this grand caper or something was up.

Anyway I’m now off to design a new product that will allow people to pay me a lot of money for doing & achieving nothing. I think I’ll call it Web Chicks!

Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/