A client called to discuss helping them setup their account with web.com marketing services. We met via phone and went through the process with their sales rep and account rep. The client had already requested Tidewater Techs grant web.com management access to their google business account to tweak some things. While on the call the account rep went through the marketing plan, asked the standard set of business market related questions and if it weren’t for her lack of confidence and inability to answer some questions on accessing adwords and analytics for the web site that was created, things would have gone smoothly. We all went through the dashboard and the client was pleased. Then we were shown the leads page where we already had a few leads. Web.com gives you the ability to listen to all recorded calls and we did. We found those calls to be existing clients. Confused as we had not yet started any advertising campaigns, I did a search and found the Google Business listing was changed. Web.com, without notification to the client, changed their primary office number and web address (URL) to the marketing phone number created by web.com and the marketing website created by web.com. The client was outraged. Tidewater Techs immediately changed the number and website address back to the client’s primary services and proceeded to revoke management access to the client’s google business listing. Speaking with the client on the matter, they chose to continue the services to see if the promised 10-12 leads per month would add valuable new business to their bottom line.
Week 2. No new leads! No new phone calls! No new web traffic. The ad campaign was weak to say the least and the keywords were all over the map with more industry terms over public terminology. The ads were not generating any clicks and the ad spend was almost nothing.
Week 3. Ad spend was continuing with little more than $40 a week on a $1200 budget. No new leads and virtually no traffic to the marketing only site. A report from the web.com dashboard showed low impression rate and even lower click through. Tidewater Techs called the customer support line with web.com to ask what was going on. They informed us all ads were running properly and it will take 60-90 days to get things moving with new leads but they still expected to reach the 10-12 leads as promised in the first month.
Several phone calls and emails were made to the sales rep asking various questions. Almost all requests were ignored in email. When the sales rep did return a call, the response was simply they had sent in a request to the web.com support team as they had no idea about spend, budgets, campaign drive or anything related to generating traffic.
The conclusion. We cancelled the campaign. The lack of support and understanding of the client’s business paired with just the overall bad taste left the client feeling unsupported and swindled. The client was very grateful for Tidewater Techs being there to explain what web.com could not and to catch the misleading marketing strategies by taking over the client’s web and phone number. Web.com has many services, some used by Tidewater Techs, this was a bad experience. The client has contracted Tidewater Techs to work with them in more detail to leverage extremely targeted marketing to drive business to their existing website (which was something web.com was not willing to do).