The Wall Street Journal’s Ruth Simon writes today about how lenders are using the rise in short-term mortgage rates to convince borrowers to swap their adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) for a fixed-rate one. She told how CitiMortgage, Wells Fargo, and others are targeting borrowers through direct mail, statement inserts, and telemarketing campaigns.

To see if these tactics had spilled over to the online world, we tried a few Google searches to see who was advertising "ARM to fixed-rate conversions." The only highly targeted ad was by DiTech, <ditech.com> the online lending unit of GMAC.

Under our search, "trade ARM for fixed mortgage," their AdWords promotion used the headline, "Dump Your Adjustable & Get a Fixed Rate Loan from Ditech.com" (click on screenshot above for a closer look), exactly what we were looking for. Unfortunately, DiTech has not created a landing page that speaks to this niche. We were dumped on their busy homepage (click on screenshot below for a closer look) and left to our own devices to figure out how to accomplish this intricate task.

Analysis
It’s simple to see what went wrong here:

   Great search engine marketing
+ horrible website execution
= wasted $$$$$

The old advertising cliche about the fastest way to kill a bad product is with great advertising is doubly true with search engine marketing. Great search engine marketing increases click-throughs, driving costs through the roof, while poor website execution pulls conversions down, making the whole effort appear terribly cost ineffective.

So before launching any clever search engine campaigns, make sure you are able to cash in on the traffic.

—JB