discussion on advertising avenues and conversion rates

[Froogle]

Ok firstly what advertising avenues are there available ?

I've signed up for:

Google Adwords
Froogle
Kelkoo
Overture
Miva

Is there anything I've missed ? Does anyone have any opinions on the above ?

My main question is what sort of conversion rate are people getting with these methods? Is there anything that can be done to improve your conversion rate?

At the moment I am getting

Google Adwords 4.02%
Froogle 2.67%
Kelkoo 1.99%

Overture and Miva have just been set up so I've not had my adds approved yet.

Is this a good conversion rate? At the moment I am working on about 15% profit margin. Taking Adwords as an example:

If my conversion rate is 4.02% and I've had 448 clicks that means 18 people have bought something from my site. I would probably say (under estimate) £30 is an average order. So that would give me a profit of £81 from those 18 people. Those 448 clicks cost me £104.79 so I've lost £23.79. I don't mind this loss as out of the 448 clicks although only 18 bought, loads more might have bookmarked.

Have I worked this out correctly and what are people's thoughts? I dread to work out Kelkoo with a conversion rate of 1.99%. I'm hoping the tracking is not working and that figure is incorrect !

cheers

[jont]

Hi Nicholas,

you have missed out the 2 most salient points - what products you sell and what the figures were like prior to the advertising campaign. Product cost does not necessarily follow higher sales if you are in a very competitive market and with a market leader (eg books and Amazon).

Other advertising you can look at is printed media. Again this depends on your products and target audience. Local or National.

As with any campaign the initial returns may be very poor - if, as you say, people are book-marking you to return via a non PPC link. In traditional media a return of 1% was considered good if targeting unknown and new customers (as opopsed to existing customer databases).

It may be worth rotating the campaigns to spot any trends that follow to concentrate your efforts more defined.

[chris ashdown]

What sort of ppc rate are you paying in Adwords and what positions are your keywords at.

You may well find that dropping your keyword ppc rate will lower your position only slightly but cost you significatly less

For myself I am happy to be at number 6-8 on the first page of adwords and pay a small ppc than be number 1 and pay a much higher ppc rate

The number of clicks is dependant on position but the actual numbers does not vary much between the top position and number 10, slightly more for position 15 and a lot more for number 20

I suggest you play with adwords calculator to get whats best for you

I find Overture more cost effective than google as it covers more search engines

[mrs incredible]

I find Overture more cost effective than google as it covers more search engines

How does this equate in terms of what you pay per click, your click through rates and resulting sales?

[acompton]

I find Overture more cost effective than google as it covers more search engines

I'm new to this so I can't answer, but I have a friend who has been running an internet store for several years. He says he gets 4 times as much trade from Google as from all the other search engines combined

[steveaich]

After a complete ROI calc we find the the following is a reflection of the order of ROI effectiveness for the major search engines.

1)froogle (it's free)(but total turnover from it is low)
2)google ppc
3)kelkoo
4)overture ppc
5)other shopping directories

[AdamL]

This is a good period:



thats for the 1st two weeks of Jan 2006. Those figures are for placed & paid orders for a physical delivered product. not for lead generation or other non-revenue item. The prevailing rate is around 8.5%, generally not fluctuating more than .5% either direction.

It has taken over £100K and 2 years to develop the campaign to that level.

6% is considered good for a catalogue comapany. 4.2% is probably about average.

Building a succesful campaign is an artform in my opinion. Very difficult to offer advise on how to do it so i'll just say the main ingredients are Time, Speculation and Analasys.

To put that last sentance in perspective, Analasys is not simply checking the convertion rates on google from time to time - its long hard hours performing statistical analasys on many variables.

[chris ashdown]

£334.50 per day and I was worried about £6.00 per day

I would be happy if all of my sites made that much each day