ExpertAdWords

What do you do if you have a product that is converting poorly? Currently, a product I manage is getting a measly 600 clicks a week. This amount of traffic is just pathetic and I have been talking with the brand owner about increasing visitors to the site. However, the only reason I am reluctant to do this is that the conversion rate for this landing page is a horrible .15%. That means in a nutshell, if 10,000 visitors clicked on our ads and visited the site, only 15 people would make purchases. At this rate, even if our cost per click was a meager $.50 and our average order value (AOV) is $90 we would be losing money hand over foot.

(2 orders * $90 AOV) - (600 clicks * $.50 CPC) = -120

Extrapolating this data, if we increase traffic a ten-fold:

(20 orders * $90 AOV) – (6000 clicks * $.50 CPC) = -1200

Obviously, the landing page needs a lot of work. That is the biggest problem if I am trying the core traffic to the site associated with this product. Additionally, I was trying to figure out the standard deviation of the conversion rate in order to justify not driving more traffic and I remembered a couple of concepts.

1. Standard deviation is irrelevant in this situation because an increase in sample size could dramatically change the average. If I make my net bigger, I may catch more fish.
2. Advertising and Marketing drive sales and not the other way around.

Obviously, what I am doing isn’t working and needs to be changed (lower Max CPC) but lowering my overall budget is not the answer. Being more creative and aggressive is.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Yahoo recently released an interesting survay detailing users search behavior before making consumer electronic purchases.

Highlights of the survay include:

• 77% of consumer electronic purchases are influenced by Internet research
• The least amount of time spent researching products was 9 hours for cell phones
• The greatest amount of time spent researching was 15 hours for televisions
• 73% respondents reported comparing products and prices online
• 64% prefered shopping online because of the wider variety of products
• 44% would research online and then purchase offline - Daily Searchcast attributed this behavior to the fact that “it is impossible for consumers to accurately gage factors like pixel-resolution (of televisions) online”.

LemmeFind

I found this really cool tool to compare all the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and gathers the results. The site actually shows the SERP so you can see exactly where your ads are showing up on each page.