Search Engine Advertising - Misconceptions
We do a lot of ecommerce websites for our clients and when they get online, one of the few ways to get a guaranteed stream of visitors to your website is to do advertising on a search engine(s) - fo example, Google Adwords.
The more people you get to your site - the more change you’ve got of people buying from you. We did some analysis in the 2nd half of 2005 and we found that between 2% and 7% of visitors to the sites we develop actually buy. So if you get 100 visitors, you could expect 2 or more sales. Please note, these are just averages not “the rule”.
By spending money on Google Adwords (for example), you can appear on the right hand side of any search results for specific keywords. THe more you are willing to pay, the higher up the list you are and your account will be debited when someone clicks on your little advert to go to your site.
First time sellers on the internet often fall into the trap of spending their marketing budget very quickly - and then run out of money. So below are some misconceptions that I feel about online advertising.
MISCONCEPTION #1: Being first means you pay a lot, but statistics show that people area as likely to click on number #2 than number #1 in the list.
MISCONCEPTION #2: Don’t necessarily have your adverts showing 24×7. During working hours (9-5pm), a lot of office workers surf the internet during breaks, lunchtime or boredom time and click on adverts to get to sites and have a look around. They don’t really have an intention to buy, they just want to window shop to pass the time. Try turning off your adverts during the day (or part of), and only enabling them in the evenings and weekends. You probably won’t get a huge reduction in the number of orders, and your advertisting budget won’t take such a huge dent.
MISCONCEPTION #3: Google may be the biggest search engine, driving the most visitors to your site through advertising - but are some of the other advertisting campaigns driving less traffic, but more purchases? A product such as Zarr Retailer is very good at analysing this type of information and telling you where the buyers are coming from. We sometimes find that sites may have 70% of traffic from Google Adwords but get 50% of their sales from MSN.
I’m not trying to say that certain search engines aren’t worth advertisting on - to the contrary. All of the major search engines can drive traffic to your site quickly - but its ultimately the value of obtaining a customer’s purchase that you need to measure.
