AdWords attracting "Window Shoppers"...

I got plenty of clicks on my lil adwords experiment, 169 clicks with about 15,000 impressions, 1.1% CTR.

I generated no sales on any of my affiliate pages, had plenty of clicks to my merchants... but no sales...

I realize 169 clicks/people visiting isn't much, but I was at least hoping for 1-2 buyers... mainly because that is about the ratio I thought I could expect.

I am in the "home bar" industry... dealing in entertainment, alcohol, home parties, etc...

I also feel my website looks nice with decent graphics, decent amounts of content... though I do wonder if I am using to many merchants, as I have about 5 options on my "buy a home bar" page alone, also adsense, and three text links on the right side also to aff merchants...

I did quit running ads on Adwords, because of the numbers above.. should I keep going with the ads to try to find people who actually will buy or is adwords better for ads that go directly to a merchant site, as opposed to a site covering quite a bit of topics on homebar and entertainment?

Any suggestions from all this babbling? If you'd like to see my website, PM me, but I don't think I can post it here, as I'm a newbie.. Thanks guys and gals!!

mmh3

 

Two things are the key to running a successful adwords campaign:

1.) Qualify your visitors before they come to your site by being as specific as possible in your ad (This usually means writing a seperate ad for each keyword and being really specific)

2.) Give them what they are looking for - Don't deliver them to the index page and expect them to find what you advertised. Bring them to a subpage that has just that product(s) on it and be sure they are able to buy with ONE click - no "click here for more info" etc.

Hope that helps a bit

 

Cool, thanks for the tips... I'll implement them on my next experimental campaign.

mmh3

 

If its specific products you are targeting, yuo could also add the price in the ad to 'scare off' people who have no intention to buy or are after cheap stuff. On that note, I have 'cheap' as a negative keyword across all campaigns. Saves us plenty of impressions and clicks, resulting in a higher CTR which gives the benefit of higher 'adrankings' and that has again a roll-on effect in CTR and Conversion itself. That reminds me, did you install conversion tracking?

 

I too have found that including price is a good idea to weed out the tire kickers. I also use free as a negative keyword.

How big was your keyword list? I've found that most of my successful campaigns begin with at least 100 keywords or so. Were you using exact match and/or phrase match keywords?

Landing page is critical, like yfs1 said. Take folks to a specific page, don't let 'em stumble around looking for what you promised in the AdWords ad.

FWIW, you might want to download a free eBook I've written called "A Beginner's Guide To Googleâ„¢ AdWordsâ„¢" It might answer some of your questions. It's available here: http://www.mannmadesoftware.com/downloads.asp

When you really want to get serious about AdWords, I've found Perry Marshall's book to be one of the very best there is (and I've read a bunch of 'em).

Hope that helps you out a bit.

 

I have always heard that you have 7 seconds to make a sale. So if it takes more than that for someone to find a link and for the page to load, forget it.

Lo and behold when I check my site stats for time spent, there is a huge group (the biggest percentage) in the 5-7 sec group. Now I guarantee those arent my adwords customers but if your ads weren't effective, they would be.

 

What's hard to know about (without setting permanent cookies) is whether a visitor returns to make a purchase after finding a site first with adwords. Rarely do I make a purchase at the first site I find (or visit for that matter) that has an item I'm looking for. I usually browse around, and may come back to the site many times over days before ordering. Once I've found a site, and have ordered, re-ordering is a different behavior -- I'll just go to the site and reorder.

I set session cookies on my site, and stuff the referrer into the customers record, and the order record. Many first time customers referrers are not set. Now whether that's from privacy controls or bookmarks I'm not sure. Certainly, I attribute part of them to my adwords campaigns.

 

I use the script from statcounter.com so that I can follow the customer to the shopping cart (my cart is an external one). When I compare my conversion rate with googles it is quite different which is consistent with what you are saying.

 

I've been thinking about the same thing. My own personal ordering behavior is similar to yours; I usually checkout more than one site before buying something. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who do the same thing. And to make matters worse, I'm giving away a free 30-Day trial of the software I've written and so my sales are (probably) always going to be in "Delayed Gratification" mode.

I have been thinking about writing a long-term cookie to anyone visiting my sales page and storing it in a database; maybe I can track conversions that way. Haven't given it too much thought or effort yet. Just "officially" released the software yesterday and all my time recently has been focused on software development and beta testing rather than sales and marketing.

It sounds like you don't want to write a permanent cookie. Why is that?

 

I just started using the free StatCounter service and while I haven't used it much yet it seemed like it might be a bit cumbersome to use for analyzing very many visitors. Do you find that to be the case?

 

Currently, I have no "actual" products on my website... just links to merchants after my lil articles on my topics. Ala martell-type websites, I guess would be a good style adjective. So, my adwords' ads just went to my index page.

I planned to use AdWords to try to jumpstart a new website, while making a few sales here and there. I've been quite shocked with the no sales bit. Like I said I figured one or two would buy.

I have thought of adding data feed for the products, or use product page's made by the merchants, but right now I've done good to just get content up, while being lazy on the product end and just putting links to the merchant's websites.

I'll truly consider you guy's ideas. I take action, and not just post to babble while standing around picking my nose. I gotta get this working in 2005, and will do whatever needed to accomplish my goals.

Thanks, all
mmh3

 

I don't want to be scaring off customers who have privacy software installed. My business is just reaching a good speed and I'm afraid of doing anything that would hurt me. Am I overly concerned?

 

That's a good point to consider. Definitely hard to say for sure! My guess would be (depending on your niche market's makeup, of course) that most people today realize that cookies aren't a "big brother" kind of thing that they need to be afraid of. And if they are concerned, then they have their privacy software to keep their guard up.

Seems like it would really have to be an overly cautious kind of person (read paranoid) that would not make a purchase of something they wanted/needed simply because a website tried to write a little text snippet to their system, although I guess it does take all kinds and as a rule, we don't want to alienate anyone if we can help it, right?

Does this make my answer a great big "I don't have a clue"?

 

mmh3: The sense I'm getting is that you have what the AdWord gurus (e.g. Perry Marshall) call a conversion problem. If you've a CTR of 1.1 (which is certainly above the 0.5% minimum Google wants to see), your ads are unquestionably working.
But from what you've said, I've some difficulty in deciding just what it is you're trying to sell -- and your visitors may be having the same trouble.
In other words, because you mention that you have no products but simply provide links to merchants, I can't help wondering what kind of sales you've been thinking of?
To put it another way, I think you need to ask yourself some questions and, I hope, come up with answers as to how you need to redesign your site so it gives you the results you want.
For instance ...
Are the merchants getting the sales instead of you?
If they are, could/should you be getting them to pay you something?
Why can't you incorporate an order form, even though this will involve you in all the complications of a Shopping Cart?
Alternatively, why can't you set up something that I suppose would be an Affiliate relationship with the suppliers (i.e. your merchants) so that they get your visitors' orders and pay you an appropriate percentage?
If nothing else, why can't you, in effect, turn your site into into a "lead generation" one whereby you connect with a visitor by email or phone to obtain a sale? This isn't all that dificult to achieve. You only need to add a phrase that, one way or another, "asks for the order" -- and it can be as simple as a Click Here link to your InBox.

I guess what I'm saying is that, although you're obviously doing something right, there are other things you need to do as well.

Duncan

 

Sorry, my response is so slow here.. I went into sleep mode during the holidays!

No doubt I need to do something different. As I said before my websites are affiliate marketing sites with links to merchants that are part of CJ, Linkshare, and Share A Sale. My traffic has been miniscule at this point, but of the 500-700 hundred visitors I've had over the last month or two, I have had some clicks to merchants... but not one single sale!

My website is a content site with articles, guides, coupons, and am now adding a lil store this month with individual product links. The plain text links to merchant's front page via affiliate links has not done anything for me whatsoever. For the most part, I have no flashy gifs, banners, etc.. just nice text links. I certainly hope I don't need to incorporate flashing gifs, 10 banners, and pop-ups to make a sale... I have tried to keep the typical web ad annoyances off my website for now. But if they work.. I may re-consider.

My point of using AdWords was to get some traffic and see if any sales converted with the small traffic. Such as I could compare it with a larger ratio once my traffic was larger. 1-2 sales on 500 visitors... 3-4 with 1000 visitors and so on. Sadly, the one or two sales has been strangely elusive.

My 1st AM site is in the "Home Bar, furniture, accessories" industry, and I have ideas for quite a few others, but I am searching for a model that generates sales that can be replicated. In my mind, there's no sense in moving onto my 2nd AM site, if I don't have a successful formula for the 1st one.

If you would like to see my AM site.. private msg me. I need all the opinions and input I can gather. I don't mind the curious, but I prefer that the folks who msg me have some experience in AM and generating sales.

Thanks, all!!

mmh3

 

Just give it some more time. Can you make a profit with a lower conversion rate than the approximately 1% you were expecting?

 

'Sup Dawg?

I'm so pleased to hear that you're all rested up & ready to make some money! (Took you long enough )

Seriously man, do I have a deal for you! (And for anyone else reading this thread).

I woke up the other morning and realized that I had made some very consistent money with one campaign in 2004. I looked into it a bit further and realized that while I had "0" sales for the whole month of December, from 5/1/2004 to 12/31/2004 I had 16 sales, 2 refunds. I had an "unbelievable" ROI of ...... you sitting down?

My little campaign generated $500 (USD) commissions at a cost for this particular campaign of only $100 (USD) I did have a number of losers to cover, expense wise, so my company totals still sucked. But if your math's like my math, that's a 400% ROI for this campaign. Pretty freaking impressive IMNSHO!

I don't remember exactly when I started this campaign and so there's no hard data from 1/1/2004 - 4/30/2004. Is my face red, or what!

Anyway, I initially started fooling around with AdWords 1 1/2 years ago and the campaign mentioned above is my only consistently profitable campaign. I realized that where it counted, the campaign above started to "gel" around May 1 and I suddenly realized two things:

1) I had a potentially good campiagn here

2) I better start keeping records!

So I did. And I will show anyone who PMs me the actual excel spreadsheet data and every other detail about this campaign! I'll show you how I turned it into my first profitable little straem of income. And that's what it's really all about folks. Learn to produce the first little straem of income & then replicate & improve it! Ya follow?

Anyone interesting in helping me beta test my ideas? Won't cost you a penny either. No BS! PM me if you're interested in talking further!

Happy New Year! Come Alive in 2000&5!