More on Adwords.. What’s your customer worth?
December 16, 2007
I attended an SEO program put on by Network Solutions and Constant Contact. The seminar was $49 and hosted here in Richmond. I figured for the cost it would be worth checking out and I had hoped that since I was paying it wouldn’t be a pure sales pitch.
I have to say for $49, I found the information very good as it pertained to SEO and Adwords. The guy teaching the “class” was extremely helpful and provided some valuable insight into how it all fits together and I was surprised, no sales pitch.
There really is a lot that needs to be considered when embarking on an adwords campaign or I’m sure you will lose money. The class brought up some basic principles of setting goals and getting some good strategies for getting started. So for today’s exercise let’s discuss our adwords strategy. First we need to what what it’s worth to us, or better yet, what is our customer worth to us.
Now if your one of those people that are using adwords to get traffic to an affiliate site, this may not work for you. For those people that have eCommerce sites or websites that will drive traffic to your brick and mortar this should help.
What is the value of your customer? To get started you should determine the average lifetime value of your customer. Do you sell services to customers? If so, how often will they come back or have previous customers come back? You may not know this answer if you are a new business, but you should estimate it. Your hope is that your customers will return over and over. In our baby boutique our average sale is $90.00. Most of our customer that come in have newborns and we carry products up to 24 months. I hope that they will come in at least 1-2 times a month and spend at least that. In this case, I’ll use at least 1 time per month @ $90. $90 (First Sale) + (90 *12) = $1080. So $1080 is the average amount of revenue a new customer is worth.
Now, how many new customers would you like to gain each week through your online marketing campaign? I’d like to get at least 3 per week.
Finally we put it all together to detemine the estimated lifetime value of new customers from online marketing: $1080*3 = $3240 * 52 weeks = $168,480. Wouldn’t that be great to generate that simply from bring in 3 new customers per week from online marketing?
Conversion Rates: Now that we determined that we would like 3 new customers a week we need to find out how many visits to our website, or clicking on our ad, it will take to make them a customer, or convert them into a sale. This will vary per business, but we’ve found that for every 40 people that visit our site, 1 will buy something. That breaks down to a 2% conversion rate 1/40 = .025. We then divide the number of new customers we want by this conversion rate and that provides the number of leads our ad needs to generate. 3 (new customers per week) / .025 (Conversion Rate) = 120 Leads. 120 Leads seems like a lot, but that’s per week. We really need to get about 17 people to the site per day. That translates to 17 quality clicks on your adwords ad.
Tomorrow will will discuss what we need to do to get those 17 quality clicks and what you should pay for them.
More on Adwords
December 11, 2007
Yesterday’s post should have got you thinking about Adwords and how you can use them. Today, I’m going to touch on the proper way to use Adwords and some mistakes that people typically make.
Adwords is a great way to drive traffic to your site if you do your research. Far too many people get an Adwords account, pick there keywords, set their Cost Per Click(CPC) and let the campaign go. They don’t realize that they are probably spending money they don’t need to.
Broad keywords can get you plenty of impressions,(Each time your ad is shown is called an impression). Impressions are free. You begin paying when someone clicks on your ad. Some people think that the more their ad is shown, the better the chance of it getting clicked. That can be true, but are the right people seeing your ad?
With Adwords, you pay to get page position. The better the page(1-2) and the higher on the page, the more you pay if someone clicks. You’re paying for a combination of Keywords and Position. Here’s how you can get both and cut down on your costs.
First, Google drops their prices as your Click-Thru-Rate(CTR) percentage goes up. So the more impressions you have, you need to increase you clicks or you price per click will increase. You can get more clicks by focusing your keywords and writing better ads.
Keyword Research
There are quite a few tools on the net that will help you pick keywords. Let’s say that you are selling Golf Clubs. You would more than likely select Golf Clubs as your keywords and a few others. You’ll also want to look at other similar keywords. To do this, I suggest WordTracker. They have a free tool that is very helpful. In this case, WordTracker suggests “Used Golf Clubs”, “Discount Golf Clubs”, and various name brand clubs. If those keywords interested you, then by all means, include them. However, make sure you use Adwords keywords delimeters to help.
Here’s where most people fall short in Adwords. Using quotes ” and brackets [] around your words will significantly change your ad impressions. Using just the words Golf Clubs will yield results when people search for Golf Resorts, Golf Balls, Yacht Clubs etc. That’s not the traffic you want and you won’t neccessary get clicks from them. You’re killing your CTR and raising your price per click.
Instead, Use “Golf Clubs”. Using Quotes will allow for phrase matching. In this case, when someone is searching for Used Golf Clubs, your ad will show. It will also reduce the number of impressions. Using [] will provide exact phrase matching. This means that only when a user search for Golf Clubs will your ad be shown. If they search for Used Golf Clubs your ad will not be displayed.
This technique will take some practice, but it will pay off.
Don’t forget to use negatives. Negatives are the words you want to exclude from your keywords. In our example, if I am only selling golf clubs, I would probably exclude balls, tees, shirts, courses. I would do this by adding a - in front of each of those words.
This alone helped boost my adwords campaign.
Writing the Perfect Ad
We all wish we could craft the perfect ad, but it’s something that isn’t always easy to do. I’d suggest looking at other adwords ads to get some ideas. Each Adwords ad consists of 4 lines. I typically set mine up as follows:
Eye Catching Title
A brief teaser
A call to action or enticement
Website URL
Try to put your keywords in your ad. Think about what the user is searching for. If their goal is to find the best site for discounted clubs, you may want to consider putting that in your title. A word of warning: Make sure you follow the Adwords TOS. That is a quick way to get your ad pulled.
Tomorrow I post some great sources for really learning the ins and outs of adwords.
Driving traffic to your website and eBay auctions with Ads
December 10, 2007
Now that I have a few websites up and running, it’s time to make them work for me. Usually, anyone that works for you is going to cost you money and that’s not what we want with these sites. Our goal is to make money, right?
When I first started selling on eBay my goal was to just get the items to sell for a decent price, cover my costs, learn a few things and maybe make some extra cash. I soon learned that when you have more than a few auctions running, it’s all about getting traffic and getting those items to sell. You definately don’t want to continually relist those items and incur listing fees if you don’t have to.
After digging into eBay I learned that there are several ways to make money without having to sell anything on eBay at all. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate links. While the eBay affiliate program is a great way to make some extra money, you have to get people to your site and your auctions in order to find your links. That can be a job all by itself.
Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as SEO, is a requirement for getting traffic to your site and your auctions. Gone are the days of just putting up a web site, flood it with phrases and keywords and hope your site is picked up by a search engine. It now takes some work. Your website has to have fresh content, relavent content, inbound links, outbound links and keywords that people are searching for. All of that takes some work and time. Don’t be fooled by all of those auctions on eBay that guarantee traffic to your site by buying their eBook. Yes, some work as I mentioned in previous posts, but there is nothing that you can do overnight…. well, almost.
Everyone has seen ads on websites that seem to be relavent to the site, most served up by Google. Those ads can both make you money, and cost you money. Google Adwords is Google’s program for advertising that will allow you to place ads on other websites and in the Google search pages. The beauty of Adwords is that you set a budget per day or per month and there should be no surprises when you get the bill. That’s were people tend to make their mistake, that simply key in some phrases, keywords and let the ad go. They believe that the traffic will start flowing in… boy are they mistaken.
Google Adsense is Google’s ad serving program that serves up the ads you created in adwords. The ads are displayed on sites that are relavent to your ad content. The site owner makes money for each ad this is displayed on their site AND clicked. Hopefully that click will drive traffic to your site.
Sorry to digress, but it’s important to understand how it all works together. So how to do you drive traffic to your auction with Ads? First, I’ll assume you have a website, have some fresh content on the site and keep it updated fairly often.
eBay used to allow people to use Adwords to place ads and have those ads directly link to their eBay store or Auction. eBay now frowns on that and in fact, will not longer give you affiliate credit if you do that. Instead, you need to direct users from another site(your own) to your eBay store.
Using Adwords can be a very good way to get traffic to your site and also send traffic to your eBay auction. Our main website, Webposter.com, uses eBays store tools to display our current auctions on the right side of our website. When users visit our site, they are immediately able to click one of our auctions and bid. Through the affiliate toolkit, we also are able to get a commission on any other items the user may bid on and win. We drive traffic to our site using Adwords ads and those promote the items we are selling on eBay.
Placing an Adwords Ad is pretty straight forward. Once you get your account setup, you create a new ad compaign. You’ll need a catchy title, some brief ad copy, and a place to direct individuals. You’ll also need keywords that are relavent to what you are selling. This is where most people make their mistakes. They simply add as many keywords as possible, set their default bid amount and let ‘er rip. HUGE MISTAKE.
Tomorrow I’ll take you through how to pick your keywords and get the traffic rolling to your site and hopefully the sales
Building your Niche on eBay
July 12, 2007
To build or niche or not? That’s a tough question to answer since there is a large mix of successful generalists and niche sellers on eBay. It’s something we have been struggling with since the start. Really, our struggle has been what niche to get into. We have had very successful sales on all the items we have listed, but they have all been in different categories. Since we are buying mostly from liquidations, it makes repeat sourcing difficult.
eBay trading assistants typically do not specialize as they are selling what their customers bring in.(To a certain extent). They’re successful in many cases because they choose what items are worthwhile to sell and typically only list items they know will sell above a certain price. If your ambition is to become a trading assistant, having a niche may not be as important, especially if you have a brick and mortar storefront.
On the other hand, having a niche is extremely helpful for those without a storefront. Picking a niche can be difficult. Sometimes the areas and subjects that you are very passionate about are extremely competitive. Don’t get me wrong, you can succeed in those areas, it will just take a lot of hard work.
You’ll have an advantage if you are a subject matter expert since you’ll know what your customers are looking for. Additionally, having a niche makes it easier to cross-sell and upsell your customers on other related items. It also helps in getting repeat customers.
So, what tools do you use t find your niche? There are plenty of eBooks available to help you identify your niche. I’ve reviewed a handful of them and none seemed to really have any earth shattering ideas. Start with a pencil and paper and begin jotting down ideas and topics you enjoy. Then drill down deeper into each of those topics.
Research your niche with keywords. You’ll need to find how much competition is out there in your niche. You can use search engine results to determine your competition and there are lots of free tools available to assist with this as well. Check out SEOBook tools for a great list. Later you can begin driving traffic to your site based on those keywords. SEOBook is a great resource and can be purchased here.
I recently came across a software package that offers to help analyze what buyers are looking for on eBay’s WantItNow! section. The software is called Auction Inspector and can be purchased here.
Over the next few days I’m going to review the software and post my comments on the blog. At first glance it looks like a good product with potential. I haven’t seen anything else on the market that claims to analyze the WantItNow section of eBay.
If you have seen anything else, or have used this software, please post your comments.
