I expected sales from the volumes of visitors sent to my website.
Have you said this before
Lets imagine that you had setup a paid search campaign using a second-tiered paid search engine like ePilot to drive visitors to your website. Chances are you were thinking that if you can generate thousands of new visitors to your website that you will automatically generate more sales, right Its a fair assumption especially since like traditional sales, online sales is a numbers game.
Unfortunately, assumptions tend to oversimplify. In paid search as with other marketing channels whether online or offline, the relative quality of the visitor pools accessed by the marketing channels like paid search lead to the conversion of visitors into sales. Quality in relation to the relevancy your product or service has to the target market and user profile accessed by the marketing channel. The higher the relevancy the greater the conversion probability. Likewise, a hungrier pool of qualified visitors, the greater opportunity for you to close more sales.
Each distinct marketing channel (like contextual advertising) and the visitors attracted through them will produce varying outcomes for the same website. Therefore, even if your website produces a favorable sales conversion from natural search engine visitors, there is only a probability that another marketing channel will deliver similar or better sales conversion results. Why Because
All traffic is NOT created equal.
So how do you know how to attract sales and not just more visitors
By following these three steps:
1. Define your Most Important Action
All businesses have a most important action which their marketing efforts seek to acquire from their website visitors such as sales, leads, and content or membership subscriptions. You must define your most important action and use it as a measuring stick for gauging results.
2. Test, Test and Test Some More!
Search properties like Google, Yahoo, MSN and content websites like Wall Street Journal and ESPN have their own unique user demographics and psychographics that you gain access to through specific marketing channels. Unfortunately, figuring out exactly which search properties and content sites have your perfect customer profile mix is neither a simple effort nor even a practical one.
Therefore, test multiple marketing channels including second-tiered paid search engines like MIVA, Kanoodle and Enhance or contextual advertisers like MetricsDirect using a small speculative budget. The most important aspect though of testing and of spending even your speculative budget wisely is provided in step three.
3. Use Performance Metrics to Judge Next Steps
Because you have established your most important action, you are capable of determining the success or failure of your test marketing channel. Calculating your performance metrics is a straight-forward procedure. Here is what you do
a) Before you activate a new marketing channel, purchase a campaign tracking system like HyperTracker, Conversion Detective or any of the other credible ones on the market. This will enable you to effectively distinguish your test marketing channel from your other active channels and provide data points for calculating your performance metrics.
b) Setup the test marketing channel using your expert marketing abilities by developing powerful creative, writing alluring ads and selecting highly-relevant keywords. Put everything into making your test marketing channel a huge success.
c) Make sure that your campaign tracking system is recording all visits and your most important action accurately. Then run the test marketing channel until your budget is depleted.
d) Gather the data from your campaign tracking system for the test marketing channel and calculate your performance metrics to determine whether to: (1) kill the campaign, (2) run a second test to generate further data for analysis or (3) maximize the channel and add it to your marketing mix.
So what performance metrics should you use
Marketers who believe in testing and measuring performance use a metric called, cost per action (e.g. cost per sale, cost per lead, etc.). It is calculated as follows:
Total Budget Spent / Total Number of Actions Generated
The total budget spent figure should include the cost for traffic and the cost for the outsourced third party or in-house labor. The total number of actions generated figure includes the sales conversion rate:
(Visitors x Conversion rate = Number of Actions).
A target cost per action should be a specific dollar figure below your net profit (defined as, Revenue Product Costs) and your profit margin objective.
For instance, lets assume that your product sells for $97, your product costs $20 to develop, carry or deliver and your net profit objective is $25 - your ideal cost per action should fall below $52.
By following these three steps you will be able to:
Establish measurable performance metrics to determine success or failure of a new marketing channel without wasting big budget dollars.
Test new marketing channels to expand your reach and sales opportunity without relying on heresy about a particular unknown or questionable marketing channel from third parties.
Ensures that your marketing strategies are focused on your goal and that youre heading in the right direction.
Put these steps to use and youll be assured a more effective allocation of your budget and a greater return on your efforts. Through calculating performance metrics, youll be able to judge for yourself which marketing channels connect you to pools of eagerly awaiting buyers and not just volume of visitors.
Kevin Gold is CEO of Enhanced Concepts, specializing in turning website visitors into leads or sales, co-editor of WebSalesability.com and published writer. Get a free report, 12 Sure-fire Ways to Increase Your Website Sales and an exclusive 5-day website conversion email course by visiting .
Many people will tell you that there is a secret method to getting your articles to spider well in the search engines. They have theories of how to get the best rankings, which key words to use, which titles and best times to post your online press releases, articles, poems, stories or public relations. Well I am going to let you in on a little secret.
The whole thing and all these so-called tips of article marketing, titling and key wording are completely full of it. In fact if you will look at the articles of those who sell eBooks on how to best get your articles seen you will find their articles do not rate as well as your articles as a novice. So take all their volumes of advice and stuff it.
I have written 3050 articles and placed them online and my data sets show that something is a miss and many articles (same subject, similar titles and key words) get no play, while others posted nearly within the same week get more play immediately and over time. Many which have been optimized for best chance of search engine ranking do not get as many article views or rank as high in search engines as articles with no real effort to make them more visible to search engines.
Even online article submission sites, which treat every single article exactly same often find that it is quite interesting the number of article views on certain articles and how others fail. Am I saying such systems are a complete crapshoot Am I saying why bother doing much of anything about it at all, just rely on beginners luck Am I suggesting that one may as well let all the articles fly and throw darts at the wall Yes, this is what I am saying. I am saying screw these so-called experts all competing for that perfect article placement.
One of my top articles for article views is; Cancun Girls Gone Wild, Wilma Shows All which is about Hurricane Wilma and the devastation to the resort towns of Cozemel and Cancun. Another is How to do Window Tinting so you see it is not so much about key wording as dumb luck or luck of the draw in page spidering. Now then, what makes my comments better than the experts Well, I have read everything they have to say, tried their techniques and watched the results on my articles and I have written more articles than anyone else on the Internet and well, I ought to know.
About the only worthy theory I have heard is the Long Tail Theory which is picking not the top 1-5 key words but concentrate on the 5-10 key words of a certain subject and of course put in the important key words too, but by being sure to contain the lesser key words that no one else is competing for, you will get more article views. My average article views are way up now and I am just shy of 800,000 article views on one site alone. So think on this and the reality, screw the experts they are full of crap and will cost you time and money.
Lance Winslow - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance;