Hi Gang,
I need some advice from those of you in advertising.
Is there anyway to predict your ROI for an advertising campaign? Here’s my specific example. Google allows you to “buy specific words – when the user types in a word, if it matches your criteria, your ad pops up. I’m trying to get more work building building a specific product. So far I’ve gotten 700 impressions of my ad and 20ish clicks from the ad to my website. But I’ve gotten no calls. My daily budget is $2/day which gives me between 1-2 clicks to my website per day. Is there a way to predict how may clicks I would need in order to start getting calls? How much I would have to raise my daily budget in order to start getting calls?
Another way of thinking about the problem is to say how much of my price point for the table should I allocate for advertising? Is there a standard percentage for that? For example, if I can build one conference table a month at $X,000 per table, I need to allocate Y% of that price point to advertising?
I know there must be some technical thinking on this subject, but don’t know where to look for that info.
Thanks for your help,
Kim Carleton Graves
Carleton Woodworking
Replies
Kim, I bid 20 cents per click with a $10 per day budget. This just gets me on the second page for most keywords, but that seems to work fine. I sell roughly one or two rocking chairs per month this way. That works out to close to the amount I pay a gallery in commission for a sale. I'm assuming that most web sales are made via the AdWord, although now that I think about it, with my ranking moving up some people may have found me through a direct search. I'm guessing you know the whole bit about reciprocal links moving your ranking up. One thing you might try, is increasing your budget, lowering your CPC (cost per click) bid, until you start getting calls. With a budget of $2 per day giving you just one or two clicks, you are must be bidding close to $1 per click.
Bill Lindau
This is pretty complex territory. There are a lot of tricks to doing this stuff and there are consultants who specialize in it.
I have a feature that my web host offers that provide me statistics on my site. It shows me which search words people are using to find my site and I can then manipulate those words to appear more often. In the case of Google, if the search word is a heading on your site, they rank it higher in the search than if it simply appears in the body of the text.
One of the tricks is to get the google toolbar and activate the page rank feature. Find search words that have sites that are low ranked and then maximize your site for those words. Then do things to get your site ranked higher, one of which is a dirty google secret. If you advertise with them, your ranking goes up.
Links can actually hurt your site rankings. If all your links are reciprocal, they don't count as much. One way links to your site are best. Also, the page rank of the sites linking to yours helps you if they are higher and hurt you if they are lower.
Problem I would think with furniture, especially large items is people want to get it locally so the internet is a mixed medium for that. My stuff is small and can be shipped anywhere.
Here is a great link http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm
Edited 8/20/2004 1:14 pm ET by Michael
Edited 8/20/2004 1:18 pm ET by Michael
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