mhansen - 10:02 pm on Jan 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

Are you products "Need to Have" or "Nice to Have"? I manage 2 ecom sites myself... One of them is investor grade products, usually purchased with extra, discretionary money... the other, is a consumable / supplies type product, that are used on the same as the first. Think Lamps and light bulbs... When people have a lot of extra money to waste, they buy new lamps... when they are saving cash, they put new bulbs in.

Discretionary site: down 8-10% yoy sales.
Consumables: - up 18-20% yoy.

To us, it looks like more people are sitting on their new-product-cash... and fixing the old products versus buying new ones.

To take what Lenny2 said a bit farther... We have also budgeted a bit more for PPC marketing this year, just for the instant results and testing for answers to our questions. Dropping $100 on an ad campaign for a few well-targeted keyphrases to a landing page, offers much faster answers than waiting 45-90 for firm organic results we can rely on.