Forum Moderators: buckworks
I put the banner ads on somewhere around 1300 to 1400 pages. I get 150,000 to 210,000 visitors a month, and anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 page views per month.
As of midnight yesterday (Friday), only 144 people had clicked on the link to the widget page. 6,350 people had visited my site yesterday.
This particular widget isn't a name brand, and it's only sold by a few other distributors. Aware of this fact, I priced the widget below just about anybody else's price, including shipping.
In examining my problem, I see three particular areas where I might have failed:
1). I did the banner myself. It doesn't "flicker." It's static. A friend told me it's boring, and not likely to attract attention. (I'm not the best designer, but I'm not the worst, either). My friend advised that I use bold colors, a notion I've tried to avoid in the design of my site.
2). Even though I'm pricing this widget at less than the few competitors who sell it, I'm not emphasizing the low price enough. I've said "affordable" in the banner ad. I don't know what other terms to use.
3). My site appeals to a niche of some 80,000,000 people in the US. However, maybe only a few million at best might be interested in this widget (boy, do I ever wish the TOS here could be more lenient so that I could go into a bit more detail).
4). Until and unless I see some sales, I'm using PayPal for payment. I've been advised that doing so will cut into sales, but I just can't justify setting up a shopping cart for an item or items that don't sell.
This is my first toe in the water with regard to ecommerce. I wish I could go into more detail about the widget I'm selling, but I can't.
So, I'm asking for some general comments. And I'm also asking for some specifics: how long would you keep trying to sell this widget? What, if anything, would you do to get sales? Or would you just move on to a different widget?
Vague questions, I know. But any help is much appreciated.
1. The first thing I would do is forget the banner ad completely. It is fairly common knowledge that most surfers these days have 'banner blindness'. There have been tests done that prove that people just don't see them. It's not that they ignore them, they're just so used to ignoring them that don't even register on the retina anymore.
I would go for text ads and links inside your copy on each page. Maybe take a look at the Adsense forum to see how they are most effectively placing their text links for conversion.
Check out the Adsense hotspots chart for placement recommendations.
I have found that on our site the smaller and more inconspicuous the text link the better the conversion.
2. I have found 'inexpensive' and 'affordable' to not be very useful phrases for getting click-thrus.
Maybe something with a call to action:
"Losing your hearing from loud bangs? Try our new widgets!"
(again, just a small link inside your regular text)
or to appeal to the qualitative personality:
"Blue Widgets! Proven to save your hearing from loud bangs."
Testimonials really help as soon as you get some (making them up yourself never works).
4. Paypal is fine in my opinion. I have one site that only sells via a merchant account / cc gateway and two sites that sell only through Paypal.
The Paypal sites do just fine as long as you have a Paypal business account that accepts credit card payments without making your customers sign up for a Paypal account. The majority of our Paypal orders are from non-registered customers (meaning they don't have Paypal accounts).
144/6350 is over 2%, which for a banner ad isn't horrible. Of those 144 click throughs, how many bought?
Your observation about "banner ad blindness" is probably right. I have one advertiser on my site who does banner ads. His ads are for "Acme widgets," and the ads only appear on the pages I have that are devoted to Acme Widgets. He gets a CTR of 5%, because the people who view his page are people who are interested in Acme Widgets.
I have another advertiser, one who produces engraved commemorative widgets. Basically, the company just buys existing widgets, engraves them, gives them a fancy name and display box, and sells them for far more than they're worth.
Rather than run banner ads, I suggested to them that we put a full page of information and photos about their fancy widgets in with the other 1,000+ pages of name-brand widget photos and product descriptions I already have on my site.
So, they now have six pages of what looks to be informational pages. Except, at the very end, there's a link for additional information and pricing.
That custom widget company's pages get a CTR of as high as 13%, although I don't know how many sales come from their pages on my site, and neither do they.
CernyM, my site appeals to a very broad spectrum of people who participate in widget-related sports. But this particular widget accessory, I've come to realize, doesn't appeal to the majority of the people who buy widgets for whatever widget-related sport they engage in.
Therefore, I think my potential market is too small.
Out of the 144 clicks yesterday, not a single visitor bought a widget. I haven't received a PayPal notification today about a purchase, so I'm assuming that I didn't sell any today, either. It won't be until after 1 pm EST that I'll know how many people clicked on the banner and went to my new widget page today.
axgrindr, I've asked for opinions on just about every widget forum out there, and most people think the hearing protection would be a better sell, since everyone except the truly stupid wears hearing protection when engaging in this sport.
The problem is that I would have to buy at least 50 sets of hearing protectors at the outset, buy boxes for shipping, and handle all of the logistics. Cost? Maybe $1000 to start, but that's without knowing if I can sell any at all.
Again, my site gets anywhere from 180,000 to 210,000 visitors a month, has 800,000 to 1,000,000 page views per month, has over 1600 pages, and ranks in the top five on the major search engines for just about every term I've optimized it for.
That's a lot of real estate that could be turned into additional revenue, if I only knew how to do it.
Replies very much appreciated.
Racing?
[edited by: plumsauce at 9:59 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2007]
I think the problem, though, is as I said before. The market for this widget-related accessory is too narrow.
There are over 80 million widget owners in the US. They use their widgets for all types of sports, and also for self-defense.
About 7 million of those widget owners have licenses to carry their widgets concealed for self-defense. And that's really the market my widget accessory appeals to. That's probably too small a subsector of the widget owner market.
I'll go ahead and have a new banner ad designed, but I'm going to have to find another product that has broader appeal.
This whole ecommerce thing is a lot harder than I thought it would be. And I'm just putting my toe in the water at this point.
The problem is that I would have to buy at least 50 sets of hearing protectors at the outset, buy boxes for shipping, and handle all of the logistics. Cost? Maybe $1000 to start, but that's without knowing if I can sell any at all.
[edited by: Beagle at 3:07 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2007]
