Where do your orders come from?

Organic SE, PPC, Links, Affiliates, eBay, Offline?

[Tonearm]

I get 90-95% of my orders from organic Google listings. I've been trying to branch out into AdWords, but I'm having trouble getting volume up and keeping it profitable. I've tried PPC shopping engines and eBay in the past, but I'm not sure they were profitable.

Nothing seems to compare to organic Google listings for me. Obviously there's no ROI to deal with, and the volume is so much bigger than anything else I've tried. I'm considering completely giving up on the rest and focusing only on adding new products and SEO.

Does anyone else receive a significant number of orders through anything other than organic Google listings?

[idolw]

Obviously there's no ROI to deal with

wow! congratulations lucky mate!
We pay thousands a month to keep our #1 free listings. We just do not pay to google directly.

I am probably not smart enough, but I am having difficulties of finding out a way to get big without SERPs and without nice budget for a start of the business.

[Essex_boy]

Google serps for me.

[Tonearm]

Essex Boy,

Do you get a significant volume of orders from any other source?

[ytswy]

My most successful site has been 50% Adwords in terms of revenue for about a year now.

This works I think because in its niche it offers something that none of its competitors do, which means it converts well off pretty generic ads.

For a couple of more basic sites - really just a load of products without anything that could be considered a unique selling point - adwords only works well for specific hot products.

That said a loss of Google serps traffic would still be catastrophic.

[Tonearm]

ytswy,

50% AdWords revenue is impressive. What percentage of that revenue goes to Google?

[ytswy]

Revenue is pretty impressive, since they're high value, low(ish!) margin items. Gross profit, around 20% but it varies quite a bit between ads.

[ytswy]

I'd add that the site is somewhat under performing in standard serps. If it got the rankings I think it should it would probably be more like 30 - 35% adwords.

[Tonearm]

A couple more questions for you because I'm intrigued by anyone who can pull off profitability and a decent volume with any non-SERP method.

What percentage of your gross profit goes to Google? Maybe around 50%?

How much time do you spend managing your AdWords campaign?

[ytswy]

What percentage of your gross profit goes to Google? Maybe around 50%?

How much time do you spend managing your AdWords campaign?

About 20% of gross profit from each sale that comes via adwords goes to Google - rough estimate.

Management time on these campaigns is fine - check them once or twice a week to make sure nothing stupid is happening - this is *not* the case for adverts aimed at individual products since these can run away very quickly if someone drops their price, but for this one site we run ads aimed at people with specific problems (rather than advertising specific solutions), so as long as we're the best at offering solutions to these problems the ads just work.

[Duskrider]

Just for reference, one of the sites I manage gets about 80-85% of its revenue from Adwords. The rest is spread across other PPC services and organics.

The site is extremely targeted and is the definition of a niche site. The subject matter is such that there is a shroud of mystery over the industry, and this site sells information from 'behind the scenes.' There also isn't much competition, and what there is isn't as authoritative as this site.

Google gets about 30%, but the profit margin is huge since all that's being sold is information in the form of an ebook. I haven't really invested as much as I probably should in SEO, and it doesn't rank that well. It's tough to get up there, though, because most of my keywords are taken by a site like about.com or other sites in the industry that sell unrelated stuff.

[Tonearm]

ytswy, how do you get away with such a small amount of management time? I thought the cure to my AdWords woes would be more time spent finding long-tail keywords and testing different ads.

[dpd1]

It's very hard for me to track conversions, because I think most of our sales come at a later date. But I would have to say that good old-fashioned community participation probably accounts for the largest portion of sales. Especially for a technical/performance related product, it really helps to get out there and meet people... provide info and help them understand things about the topic. Then of course you get your sig with the plug line and URL in on every post. That's for sure where the majority of our traffic comes from. I guess a lot of people might find that kind of a 'housewife biz' sort of tactic, but it works. I haven't given up on AdWords and stuff like that, but it doesn't look like it will be any great benefit to me. It's just too costly. If we were talking 3-4 cents, I might be able to do something with that. But at the current prices, it's too expensive.

[ytswy]

how do you get away with such a small amount of management time?

Basically its the nature of the site - most of what it sells are highly comoditised products, but at a significent premium due to the specialist niche we sell to (and the pre and post sales support we provide). We also sell specialist niche-specific products, but the volume on these is relatively low.

What this means is (I at least) can't get product specific adverts to work very well, since we're either going to get a lot of people who'll close the browser as soon as they see our prices, or the products are so specialised that very few people would actually search for them (we're the people who tell them what products are available to solve these problems basically).

What does work are a relatively small number of 2 keyword broadmatched triggers that show ads which sell the specialist advice that the site provides, and of course a site that lives up to the promise. These ads have been pretty much unchanged for a year or so (even though the products we sell have changed quite a lot on this time), all I've done is increase the pricing on some of them as more competition has come to these keywords.

To be honest this thread has made me realise that I should probably be doing a lot more - or hiring someone to do more - since there *are* areas where a more tailored campaign would make sense. The reason management time is so low is really because I've avoided areas which would take constant micro-management because I don't feel I have the time.

Fundamentally I think the adwords is working so well is that we have a very good site, not neccaserilly a very good adwords campaign.

[davetechnosis]

Ah... man, you are really lucky enough to get this. I am trying to figure out a way to promote my site, but not yet lucky. Any idea? Where to start from and what you did to get your site popular?

Regards,

Dave.

[edited by: lorax at 12:54 pm (utc) on Aug. 21, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[Tonearm]

Nice ytswy. I've spent a considerable amount of time on AdWords and can't really make it pay. Google SERPs are great, but I hate to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I don't think I have much choice at this point though. Congratulations on a successful AdWords campaign.

[arieng]

Before AdWords, our site revenue was 75% offline-driven/return/referral traffic and 25% organic search with Google by far the largest contributor.

This last year, we made a serious stab at AdWords and it is now our largest traffic producer and second largest revenue contributor. Haven't been able to do the same with paid Yahoo or MSN though.

[Tonearm]

arieng,

Congrats on that. How much of your gross profit on those AdWords orders goes back to Google would you say?

[arieng]

While testing new keywords, we essentially gave it all back with costs ranging from 35-40%. As we've identified the chaff and cleaned up our account, we have steadily brought costs down to around 10%. Expensive, but still very profitable.

[dpd1]

>>>What does work are a relatively small number of 2 keyword broadmatched triggers that show ads which sell the specialist advice that the site provides, and of course a site that lives up to the promise.<<<

This is an angle I somehow missed... Advertise the content, as opposed to the specific products themselves. Seems obvious, but it hadn't crossed my mind. That might be something that would work better for me, as I'm in a similar situation.

[Tonearm]

Are you guys selling info?

[ytswy]

Not selling info, but the info is very much what distinguishes our site, and is the reason people buy from us.

To clarify, we don't pretend to be an information site or anything, but our USP is that we provide information for less skilled users of certain widgets who know they need certain widgetThings but find the whole area confusing, and our ads sell this point.

[Essex_boy]

TONEarm: yes I do

[arieng]

I'm selling hard goods, but a couple of years ago I was involved in very successful project that sold strictly info products exclusively through AdWords. Higher margins means you can afford to spend more on traffic, right?

[Tonearm]

I wonder if it would be really beneficial to hook into the AdWords API. With that, I could add a little extra info to the database for each product and category, and have the program manage the whole thing easily. I think AdWords management could be really automated, precise, and far-reaching with something like that.

[hellraiser1]

I think AdWords management could be really automated, precise, and far-reaching with something like that.

interesting --- if everyone made mad money from the SERPS or PPC from the start, everyone would be rich --- and if everyone was rich, then, relatively speaking everyone is poor.

So --- i guess its really a puzzle, a combination of things. Many online businesses fail you know. Its funny for me, at first i thought it was more logical to send automated data feeds to shopping malls. Lost more then i made. Then i did SEO and recently created effective search pages and page layout based on user history, putting in front the product lines that sell the best, thus more exposure in Google for whats popular at the moment... Stopped the shopping malls and spend 1 dollar for every 6 i make on Google PPC. BUT have a lot of items i want to sell faster, so i reentered some top sellers into the shopping malls...

to conclude, i think the combination, programming, and inclusion of many venues is more important then just banking on one because it is easier. If adwords is a great potential, but you don't have the resource to manage it, then automate it based on history, sales data and your in-stock supply info VIA Google ad words API

The more you do, The more you will get out of what you do, as there is no turnkey solution to success