Forum Moderators: buckworks
I'm running a couple of ecommerce sites, one for about a year, another for a few months. I am currently relying on organic traffic and Google Base for visitors.
I haven't started using Adwords or other paid traffic as I am a cheapskate, and don't think I could get a good ROI with my profit margins.
I was wondering how many/any other people run purely organic ecommerce sites. Am I crazy?
Tom
The three main sites that I use are as a result of:
1. General publicity (OK, its Amazon)
2. Printed ad in a specialist publication (not THAT sort of specialist publication!)
3. Came across while checking out affiliate marketing options and liked their product range.
When I received an Adwords voucher on upgrading my hosting I had a little play at setting up an Amazon aStore but didn't get a penny in sales through Adwords.
First sale came in one week.
We ran the AdWords for about a year on a $35 day/budget. Sales were good, but always always, watching those stats for increases in traffic NOT from the adWords server.
When it got to a point where the organics were sufficient to sustain sales, we closed all adWords campaigns. It was scary . . . .
But the sales continued at approximately 85% of the sales WITH adWords.
So no, you're not crazy, but what you need to be is patient, it will just take longer. Keep adding site content.
I was wondering how many/any other people run purely organic ecommerce sites.
The growth curve has been steadily upward. The past year or so it has REALLY shot up (which makes me look good ;)).
It's all been done with content, SEO tweaking, analyzing stats & analytics, adding more products, listening to customers, etc.
I do plan to experiment with paid ads at some point, but glad to see some others have success without them.
I need to work on my content writing I think, and I am looking to increase my product range. I drop ship a few hundred products on each site, but I know the more the better.
I tend to agree, the expense of Adwords clicks these days means you need to have a high value product to make it worthwile.
I am concentrating on building relationships with companies via forums and phone calls. This seems to be a better use of my time that pulling my hair out with SEO campaigns and Google Keywords.
Now I only advertise one type of widget, and only during the months of May and June. Even at that, the cost of Adwords consumes one-half to one-third of the profit of every widget sale.
For the rest of the items I sell, sales come through organic searches, Google base, or word of mouth.
Mine isn't a huge business, but it's enough for me to make a comfortable living (and have a one year old Mustang GT, a Harley, and other toys ;) ).
I was wondering how many/any other people run purely organic ecommerce sites. Am I crazy?
You are not crazy. My commercial sites (not in my profile) do not google adword or adsense and have done very well since 1996... some better than others, but all at least paying their way. Making a "killing" on the net is more difficult these days because of the sheer number of competitors but a living can be made with the right product(s), marketing, and sales.
We ran the AdWords for about a year on a $35 day/budget.
I was wondering if rocknbil or others can say how long per week they spend managing an adwords campaign of this value. This would be something to consider if the ROI is small.
After it got into a "comfortable" position - ads that displayed in the first page of searches, and at least half the clicks let to conversions - we just let it run.
So basically all of the ads we displayed came up on the first page of results, during our peak traffic hours, or they were kicked out the door.
We left the content network alone, too much abuse there. Also a large input factor in determining "what works" is frequent comparisons against Analytics stats.
A second client of mine had an existing campaign that someone had set up, obviously clueless to The Way Things Work. He was spending $100 per day with a very modest return on leads. Some of the clicks were costing him $3-$5 per click in a very specific niche. I reviewed his account, set up a second campaign with focused keywords; his ads now ran from 5 cents a click to 25 cents a click, with the most expensive one at 50 cents. I also scheduled his ads to run during his peak hours only.
His leads increased to %200 over previous and his daily budget was now $15 per day.
So to answer the question, initially, 2-3 hours per day for a month or so, after that, pop in and check in it every other day, 10-15 minutes.
I'd suggest you investigate Amazon. I've been selling through their portal since December and am quite happy. With Amazon, their fee is a flat rate and is taken out as a percentage of each sale, so my ROI is determined by only two factors: how much time I spend adding product/writing descriptions and the sales price I set. Amazon takes care of all the advertising...simple, straightforward, easy math for me! I also gained access to customer base which previously didn't even consider me a viable option. Amazon has more than made up for the sales I've "lost" since cutting my AdWords budget.
I was wondering if rocknbil or others can say how long per week they spend managing an adwords campaign of this value. This would be something to consider if the ROI is small.
We do between $200-$300/day in Google Adwords. I spend 10-20 minutes daily tweaking and generally just doing what I can to make the campaign better.
The ROI is good. Good enough to dedicate the time towards.
Keep adding site content.
You need content that would drive traffic to a ecommerce site and convert.
Not necessarily. A lot of people complain that it's hard to get links and organic/referring traffic to an ecommerce site. Having a collection of good articles is one way to attain that.
Yes, and before everyone fell for the Goto/Overture .01 bid stuff.
What changed is you now get to sell three times as much stuff to make the same amount of (net profit) money.
..and if I sound annoyed, I am.
I can live with the money aspect - but the TIME it takes to set up and track this stuff is a real negative.
We spend $500/month in adwords and generate 20k/month in sales from it.
Then you should write an ebook. It will sell like hot cakes.;-)
[edited by: KFish at 10:33 am (utc) on June 10, 2009]
Then you should write an ebook.
Unless his profit margin is less than 2.5%, then he'd actually be losing money ;)
Unless his profit margin is less than 2.5%, then he'd actually be losing money
Sounds too good to be entirely true. I wonder what his margins are and if that 20k in sales is directly from Adwords or total sales for the site. If it is just from Adwords I would try to spend more like 5k per month and see where that gets me.
The 20k is directly from Google Ad Words not total sales. We have a tracking id on our urls in our google ads that tracks where sales come from and I can see in my reports total sales.
I dont personally manage the adwords, we have someone in house that handles that aspect of things (as well as many other things). All I know is the budget is $500 ... as far as I know, that is never depleted and we are always at the top for our ads.
I will speak with the person who does the adwords to see if I am correct or if we do actually run out of funds sometime in the month. If we do, the MadeWillis you make an excellent point in that we should be cranking that up.
I will say we have a pretty unique niche market with 5-10 competitors and of those 5-10 we have 3 or 4 that run adwords along with us.
Lastly, I do know that we have a pretty targeted campaign. We have a very large set of ads based on specific keywords and we also put in negative keywords so we dont show up places we dont want to be. We also target specific locales as we know where our customers are and are not. Lastly, we do no content ads, its all search ads. We spent a great deal of time fine tuning the campaigns and we also rotate them so the customers dont see the same ads over and over and the same offers over and over.
I also scheduled his ads to run during his peak hours only.
rocknbil, what is the logic behind this? Is it to minimize click fraud?
Also, we just recently started bing ads. So far im unimpressed with the result there but its still early. We started bing as microsoft is running like a 100 million ad campaign to get the name out and we hope to take advantage of that.
Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages for both. SEO is less expensive and beneficial for the long-term, while PPC gets you the quickest traffic for a price.
