The Traffic – to be or..... to be!:-)

your thoughts

[Art]

Hi everyone,

You know, despite my long experience of working with Overture it is still not clear if it is reasonable to pay for traffic or not. In case if (of) you don’t have Really Popular keywords related to the service you provide. Like you spend money, you have traffic, but you don’t have the sales level you’re expected:)

So my question is does someone have a good experience with the situation like mine?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

Art.

<edit: no sigs [webmasterworld.com], please -rcj>

(edited by: rcjordan at 6:15 pm (utc) on May 9, 2002)

[Travoli]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Art.

Are you making money or losing money? If you are making money, I am assuming it is not giving you the desired profit margins. Have you tried tracking which terms lead to sales vs. which do not?

[nell]

Sales conversions depend on much more than just plugging into a bunch of keywords. Look carefully at those listings around you.
For starters, have a few unbiased people browse the listings where you are found and ask them which one they would buy from and why. Often, the obvious is not so obvious.

[chiyo]

nell said "...Often, the obvious is not so obvious..."

Absolutely. Never lose touch with the customers experience and never assume. You will be very surpised at how differently your customers behave.

Discipline yourslef to continually set up experiments where you watch high prospect people react with search engines or your and competitive sites, where they dont know your interest. We use focus group type set ups, or inviting people in and paying them so we can watch and make structured observations on their browsing and searching behaviour. But there are other ways if you cant afford the time and expense of focus groups and professional research.

For example for a general view, spend a day wandering around cybercafes and peeking at what people do. OK, cybercafe behavour is different than office or home type browsing behaviour, but i will guarantee that you will get a lot of extermely valuable personal insights and surprises.

Well said Nell.

[fathom]

Pay to play has alot of value when you need (or want) immediate results like for short term promotions.

Otherwise, letting pages propagate naturally is sufficient and especially good on the bottom line.

hmmm... Short term promotions. An example - To capitalize on short term newsworthy events Headlines - "EARTHQUAKE ROCKS NORTHEAST USA AND CANADA"

Well, it just so happens we have something to benefit this overall market's understanding of earthquakes.

... now where did I put those credit cards after that Hubble upgrade.

[Art]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts! Yes I do tracking the k/ws which bring me sales, but sometimes it seems like it really depends on weather conditions:-) I mean I can get 2-3 big sales for a particular k/w at March, but at April it'll be nothing. And there is more, let's say I have 300 unique visitors each day and no sales, what all these people are doing on my site?:-) Is it a red flag for changing something on my site?