Spending Money to Make Money

how to divvy up a finite budget for an e-commerce site

[Cam_Morton]

I have a client who sells gift-type products through a traditional call centre and his website. It is a small and young operation with very little brand recognition. Right now the website takes about 7% of the orders, a proportion which is growing.

The owner is considering purchase of some top line ad space in one of the web directories which can be considered a direct successor to the old hard copy yellow pages.
The cost represents a healthy chunk of the site's promotion/ad budget.
So the question is about behavior among web-users who are also internet consumers.

Say such a person is looking for a gift for Aunt Mildred -- chocolates for delivery in Victoria, BC, or flowers in Albuquerque NM ... is the search for a suitable online merchant more likely to begin with
-- (path 1) a directory like the one described above, or
-- (path 2) a search engine like Google?

If we compare users of those paths, are members of one group more likely to actually make an order and buy a product?
Given that our data for this kind of decision making is both young and shallow, what kinds of risk-spreading can you recommend in a site promotion budget for a company like this one? I have to make some kind of comment on this issue (the wiser, the better 8>) )
Thanks in advance ...
Cam

[rcjordan]

Cam, welcome to WmW.

>The cost represents a healthy chunk of the site's promotion/ad budget.

That's the sticking point for me. If I were planning the campaign, I think I'd hold that directory ad as a last resort and first commit only a portion of the budget to test the ppc engines like Overture and google's adwords.

[skirril]

Its a tough decision, but I think it has a clear answer:

- put the site into the free engines
- DMOZ/ODP

Then look at the bigger content sites, like e.g. Terra/Lycos, Yahoo,..

Then looki at the Pay for Spidering/ PPC engines

And only then look ay specialised yellow-pages dirs.

ou'll be amused how much an entry in ODP and Yahoo can do, at very little cost. :)

[ggrot]

You can also ask the owner of this web property if he would let you try out a spot on his site for a few days at a reduced starter rate. It will give you a very good idea of what traffic levels you can expect and maybe even a rough idea of how well it converts.

[Mike_Mackin]

GIFTS [overture.com]

>You'll be amused how much an entry in ODP and Yahoo can do, at very little cost.

I would build specific domains and get them listed in the directories under specific sub-cats. [dir.yahoo.com]

imho