Cost Efficent Advertising

[thedancingdaisy]

I feel like I pay a small fortune for advertising. I spent my first year of business doing a lot of trial and error with various advertising options on the Internet. I have found that I get a lot of visitors with Shopzilla, unfortunately only a small percentage of them actually purchase.

Anyone have ideas or tips they have found to be successful when it comes to advertising? How about helpful resources? Does anyone else use CPC and find this to be a very costly method?

[bristweb]

Originally Posted by thedancingdaisy

I feel like I pay a small fortune for advertising. I spent my first year of business doing a lot of trial and error with various advertising options on the Internet. I have found that I get a lot of visitors with Shopzilla, unfortunately only a small percentage of them actually purchase.

Anyone have ideas or tips they have found to be successful when it comes to advertising? How about helpful resources? Does anyone else use CPC and find this to be a very costly method?

the only suggestion i can say is to plan on spending.

#1 - hire an expert, this will be expensive, but they can get your advertising to be effective
#2 - trial and error, any mistakes will cost you dearly, but if you're attentive and can afford it, you should eventually become proficient.
#3 - don't advertise and business will dwindle

[cekman]

I use CPC advertising almost exclusively, although I do advertise in a couple of magazines also. I use Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Nearly all of my new customers come from these ads. I wouldn't be in business without them.

That said - I spend a LOT of money on advertising - by far my biggest expense. You can budget what you spend by ad campaign - so if you want to try it out and test it you can. With Google I don't have much limit set and spend hundreds of dollars a month. With Yahoo I have it set at $50 and add to that when it runs out - usually once or twice a month. I just don't get the traffic on Yahoo and MSN ads that I get with Google.

I also really like google analytics a lot. It's not perfect - but it gives me a lot of information.

One thing with the CPC - you may not be able to compete on the common keywords- so look for less common ones that you can get very cheaply. Also try common misspellings of words.

I don't know how an online business can go without CPC advertising - unless you are very high in the standard search rankings. I was on the first page of Google for many of my keywords before I switched to 3dCart. I'm hoping to work my way back to the top over time. That was one of the only bad things about switching carts.

Good luck
Cekman
www.cobwebcorner.com

[thedancingdaisy]

With my trial and error, I basically tried various advertising methods and ones that didn't seem to bring visitors I stopped using. I used Google and Yahoo CPC, I currently am not. I found it brought very few visitors, even less purchases, and cost a lot.

I use Shopzilla a lot. It brings a lot of visitors to my site. The problem is I can go through $200 of advertising in 3 days, which gives me roughly 750 leads, but of those 750 I get maybe 3 orders. I guess paying $200 for 3 orders doesn't seem all that great to me. Maybe that is just how Shopzilla is.

Anyone use Shopzilla/Bizrate and have similar experiences?

[Rungreen]

I've spent 6 years on the the CPC "crack", and i've gone off it recently. I still use it, but I have cut it down a lot.

Since one of my competitors(ahem) lurks here, PM me for details on the latest.

[DCG]

I'm in the same boat. Spending a lot on clicks from Shopping portals and a bit less on pay-per-click through Google & Yahoo. Getting plenty of hits, but very few orders.

I need to try to find a cheaper way of advertising.

[rrw]

Yeah, we too have cut WAY back on our CPC--after 7 years we finally figured that it really wasn't worth $35.00 to get a $50.00 sale. We have a high organic ranking for our main search terms, and that didn't change at all when we switched from Monster to 3D.

Interestingly enough, even though the number of sales has decreased, our net income is about the same. It was very scary cutting it back as drastically as we did--we were spending over $125,000 a year and have cut it down to about $24,000 now. Guess we won't be getting that beach towel at Christmas from Google this year!

[cekman]

The best money I spend is by far through direct emails. I use Constant Contact. Whenever I send out an email I get lots of orders. I don't send them out often - just when I have new products to announce or a sale.