“Visitors who arrive at a retailer’s site from paid search ads are 50% more likely to buy than those who come from clicking on a natural search link, according to a new study by search marketing firm Engine Ready.”
“But most likely to buy are consumers who navigate directly to a retailer’s site by typing in a URL or clicking on a bookmark, as their conversion rate registered at 7.38%. And consumers who came to an e-commerce site from another site or an e-mail converted at 6.58%, the study shows.”
We at SRMC are not surprised by these results since direct traffic and email traffic are typically from existing customers while search traffic is typically from people who aren't yet familiar with your company.
What is also interesting is that paid search has far better results than organic, or natural, search; with small companies struggling with how to spend smaller and smaller budgets we expect people to shift initiatives from SEO to paid search, especially since SEO can be quite expensive. This is not to say that companies should not spend on the SEO basics, but established companies should concentrate search budgets on PPC rather than organic.
The study also revealed that paid search traffic also had higher spend averages compared to the other categories. But not by much. Since direct and email traffic tend to be repeat buyers, albeit with slightly lower average spends, we think that these categories will remain the meat and potatoes of the internet marketing budget.
This information is a boon to smaller companies that may not have the time or budget to adequately measure results but that are struggling with how to spend tiny budgets. Obviously, tactics like email should be given more weight than SEO or paid search. One way you can think about structuring your budget is to spend based on effectiveness.
For example, if you have a budget of $50,000 for internet marketing, think about spending 70% ($35,000) on customer relationship building tactics like email, 20% ($10,000) on Paid Search and 10% ($5,000) on SEO.
See the Article at Internet Retailer>>
Chart of the Week 2009 Archive >> |
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It’s summertime, when many marketers are taking a well deserved break, but ecommerce folks are hard at work, gearing up for what is projected to be an improved holiday season over 2008 with growth up approximately 9%, and significantly more in some sectors.
Here's a look at our top three tactics to improve website conversions, as rated by nearly 1,500 ecommerce marketers in April to help you prep for shoppers' return to the Internet.
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#1. Perpetual shopping carts.
These take many different forms, from simple notes that there’s a product sitting in the cart, to dynamic overlays showing images of the product, price and estimated shipping costs, for example. The relative impact of the perpetual shopping cart is going to vary by execution, but the essential function is universal-it keeps the purchase in the mind of the customer, and that psychological anchor helps guide them back to the purchase.
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According to a recent survey conducted by eROI, the internet marketing agency, only 63% of organizations who use email marketing are testing their content to improve ROI.
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To improve ROI, here's what the testers are testing:
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It seems like common sense to an experienced internet marketer to test these catagories but what about smaller companies who may not have the time, funds or experience to test email campaigns? Whey are so many not testing?
The same study indicated that 33% of organizations did not test because they did not know how. Another 27% of organizations said they did not test because they did not have enough time. Only 8% of organizations said they did not see the value in testing.
Go to eROI to get a copy of the full report >> |
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According to a recent study conducted of over 200 businesses, email delivery and open rates are still incrementally increasing despite a huge increase in volume (there was a 12% increase in email volume in the last year alone). Delivery rates increased from 93.4% to 94.1% and open rates increased from 20.9% to 22.1% Average click-through rates also increased, from 5.8% to 6.1%.
What was most astounding about the study was the key finding that 53% of consumers who opt-in to companies' email marketing program make offline purchases as a direct result of the email program. This includes people who don't even open or click the email. Apparently, just the arrival of the email is part of what keeps a consumer engaged.
This makes sense since marketers and advertisers have known for years that frequency, along with relevant messaging to a targeted audience is an important consideration in any campaign.
We at SRMC have seen many clients balk at email marketing. Clients often cite click-through rates as too low for all the work that's involved in running and managing a consistent email program, especially the creation of unique and relevant content. If you ask us, a 53% sell rate is reason enough to continue or start an email program. |
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“We just did an assessment of advertising placed on social networking sites and were surprised to find that nearly 20% of all ad spending is by local businesses.”
“The amount projected to be spent locally in 2009 comes to $641 million out of $3.26 billion across the sites surveyed.”
A key finding is that the majority of this local ad spend is captured by two Web sites – MySpace and Facebook. Between them they captured $363 million dollars, or 57 percent of the surveyed local social network advertising.
One of the things I think small businesses need to think about soon is whether to get in the game now with social networking spending or forever hold your peace. During the early days of Pay-per-click, we at SRMC had a lot of trouble convincing small businesses to shift spending to these media outlets. Then, by the time small businesses wanted to take part, the prices had been driven up considerably.
SRMC has run many highly successful campaigns (check out the one we did for GBT) using social media but are experiencing the same resistance from small businesses that we experienced in the early days of Google and then SEO. The prices now are low—we spent between $0.42 and $0.58 per click in our most recent Facebook campaign. And, because there are so many demographic picks—such as town, state, age, sex, workplace, college, keywords, etc.—it's very easy to target and spent specifically on your core consumer base. |
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New to the list of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) providers this year is Facebook. While not a search engine, it offers contextually targeted PPC text ads in a way similar to the Google content network.
As this chart shows, usage of the recently introduced PPC on Facebook is only slightly less than that of Yahoo!’s well established content network. The somewhat sticky question this provokes is why, in a siloed world of search, display and offline media buying, are search marketers buying display ads? If more and more media buying moves to performance-based PPC bid models, does that put the Search Marketer in charge of the larger media buying budget?
To muddy the waters further, PPC ads on Facebook are often designed to drive users to Facebook-markable web pages creating a viral spread effect within the social network. These engaged users posting links on their Facebook pages drive organic traffic-until now the domain of SEO experts. The effect of all this is that more experts have to become generalists, and cross-functional strategies are becoming more common...
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