How Do You Measure Ad Success?
You’d think that success would be easy to measure, but advertising has never been a so simple to figure out.
When the talk turns to CTR, CPM, CPA, CPS many online business owners’ eyes glaze over or they throw up their hands in confusion.
So today I’m going to break down the mechanics of what these terms mean and how they work. It’s easier then you might think to wrap your head around it all.
Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a standard measure of how effective a particular ad really is.
CTRs range from the ecommerce industry average from about 0.20% to as high as 5% or 10%. As a general rule though, the more targeted the site, the higher the CTR your ad will return.
For example, one would expect an ad for Tiger Woods Golf Club to get a higher CTR on a golf related web site than on a site whose theme was sports in general. On a general site such as The Wall Street Journal Online, they would get an even lower CTR.
Cost Per Sale. A much more relevant number to pay attention too is the actual cost of making the sale of a golf club. And at the end of the day, you don’t care how high the CTR is if those clicks don’t result in a higher proportionate number of sales.
Make sense?
CPM Banner Economics- Direct marketers look at any advertising method at the end of the day in terms of how many sales their ads produce immediately.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s look at how your numbers might look if you were using banner ads.
Naturally, your results will vary, depending upon where you advertise and the effectiveness of your creative. Here are some arbitrary numbers to use in our calculation:
• CPM = $2 (a not untypical rate for general, not-very-targeted websites)
• CTR = 0.20%
• Conversion Rate = 2% (from your landing page)
Cost per Visitor = CPM / (1000 x CTR) = $2.00 / (1000 x .002) = $1
So, in our example, the $2 you spent to show the banner ad to 1000 people netted you 0.2% or 2 visitors to your site.
Each visitor cost you $1 to get there. Ok. Now let’s calculate what your advertising cost really is per sale.
At a 2% conversion rate from you landing page, you would need 50 visitors to see your and come to y our site in order to make one sale.
Here’s the formula in a nutshell
Cost per Sale = Cost per Visitor / Conversion Rate = $1.00 / .02 = $50
So in this example, it is going to cost you $50 to get one sale? Yikes!
But don’t freak out just yet… let’s look the bigger picture.
What if your site had 10% conversion rate instead of just a 2%? Now it would only cost you $10 to get a sale.
Where most ecommerce merchants selling online fail to take into consideration is how having a back-end product, or doing an upsell at the time of purchase can affect these numbers.
For example, what if it cost you $50 to get a $50 sale? Wouldn’t be worth the trouble right? That depends….
What if you had a back end product that you could offer these buyers and you knew that 30% of your first time buyers bought your back end product?
Let’s look at the numbers:
You spend $50.00 to make $50.00 so it’s a wash. But now wait a minute… 30% of 1000 (using the example above) means that you now have 300 people taking you up on your back end product!
And it cost you NOTHING to sell this back end product because the customer acquisition cost was already off set by their purchase of the first product.
Regardless of what your back end product costs, you are automatically in the black – because it cost you zero dollars in advertising to generate that sale.
Looking at it this way, you could even go underwater on the front end purchase and still make money. The key to making this work is to know and understand your conversion numbers first.
What Shopping Cart Software Is Really Best For Your Needs?
Having an online shopping cart is an important marketing tool for any e-commerce site. To the one best for your business, you must first evaluate what your needs include. Skip the demo versions which often may omit some of the important features on the full version.
If you are a handy at programming, you may not have any problem modifying your shopping cart software to serve a specific purpose. However, if you are not, then you are better off looking for the shopping cart software that contains the features you need and the technical support to guide you through the installation and implementation.
Ecommerce solutions like the ones we provide at http://www.1AutomationWiz.com/shopping-cart-software.htm are great for both the beginner and pro and are the fastest way to get your shopping cart online quickly.
Some shopping cart software has features that let you perform extra tasks such as inventory control or the capacity to resell the items that have been downloaded. Since these can cost a lot more than other shopping cart programs, you are better off not getting them if you don’t really need them.
In choosing your shopping cart software, if you consider the market record of a variety of models or you purchase the one you have chosen after carefully evaluating all those available, you need to take some points into consideration.
Capacity of the Software:
The software’s capacity should be one of the most important considerations you make in choosing which one to purchase. It isn’t unusual for marketers to choose shopping cart software that only has enough capacity for a minimum number of sale items.
However, if you have the normal expectation of growth to contend with, it isn’t reasonable to consider buying new software cart software to meet you changing needs every year. Updating the software is also unreasonable since it is likely to be a financial burden. With hosted ecommerce solutions like 1AutomationWiz.com you don’t have to worry about updates though as its taken care of for you automatically.
To prevent problems in the future, you are better of starting with shopping cart software that has the ability to meet an increasing amount of business. To get the right capacity in your software, you will need to consider the growth plans you have for your business over the next few years.
Keep It Simple:
It doesn’t matter how capable your shopping cart software is if you don’t have the expertise to use it. You should choose software that takes ease of use into its design consideration. This is the component that determines how easily your customer can checkout so that you don’t have multiple cases of cart abandonment to take away from your potential sales. You can choose software that will provide customers with one cart page as well as the option of checking out as a guest.
Consider Price:
The cost of your software should be as much of a consideration as any other expense you incur. Start your search for shopping cart software with the intention of finding the one that has all of the features you need for your business, including the option of adding on as your business expands. This is more important to your business than getting the lowest priced software. Always make the potential contribution it will make for your business your first consideration.
Reviews:
What do other people have to say? You can always check out the market reviews that are available for the software you are considering before purchasing it. This will give you information from others who have tried it and know what its advantages and disadvantages are. Previous users have information that isn’t available anywhere else.
Hopefully, these quick tips are what you’ll need to keep in mind when looking for shopping cart software so that you can get the one that is best for your business.
SEO Factors to Consider
Link Building is the start of a journey to higher natural rankings. But there are other factors that should also be considered.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content from a different domain or is appreciably similar.
What does that mean? It’s confusing. Some professional SEO guys say that you can lose ranking if another site owner copies your content and places it on his site, or (ahem), you copied someone else’s content and pasted onto your site.
Personally, I think that’s a load of B.S. The evidence just doesn’t prove this too be true. Well on one side anyway. If you use an article for example from another web site, you won’t get as much “juice” for it since Google found it somewhere else first. But it’s not going to hurt your rankings (unless your entire site is copied content – also called scrapped content).
On the other hand it CAN NOT hurt you if someone scrapes your content – as long as google has indexed it on YOUR site first.
Metatags
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements to provide structured metadata about a web page. What does that mean? Metatags provide information visible to the search engines that help the engines download, categorize, and index your site. You’ll have a hard time ranking if your tags are not structured correctly.
Of the 3 major meta tags – Title. Description, and Keywords, the TITLE tag is the single most important. That’s what the search engines are looking at when they index your site.
The Description tag: is for “click conversion” meaning that it should be used to “sell the click” when someone sees your site in the search engines.
The Keywords tag is pretty much worthless for SEO these days. However, including a FEW can’t hurt.
Keyword Density:
Keyword density is the percentage/number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on a page.
Most SEO professionals suggest a keyword density of 2-7% but that number differs depending on who you are listening too. What does that mean? It’s pretty straight forward. Its the number of times your keywords appear on a page in relation to the total number of other words on the page.
So if you are trying to rank for a specific key word, that word should be on the page you are trying to promote. But not too many times as this could cause a drop in the rankings. Lots of “experts” claim you should aim for 4%.
But that too is a shot gun approach, and could actually get you in trouble. My friend and the SEO expert TO the “SEO Experts” is Jerry West of WebMarketingNow.com and he tells a different story.
The percentage of Keyword Density you should use is dependent on WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS are using and for their top ranking pages that you are trying to beat them on.
So for example if you have a competitor who ranks #1 for a keyword you want to target, figure out what THEIR KWD is and start there. You might be able to rank with a KWD of 2%. Or it might need to be higer.
Now of course there are many other factors that come into play here but this should give you a beter understanding of how KWD is figured and how to use it on your pages.
System Maintenance This Weekend
1AutomationWiz will be performing application upgrades and system maintenance this weekend
This weekend we will be performing upgrades to our application and database system which will result in significant performance and security improvements for our customers.
Between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM (ET) on Saturday, February 27th, 2010Please note that you will not be able to log into your account, however, your shoppingcart will be available and be able to process orders during this maintenance window.
Your account information and customer database will not be affected by this upgrade and afterwards you will be able to login and conduct business as usual. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this maintenance period may cause.
Apple Yanks over 5,000 Apps
Reactions to Apple Pulling Over 5,000 Apps Without Warning
Apple has dominated tech headlines this week, as the company has created quite an uproar by unexpectedly removing over 5,000 apps from its App Store. The apps removed have been deemed “too sexy”, but much of said uproar has been more about Apple’s definition of sexy, and its double standard.
Apps containing women in bikinis and even workout clothes have been eliminated while apps from Playboy, FHM Magazine, and the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Issue have remained available, and even promoted on Apple’s App Store home page.
After much of the ruckus had been raised, Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller talked to the New York Times, saying, “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.” He also indicated that the difference with the Playboy, Sports Illustrated apps, etc. were that they were from well-known companies that were already available in “well-accepted” formats.