This week I’ve started a new project to get better photographs of everything we sell, starting of course, with the high value stuff! Hopefully this will result in higher conversion rates from taking more detailed, upclose shots like this:
Archive for June, 2007
Photography
New record…
AdWords brought in over 50 conversions this week which is the first time its been over 50, well, ever, as it never used to work properly with actinic! woo! Clock Warehouse is slowly recovering too.
Frustrating..
One of my business areas is thriving in Adwords and direct sales at the moment, however the other just refuses to do well. I think I’m going to have to re-evaluate my whole strategy in this area. Its very frustrating as my main business area is thriving, partly because it is fathers day soon, but partly due to revamped adwords and better organic search. I’m just a bit stuumped in how to get this other area to grow – bak to the whiteboard me thinks…
Increasing business..
As previously mentioned, my two business areas performed fairly poorly in march and april due to installation of a new e-business system.
Part of this was due to the failiure of some 301 redirects which damaged my PR in google (and serps haven’t been too hot either). As an initial remedy I decided to try and increase traffic through PPC whilst creating an ambitious project to cut CPC and increse conversions, this, together with greater stock control and communication with customers has helped see an increase to 150% of the previous months sales whilst reducing advertising costs, as a percentage of revenue by 5 times!
Its always tempting to keep poorly performing adwords on the pretence that they might perform tomorrow, but by getting rid of these you can spend more money on the keywords that are performing. Aditionally, if you have keywords with high impressions and low conversions, try making them more specific and fine tuning these. If they are being seen by fewer people as a result, you can afford to pay a little more for each click through – chances are they will be converting at a higher rate!
This month I will be embarking on projects to increase organic rankings, to counter and hopefully exceed the page rank that I lost and increase my presence in the search engine listings.
Driving down costs
May has seen a drive to lower costs, the main target being google adwords. This has been due to the lull in sales that happened in march and april that has affected our profitability. Now that most of our energies are not being spent on fixing bugs with our new e-business system, time can actually be spent on marketing and providing better customer service.
During this drive, I have re-modeled most of my ad-groups to make them more specific, which has seen conversion rates increase, making each click more valuable and thus allowing the max cost per click to be raised. This in turn means our ads feature higher up the listings and get more clicks, which, going full circle are converting at a higher rate.
This has seen the cost of adwords dropping dramatically from a stagering 25/20% of revenue down to an awesome 95 (my target was 15%!)
