Too many people try too hard to get people to whip out their credit card and purchase online. Unless you are a huge brand name online, the highest conversion you can expect (the amount of sales you get divided by your total number of visits) is about 2%. I hardly see more than a true 2% conversion rate when you ask for a credit card. Now, when it comes to gathering data (an online lead) you can get as high as 15%. If you are a good sales person, you should be able to close half of your warm leads. If you closed half, your overall conversion would be 7.5%. This is about 4 more sales that you would have if you would have relied only on your website to close the deal down. Imagine what you would have to … Continue reading →

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Are you as sick of seeing the ad below as much as me? If I see another Google ad my head will explode. With the reach they currently have, I believe Google will start doing more bad than good for themselves. They will have the same issue that Alta Vista/Yahoo/Excite had in the 90′s. Although banner ads are now have a click through rate of under 1%, when they first came out, you could get a click through rate close to 6%. Right now, all data shows that text ad’s kick the crap out of graphic ads all day long. The problem is that more than 50% of ad-based websites are displaying Google ad results. If people see the same thing over and over again, they will simply stop clicking on them. Website owners, please start spreading your wings a bit. There … Continue reading →

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Far too many times when we start working with clients on their internet marketing campaign are we asked by the client to send daily/weekly reports and give them our insight about each day. This could be one of the biggest problems we are faced with. Companies online have become obsessed with data to the point that they stopped looking at longer-term benefits of any given campaign. “What did yesterdays Google campaign yield for me yesterday?” “on Tuesday we got 73 orders, today only 52, should we shut the campaign off?” The fact is, there are fluctuations online that no one can really point to. I call it the Conversion Chaos Theory. Although there is no evidence of what causes cycles in ecommerce, they are there. Sure, there are the obvious holiday/vacation/weekend cycles that most retailers see, but there is evidence … Continue reading →

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