The legend of cheap advertising?

From: Boris Kontsevoi <arch_at_ok.cz>
Date: Thu 01 Feb 2001 11:32:44 -0600

Last year I have asked this community for help with
evaluation of our web site proposing a case study. We
offer web design and e-commerce solutions. Our site's
URL is below. We've got may good suggestions and
utilized some of them changing the content, introducing
payments by credit cards, trying different forms of
Internet advertising, etc. We did increase traffic to
our web site in about 3 times.

We have some results that I would like to share with
you and ask your advice on some immediate consequences
from our experience. Our advertising has the following
results (the first number is CTR, the second average
cost per visitor):

Search Engine positioning <0.1% ~$2.50
Banner Ads, Google AdWords ~0.5% ~$2.20
Opt-In e-mail ~23% ~$1.20
Classifieds ~0.2% ~$1.10
Pay per click search engines 0-2.6% ~$0.04

Of course, it's our particular results and others may
have different numbers but the main conclusion is that
there is no such thing as cheap Internet advertising.
Any form of advertising, except pay-per-click search
engines, leads to over $1 spent per visitor. It would
be OK as soon as your web site has "sufficient"
visitors-to-leads conversion ratio but here we have got
a problem. Our "visitors-to-leads" conversion ratio is
lower than 1%. And this is not sales yet. Just leads.
In fact, we are receiving more offers from other
companies and job inquiries than orders from our web
site. Then the question: Is something wrong with our
web site?

We have conducted some polling and got the following
results:
- 75% of respondents were satisfied with site's design
  and content
- 55% said they "may be back for purchase"
  (If somebody is interested in more details, please
  contact me.)

So, the web site seems to be OK but where is the
problem? An extremely competitive field? Still
something wrong with our web site? Could you review the
site and advise what should be changed to increase
"visitors-to-leads" ratio and direct purchases from the
site? I would very appreciate your help.

A final note about "pay-per-click" search engines. They
seems to be effective but it's not a panacea too. The
main problem of "targeted keywords" advertising is that
you can't be sure what one really needs when searching
for "your" keyword. In our case, for example, searching
for "Flash" may mean that one needs information about
Flash, or wants to see some movies, or investigates
competition, or is looking for a job, etc. Not
necessary wants to order a Flash movie. Based on
indirect results of our polling mentioned above and
analysis of our GoTo traffic I can suppose that at
least 60% of "targeted" visitors are not really
"targeted". They were not looking for a vendor but for
something else. It's interesting question itself
because strongly affects "visitors-to-leads" ratio.

Thank you,
Boris Kontsevoi
WEB SPACE STATION
Web Design and Software Development
http://www.web-space-station.com/?locd
mailto:arch_at_ok.cz





Received on Thu Feb 01 2001 - 11:32:44 CST