Re: Estimating traffic and conversion

From: Mary O'Brien <mary_at_trafficmentorseo.com>
Date: Mon 21 Jul 2003 10:37:58 -0500

Michael,

Here are some answers to your questions.

"We are having difficulty predicting our ROI because we cannot make
estimates on the number of visitors we might expect to the website, and the
conversion of these visitors to actual sales. Does anyone know of sources
for this kind of information?"

One way to do this is to figure out what the keyword universe is for your
product. In other words, what kind of interest is it generating on search
engines. Go to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool (in the advertiser
center) and figure out all of the searches that might be related to what you
are offering. Don't stop at the most specific, but also include any niche
terms. Add up the total number of searches for all keywords. This will give
you the total number of searches related to your product. As Overture
reaches approx. 80% of all web users, this will give you a good estimate of
the search marketplace.

Overture suggests that the average clickthrough rate is 4% if you are in the
number one position. This obviously varies substantially by channel, but
it's a good number to use for calculation purposes.

The conversion rate is harder. This depends much more on the design of your
site, and can be as low as .02% or as high as 9% depending on the nature of
your product and the usability of the site. A good rule of thumb that many
retailers use is 2%. So using those numbers you can get a good working
estimate. In other words:

100,000 searches X 4% clickthrough = 4000 visitors @ 2% purchasers = 80
conversions. Remember that many customers do not buy on the first visit, it
may take 4 or 5 visits to convert them.

"How long does it take to get established with search engines? If we use
PPC search engines will the website get traffic quicker?

It can take up to six months before you start seeing decent traffic from
organic listings in the search engines. PPC campaigns will bring you traffic
immediately, and it may be a good way to test the design of your site before
you have it fully completed so you can see what needs to be tweaked. You may
want to try the smaller engines as a test, or try a low CPC on Overture and
Google. The larger engines can be expensive places for a test buy, unless
you know what you are doing.

A PPC campaign is also a good way to figure out which keywords you want to
optimize your site for , as you will then have more insight into what
searchers are looking for and can design your pages to meet their needs.

Hope that helps.

Mary :)
mary,TrafficMentorseo.com
www.trafficmentorseo.com




Received on Mon Jul 21 2003 - 10:37:58 CDT