Many e-commerce businesses live or die on the cost of their "clicks". Indeed, we have seen major "dot-coms" crash as the result of a slight increase in their customer acquisition costs (CPA).
We often interview CEOs and marketing directors, and while many are able to tell us their average cost per click in Overture, Google AdWords, or FindWhat, many more cannot tell us their OVERALL cost per click.
This is dangerous.
To illustrate the significance of this metric we have prepared a simple chart. The numbers are adapted from a functioning e-commerce website.
NOTES ON OUR METHODOLOGY
RELEVANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION
| Google PageRank's Impact On Overall Cost Per Click | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Click Source | Number of Clicks | Campaign Costs | CPC |
| Google AdWords | 20,625 | $3,446.96 | $0.17 |
| Google Directory | 16,901 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Combined Traffic Driven by Google | 37,526 | $3,446.96 | $0.09 |
What You Need To UNDERSTAND: When we factor in the traffic from The Google directory, we reduce the overall cost per click by 47%.
The following is one method of improving your search engine rank for relevant keywords:
1. Research related keywords to your niche and create a list of the most-searched terms.
2. From that list, develop a set of keywords that would produce the most relevant traffic to your site.
3. Incorporate those keywords into you home page site description. Apply as many keywords to your home page text as possible while keeping in mind the consumers and the likelihood of them reading this. Keep your text user-friendly at all times.
4. Once this is done you may adjust your tags: Use the above list and add keywords as meta tags to your code. Create relevant "alt" attributes for all images
To improve your overall site rank and individual page rank the above should be performed on each page of your site, starting with the most important.
"Internet company Yahoo! said Monday it plans to buy commercial search services provider Overture Services Inc. for $1.6 billion in cash and stock.
"Overture shareholders are to receive $4.75 cash and 0.6108 share of Yahoo! for each of their shares, which puts the value at about $24.41 a share, or a premium of about 13 percent based on Friday's closing prices."
Story on Internet Advertising Report
Forrester Research:
By 2005, affiliate programs will constitute 20% ($53 billion of e-commerce sales compared to $10.5 million in 2001) of online sales.
Must-haves for affiliate programs include:
1. Quality Products
2. High Commissions Per Sale
3. Two-Tier Payouts
4. Lifetime Commissions
Former ClickZ publisher Andrew Bourland recently acquired Adventive Inc., publisher of the i-Sales discussion list family. Here is a recent note from Bourland about the acquisition:
On June 3rd, my company -- Up2Speed LLC -- acquired the assets of Adventive, Inc. from John and Adam Audette. John launched the first of these discussion lists -- i-Sales -- back in 1995 and did a superb job in creating a community of people teaching, debating, conversing and networking with each other. His will be a huge pair of shoes to fill, and I feel humbled by the task in front of me. I hope you will be patient with me and my team as we learn the ropes and trust you will let us know how we can serve you better.
For those of you who don't know me, I was the co-founder, Publisher and CEO of ClickZ until my partner, Ann Handley and I sold the company to Internet.com in September of 2000. We stuck around til May of 2001 and then went into a state of semi-retirement. I thought I wanted to retire completely from the online marketing world about this time last year, but I started feeling a yearning to come back earlier this year -- so here I am.
John Audette and I had on and off discussions about me potentially buying Adventive dating back to September of 2001. The conversations usually ended up with him not being ready to sell, wanting to give it one more shot, or with me
not willing to pay his asking price.
This time around, John and Adam were ready to move on, and I was willing to pay the price he asked. So I am now your new Publisher.
It has been no secret that John and Adam struggled to create a business model for Adventive that would pay the bills and afford a small profit, but it never quite happened. They tried premium memberships and most recently went to a
licensing model for which Adventive played the role of service provider to a number of independent lists. Neither program worked out.
I'm taking over this publication with no illusions. Discussion lists are tough to monetize. But I can promise you this: you don't need to worry about me launching a paid discussion model, and as of today, the licensing program is
over.
There are any number of new approaches and content possibilities between Adventive and MarketingFix which we plan to develop and offer to you, our readers. So while you can expect that the discussion lists you are currently
subscribed to will not change, just know that we'll be making some interesting new offerings available as well.
Up2Speed will be developing a series of information tools, resources and services which we will offer to you -- yes, at a price -- over the coming months. If they meet your needs, I hope you will do business with us. If not, you will still
be a member of our free discussion lists and we'll just hope that future offerings will suit your needs better. It's our responsibility to make this a viable business that will continue to serve the online marketing community over the coming years -- not yours. I hope we measure up.
Finally, just as I was when I published ClickZ, I want to remain accessible to you as Publisher of Up2Speed. If you ever want to write to let me know of a problem, a concern, a suggestion, a comment, a gripe or even a compliment, I hope you will email me at bourland@up2speed.com. I read and respond to all my emails, so if you write, just remember it's a real live human being -- me -- on the other end who will be reading your email with interest.
I hope you will grant me permission to notify you as time goes on of new content offerings, developments, etc. I won't spam you, and I'll keep these publisher letters to no more than once a month. Fair enough?
Thanks for your time...
Your striving publisher,
Andrew Bourland
Google just released beta 2.0 of its Google Toolbar. New features include a pop-up ad blocker, a form auto-fill, and a one-click blog posting enhancement for Blogger.com.
More information on the release can be found at: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20030626S0004
You can download and install Toolbar 2.0 at: http://toolbar.google.com/install-beta