In this article I will just be discussing my experiences selling on my website using only Google Base or as it is now known Google Products to market my items. It’s not intended to be a guide and I cannot really advice anyone to copy my example.
I started selling on my tools and accessories website last year. I naturally started with Google Adwords submitted a Google Base feed. I Listed quite a few items saw the traffic come in mainly through Google Adwords and laid back and waiting for the sales to start coming in. Well it did not. People came, saw and left. I was left wondering what I had done wrong. I spent hours changing bits and pieces on the site but still no sales. After giving up worrying I turned my attention to just building the site, listing more stuff and suddenly I got a sale. Then another and another and so it started. I did sell here and there but it was not enough to pay for the Adwords.
I had reduced my budget to the barest minimum but still was not breaking even. I decided to rev it up a bit, increased my budget and tried to direct traffic to the faster selling lines. My cost soared but the sales stayed the same and in some instances dropped. I quickly dropped back to my old budget. After doing all I felt I could I decided to analyse my sales and track where my buyers were coming from. What I discovered surprised me.
Google analytics showed that I got almost 60% of my traffic from Adwords and just 30% from Google organic. Analysis of this showed that only 65% was from Google base while the rest was from Organic searches. I also checked the traffic sources of the customers who bought. 80% had indicated during the checkout have come from Google Search. I had assumed they meant Google Adwords as they may not know the difference between Google search and Google advert. Anyway my Adwords conversion scripts were not working properly so I could not track conversion rates Adwords control Panel. I finally tracked sales traffic sources using a combination of Google analytics and a Joomla module called Usertrace. The result was as follows;
Adwords ~ 30%
Google Products ~ 50%
Google search ~ 10%
Other sources (e.g. Shopwiki) ~ 10%
Adwords including Search Partner referral accounted for 60% of all traffic and generated only 30% of the sale. More importantly it was costing me all my profits. So, if you are me what will you do? Well, I just switched it off. Traffic is lower but sales have not really gone so bad. I am now working hard to improve my website SERPs and hopefully in a few months time traffic will bounce back.
The most important lesson here is that targeted traffic is the most important thing. Secondly Adwords is good for high priced items. I sold a few expensive items using Adwords, which is good, as one sale usually covers the cost of Adwords for the whole month. I have however now run out of stock of the bestseller. Lastly if you wish to sell to Europe then you need Adwords, Google Base operate only in UK and Germany at the moment. Almost 80% of my clicks in Adwords were from some European country. But really at this moment, I can’t afford it. Of course I will be back when my site has grown significantly, but for now Google base it is.
Once more, the above is based on my experience selling Tools, Camping and Outdoor accessories and household items on my website. Experiences may differ from Website to Website
By James Oguns
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