Staying Alive
The struggles of a business trying to survive.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to my post. I’d like to respond to some of the comments, because, well, just because.
First thing first: my AdWords campaign, as it is configured today, works very, very well. It produces inquiries, which we turn into paying customers. The average inquiry we get via phone and e-mail yields about $3,450 in revenue. And my total AdWords spending is less than 5 percent of my annual revenue, which I consider to be acceptable. So all of the advice to fiddle with this and change that and look into the other is interesting, but I may or may not change anything. It ain’t broke. I don’t need to fix it.
Second, some clarification on my account and budget. I advertise only on the search network, not the content network. I used to run on the content network, but we got enormous numbers of junk hits that were related to searches for sports conferences — and yes, I know that I could have cleaned that up with negative keywords, but that’s a never-ending task. I suspect that people who want to buy conference tables are doing so for their business, not on a whim prompted by their personal browsing. So I’ve set up my marketing under the assumption that tables are a one-time, highly considered purchase. Nothing in my experience has made me reconsider this. And I should have said this, but we’re spending $500 per weekday, and nothing on the weekends. So my total ad spend runs around $9,000 a month, or about $108,000 a year. We’re on track for $2 million in sales this year, which is where I got the 5 percent of gross number.
On to the comments:
I’m curious, have you taken into account anything year over year in your calculations or anything else other than what your average has been this one isolated week compared to the previous 40 weeks or so of data that you had compiled? – Mark Bowers
So it’s an extremely interesting question but a pitifully small sample upon which to even consider writing and analysis. – Bob
Let’s talk data. For the last 24 years, I would buy a paper calendar at the beginning of the year, and use it to record appointments and also make note of incoming calls. Not a very sophisticated system. I decided at the beginning of this year that I wanted a much better record of incoming calls, to see whether any patterns emerged. So I set up a spreadsheet on Google Docs, with a cell for every day of the year, and shared it with my salesmen so that we could all record every incoming inquiry. This has worked well. When I started my new Web site, I added a sheet with number of inquiries for the last half of 2009 and all of 2010. During that time, we received 613 inquiries, a monthly average of 30.65 (compared to this year’s average of 58 per month.) Is this data set too small for validity? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m not a statistician. I’m just a small-business owner. I collect whatever data I can get with the time and resources I have available, and I draw conclusions from it because I have to. I’ll keep working on my system and probably improve it over time. But I can’t wait around for a perfect system to appear.
And regarding the length of my experiment: missed inquiries cost me money. A lot of the calls we get result in jobs weeks or months later. And some of the calls result in really huge orders — I’d hate to miss one of those because I was amassing a statistically significant data set. So I was unwilling to run the experiment for longer than a week, particularly when incoming call volume plummeted.
FWIW, I never click on the paid ads. For something as visual as your product, I skip right down to the image results. Then I can see several companies’ tables all at once. And there you don’t do very well. Only one little photo on page two, surrounded by multiple photos from your competitors (Franz, hardrox). You should recode your .jpg file names so they will show up better. – JAB
This is a very interesting comment. It never occurred to me that anyone would shop this way, but it makes perfect sense for a visually oriented product. We do code our photo file names to try to make them S.E.O. friendly, but there’s only so much you can do with a file name. This type of search doesn’t seem to have any connection to AdWords. I don’t know how Google ranks the images they turn up. I just tried a search (“custom conference tables”) which returns my site as both the top paid and free listings. When I hit the image tab, we have only one picture in the first 25, and five in the first 200. Maybe Google is missing an opportunity here — why not expand AdWords to the image results? I’d happily pay for placement.
I rarely click on AdWords results at either the top or side because I know Google is going to get paid by what is often a small business with narrow margins … So if the ad seems relevant to my needs I’ll scroll down and click on the “free” search result for the same company, or even manually type in the company’s URL instead of clicking on the adword link. But I’d miss a lot of companies without the Adword link. — MK, New York
So what do you do if there is no free link from the company buying AdWords? I’m inferring that you click someone else. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this drives me crazy. I bought that top link so that you would click it if you thought it would benefit you to do so. Please don’t worry about my ad budget. I’ll worry about it, and if it seems to be money poorly spent, I’ll change my marketing.
My company was one of Google’s original advertisers. About two years ago, we cut back our AdWords budget by 80% and just focused on phrases that brought visitors to our shopping cart. We were nervous about how Google would react, but our experiment worked. Our sales did not decline and our organic listings did not suffer. — Steverino
This commenter highlights one of the best/worst features of the free listings: older links have a self-reinforcing advantage over newer ones. I weep when I consider the top free listing for “boardroom tables” that I thoughtlessly threw away in 2005 (by creating a new Web site with a different set of URLs.) Once you get to the top of the free heap, you are most likely to stay there, as you will automatically get more clicks than the succeeding links. My theory, and my experience backs me up on this, is that the best way to move your free link up the list is to drive traffic to it with AdWords and show Google that people are finding the link to be useful through a good bounce rate, time on site and other metrics that reflect the user experience. How does an S.E.O.-optimized site dislodge a site that also has good S.E.O.? AdWords seems to provide the extra boost.
One recommendation (as someone who invests in domain names for a living) is that you upgrade to CustomConferenceTables.com instead of using the domain name with hyphens … The company that owns the name w/o hyphens is a very large company and the price is affordable, especially considering the products you’re selling and your current advertising outlay. — Eliot Silver
We bought the URL with the hyphens because it was available, and my Web designer thinks that it makes no difference regarding the S.E.O. strength of the name. Just out of curiosity, I contacted the owner of customconferencetables.com to see how much it would cost. I was told $1,680. Forget it, I replied, that’s outrageous. Would you sell it for $800? Have to check with my manager, said the salesman. Thirty seconds later I get a call back: $800 is O.K. That made me wonder how much lower they would have gone. I decided not to do the deal — I don’t actually think that owning that particular URL is important, as customconferencetable.com is owned by a third company, and most of the other obvious variations are in different hands. It’s a jungle out there in conference table land. There will be some confusion for people who don’t look any further than a URL. But that is not how people shop. I have faith in my site’s content and my sales process. We’ll make it work.
UShapedTable.com
UShapedTables.com
SquareConferenceTable.com
CustomBoardroomTable.com
CustomBoardroomTables.com
All are available. Buy them and forward them to the site. — John
I took the $800 I didn’t spend on customconferencetables.com and bought these instead. I will be forwarding them to the relevant pages on our site. Thanks for the tip!
Paul, like many people I’ve long since switched to Bing. Have you tried your search terms there? – lesle
Thanks for commenting, lesle (or is it Mrs. Gates?). Since Sept. 1 of this year, I received 4,287 organic visits from Google and 3,019 visits from AdWords. Bing sent me 122 organic visitors. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look as though I should be spending much time worrying about my Bing traffic. Is it possible that Google suppresses Bing results in Google Analytics? That would be quite underhanded, but who is auditing Google Analytics for accuracy? Just in case, I’ll ask: Is anyone out there doing well with Bing?
Put your SEM/SEO history into a Shewhart process behavior chart (Excel templates available on the Internet). This will put probability control bands around the data and provide some analytic insight, including cyclicality effects. It will also help separate signal from noise in the results. — Mak
I’m not smart enough to do this, but anyone who wants to try it is welcome to my raw data.
When it comes to paid ads influencing a company’s rank in the organic results, we’ve always felt very strongly that there should be no connection between the two. Google does not use your status as an advertiser to influence organic rankings. – Frederick Vallaeys, Google AdWords Evangelist
Thus speaketh Google. But until Google tells us precisely what factors go into making organic rankings, I’ll have my doubts about their bright line separation between AdWords and organic.
Enough on this subject (at least for now). Next post: my falling health insurance costs!
Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside of Philadelphia.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d6f11189868157160303a698b837788f
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