Acne Advertising Hiatus
With the impending site updates to Acne Vitamins, I’ve gone ahead and turned off our online advertising for a few days, and it sure makes a noticeable difference. I’m always skeptical about pay-per-click advertising, partly because click fraud is so common that it’s hard to tell how many real potential customers you’re reaching, but one thing is for certain - it’s still the easiest way to get traffic fast.
It seems that about 2/3rds of my traffic currently comes by way of Adwords, and unfortunately, sales are right in line with that figure. When I first got into using Adwords, I experimented with the typical bottom-scraping tactics that most “experts” tell you to use - bidding low on hundreds of terms vaguely related to acne in order to maximize low-price traffic. However, experience has taught me that the best traffic comes from those clicks that are closely related to your target audience. This traffic tends to be worth the extra cash, as these are the people that will actually buy your product. You may not make money off new customers, but if you’ve got a good product, repeat business over time builds up and turns into profit.
PPC is especially important for Acne-Vitamins simply because our page is still fairly new (less than a year), and thus still ranks rather poorly with the big G. On the bright side, it seems the site has made a jump in the last week in the natural rankings. Google now has me on page 3 (instead of page 35) on a search for “acne vitamins.” I don’t exactly want to celebrate just yet though, as this has happened before, only to see the site plummet back down into no man’s land. If Google started ranking me as well as MSN and Yahoo, chances are online advertising would be a little less important, but it’s never smart to depend on search engines for revenue, especially with how unpredictable the major engines are these days.
The new acne product brand will be on display in a few days, but until then I’ll be setting for less traffic and a slightly higher profit margin. With the great improvements out new line will offer, I expect our rate of repeat customers should go up, and that’s really the most important factor. Plus, you can’t buy better advertising than word-of-mouth.
