Marketing Trends
Some of you may have noticed that Acne Vitamins is no longer appearing in the Google sponsored result ads that appear alongside your normal searches (also in AOL searches). I had turned them off a few weeks ago during our backlog crunch in order to slow down our demand a bit and give our manufacturer (that was buried in the blizzard at the time) time to get us restocked. So far I haven’t bothered to turn them back on, although I may do so sooner or later. Adsense has indeed been the most directly effective means of generating traffic for Acne Vitamins, although our improved search engine results, particularly in MSN and Yahoo, are now helping out a bit. However, it’s amazing the difference in the quality of leads that natural search results bring in compared to pay-per-click ads. You would think that people clicking on ads would be those who are more motivated to make a purchase, but it seems the exact opposite is true from my experience. It’s always been a given that a certain percentage of our expenses are the result of click-fraud (non-interested parties clicking sponsored ads to either make themselves money or hurt their competitors), but it seems that percentage is probably a lot higher than I previously assumed. On the bright side, we’ve been getting a lot more referral business from satisfied customers telling their friends, and I’m glad to hear that Clear5 is working so well for most of you! It’s interesting, as right now our daily traffic is about half that of what it was while we were using Adsense, but sales are at the same level or higher. It’s got me thinking I should add a referral option to our free bottle offer, which might just happen in the near future…
