Successful web site promotion for Small Business - 2Your 'web site promotion for small business' activity faces this stark reality... Fact: 99% of business web sites don't make the sale. Out of the 1% that do, the CR (conversion rate) generally varies between 0.25-5%. In internet surveys conducted, the average CR is 2.6% among leading online merchants. Smaller sites had CRs of less than 1%. Once you've calculated your CR over a reasonable number of visitors (1000 is about the lowest number you can use for it to have any statistical relevance), you can quite easily determine the 'value of a visitor' for your 'web site promotion for small business' campaigns. For example, if a product generates a net profit of 25 currency units (£, $ or whatever your own currency may be) for your business and your CR is 0.5%, you need 200 visitors to get one sale. This one sale is worth 25, so the value of each visitor is 25/200 = 0.125. Therefore, if any kind of 'web site promotion for small business' activity costs you more than 0.12 per visitor received, it's never going to make you money...end of story. Or is it? Well no actually... You may accept that you will make a loss on 'purchasing' visitors to get your business more widely known during your 'web site promotion for small business' activity. Or you may also sell a more expensive product or a consumable product which leads to further sales later, once a visitor knows about you and/or buys the first product. The product that I personally recommend for tracking these kind of 'back-end' sales very easily (i.e. sales that you make following an initial purchase), and every kind of 'web site promotion for small business' activity, is called 'AdMinder'. We started using 'AdMinder' in August 2001 and still use it all the time. It's another very popular web site (ranked #2,415 on the internet by traffic) for the same reasons I mentioned on the previous page for 'HitsLink'. With 'AdMinder', you assign a unique 'tracking' URL to any 'web site promotion for small business' campaign (e.g. banner ad, e-zine ad, pay-per-click search engine promotion etc.). It then measures unique clicks on that URL, any user-defined action (such as joining your mailing list or downloading a free report), sales and, most importantly, 'Return on Investment' ('ROI'). And it tracks these things for years. Are you starting to see the power of this? For example, you set up your 'web site promotion for small business' campaign with 'Overture', the most popular 'pay-per-click' search engine (more about 'pay-per-click' later...). You assign a unique 'AdMinder' URL to this campaign - it receives 578 clicks in the first week. This generates 3 sales in the first week, which follows your average CR (0.5% as above), but in week 3 one of the same customers buys another product and in week 5 another and 3 years later she buys something else from you. All of these different purchases are tracked by 'AdMinder' using your unique tracking URL and it updates your ROI in real time. What is the relevance of all this? I'll tell you...instead of a knee-jerk reaction to visitors received from your 'web site promotion for small business' campaign on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis, what you really need to be looking at is the lifetime value of a customer. You may or may not be aware of this value in your own business. If you've only recently started out, of course you won't have any idea, unless for example, your product is consumable, lasts for 'x' days and 75% of people that buy from you are likely to make a repeat purchase. The point to recognise here is that there is a bit more to all this than campaign 'x' cost 200 currency units and by the end of it, you'd only made 150 units profit, therefore you made a 50 unit loss. 'AdMinder' makes it very easy to track all this stuff - in fact it does it all for you and you can see all the relevant results of your 'web site promotion for small business' campaigns at a glance. Remember the famous quote from the President of a large Corporation, "I know half of our advertising works - I just don't know which half!" This, of course, was for 'offline' advertising. On the internet, everything is 'trackable' and therefore quantifiable. Make sure your small business is using the tools to maximise the benefit of this enormous advantage. They'll make your marketing budget stretch a lot further in your 'web site promotion for small business' campaigns! Click here to see 'Adminder' for yourself.
OK, now let's discover the facts (and myths) about search engines...
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