This has been quite a busy week thanks my new osCommerce store going properly live, as I mentioned in a previous post.

As I have access to a number of sites which are regularly spidered by search engines, I have placed text links on them in order that the search engines will see this new site and begin indexing as soon as possible. But even so, it sometimes takes a while before you see the new site appearing in search results when searching for it by domain name.

So, whilst waiting for all this to happen, I thought I’d experiment with a bit of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising in order to get some traffic visiting the site. I signed up for new accounts with both Google Adwords and Miva (the new name for e-spotting). There now follows an account of my initial experiences with both:

Adwords
I have used adwords before and found it reasonably effective, but as with most such systems things have moved on and there are new subtleties to be learnt… My first problem was that, having set up my new campaign, my keywords were just generating no impressions at all, even after 48 hrs. It turned out that my account had been “flagged” for review because of some of the keywords I had chosen (nice of it to tell me!). Anyway, all kudos to google adwords support for explaining that and fixing it for me quickly when I enquired as to what was going on.

Next issue – finding keywords which will bring good, targeted hits to my site without costing the earth. Evidently the business I am running faces stiff competition because of high consumer demand and relatively high margins, but I can’t believe the way the cost per click has been driven up as result. As the amount I’m prepared to risk per day is constrained, I’m not getting many page impressions at the moment unless I push the Max Cost Per Click somewhere up around £2.00 - if conversion rates turn out to be low, this is a good way to blow loads of cash.

Still work to be done here then. I can’t afford to ignore adwords whilst the site isn’t showing up in regular google results, but I need to find those keywords which searched for quite regularly, but which aren’t being targeted by so many competitors – therefore these will work out cheaper but still bring lots of good targeted clicks.

Miva
I was quite impressed by Miva from the outset. OK, so you have to put a minimum of £50 in to start with, which was a bit of a wrench, and your account has to be reviewed before it goes live, but this all happens quite quickly. The editors even improved upon the poor copy I had written for my ads and added a graphic when I had been in too much of a hurry to do so – now this is more like it….!

Soon after my account was live, I started getting shed loads of hits to my site – cool…. Not so many conversions to sales though and my £50 was being eaten up quite quickly. Noted first disadvantage of Miva – whilst you set a bid cost per click, you can’t set a daily budget, so things can run away with you!

A quick inspection of basic referreral information in my webstats revealed that I was probably getting lots of hits from people who were looking for a different kind of site. So I removed a couple of the 10 different keywords I was using for my campaign and this started to cool things down a bit.

After leaving things to settle down a bit for a while, I checked back and found I was still getting a good level of traffic, but still very few conversions.

Now it was time to get some serious analysis going……

Supertracker Analysis of the Above
For each of my campaigns I had used a different referral URL, knowing that this would probably be useful information later on.

For adwords I used : http://www.mysite.com/index.php?ref=googlead
And for Miva I used http://www.mysite.com/index.php?ref=miva

The ref=xxx part of the URL is simply ignored by osCommerce, but it will me to determine what each PPC campaign is doing for me when I look at my supertracker stats. Note – Supertracker doesn’t do anything really clever with this yet, but I plan on making some reports that take the assessment-by-eye out of this real soon.

Supertracker is something I’ve had in development for quite a while, but it was only when faced with analysing what was going on on this new site that I completed it sufficiently to answer the questions I needed answers to.

The initial results caused me to make some immediate changes to the front page of the site and also to introduce some new deals to encourage people to buy, which has increased the number of people browsing onto products pages and adding to cart. However, I also found that I was getting a lot of referred hits through Miva from people outside the UK – not what I want :o(

If I recall correctly, you specify your targeted geographic area when you sign up for Miva, so it is surprising that I should be getting such a high percent of traffic from outside that area – looks like a another disadvantage of this system.

So, at the moment I’m stuck between a system that delivers lots of hits from people who aren’t likely to buy from me and a system that will probably deliver a higher proportion of paying customers at a price which potentially negates any profits made.

Definitely more work to do in the marketing strategy department over the coming days/weeks then, but without supertracker I would probably have wasted a lot more money trying to pin-point the problems.