How much to budget for?

[pioneerVicki]

I have three questions. 1/ To get a minimum of 100 visitors to my site - how much should I budget to spend? I've found I have to pay around 40 -50c so far for any words that work. I'm still trying to find all these 10c words SOL talk about! (From non PPC trafffic I'm only getting about 10 visitors a day - I do expect that to gradually improve.)
2/ I have heard somewhere that the conversion rate for a jewellery store is only about .5% rather than 2% - is this correct?
3/ I haven't bothered install any of the tracking tools Yahoo or Google give use - I'm just using the views & words from the store. Should I install them?

[Bethers]

Ah, the question isn't how much to budget - but whether or not you're getting a ROI from the terms. If you are making money on the PPC - you can spend more if it brings more. However, what is vital, is that you are tracking every single word and phrase you are using - and that you know exactly which ones are bringing visitors and which ones are bringing visitors who buy.

Then, whether your conversion rate is .5 or 2.0 - doesn't really matter - what matters is that whatever the conversion rate is, you are making money from the ads, not losing money. If you bring in 1000 visitors - and get sales, but you're paying more for the sales than you are profiting, you'd be better off with your 10 visitors a day.

[Richard]

Hi Vicki

I used ppc on the advice of EMS (shhh not going there) and we had great stats but not one sale

We actually got our first sale on the http://www.thepearls4u.com in December after I spent a lot of work on recommendations from here at the forum.

It's not a very good store in that while our stats are okay we haven't had a sale all year.

[pioneerVicki]

On other places at the forum they say you have to have at least 400 visitors a day before you get regular sales. SOL say 100. I'm only getting 1/4 that; therefore I want to up the number to see what happens. I'm gradually bringing ad on etc to check; & I haven't got a large budget; therefore I'm interested in knowing how much I should pay for words. SOL say to go for a large number of low paying phrases; Shoshana says to write a separate ad for each word. Until I get more visitors & sales I can't really work out a budget - I think about $100 for an average sale. How much should I spend to get quality traffic? I'm getting good page views since I put the ads on; I think I'm targeted - I'm selecting specific pages of the store - eg the Peridot page for peridot earrrings etc. So I can keep going along that line with 'ruby' 'opal' etc. I want to see if getting traffic will bring sales. I've found getting all the key word set up & H1 didn't do anything really. Making an effort to get into directories is working a bit; links will help, but as 90% of request I make are ignored; that is going to be long in coming.

[Christine]

Vicki
Major warning here. Heed Beths advice and keep a very close eye on every visitor coming through your PPC. I got caught for major $$ I will tell you what happens. Once your campaign is running along nicely the controller "overture" or whoever, decides to subcontract your ads onto very popular websites that they are affiliated with. Your ads are put in the middle of their pages and of course lots of people, sometimes thousands will click on them just to look see and the site owner and overture split the money that you pay them.

Where ever your ads are placed click on the links to see what the customer is looking at and evaluate it from there.

[Bethers]

I will repeat, there is NO SPECIFIC budget dollar that will bring a certain amount of traffic. You are in a very competitive market. Being so means you need to pay higher dollars on each click through. This means you need to pay close attention to the click throughs versus sales versus PROFIT on the sales.

Profit means after ALL expenses - including PPC. If you don't have a profit, you're better off without the traffic and without the sales. If you have to spend $100 for one sale of GROSS $100 - you just lost money.

Say you have 100 clicks at 50 cents/click - that means those 100 clicks just cost you $50.00. Now, what if you get a conversion rate of 1%? That would mean you have one sale. If that sale is for $100 and let's say your markup leaves you with $40. This sale cost you $50 in PPC to get $40 - which means you LOST $10 right out the door without considering any of your other expenses (cc fees, hosting, etc).

Don't get me wrong, I've used PPC successfully - but I always managed it - I never let it manage me. Your question of "how much to spend" reminds me of the car salesman who sells you a car based on the monthly payments. You pay two to three times as much because he gets you with high interest rates. Just like that's the wrong way to buy a car - it's also the wrong way to budget PPC.

If you only have so much to spend on PPC - what you need to do - are find the phrases that really can help you with niche traffic - that costs less per click (if possible) and watch to make sure that they bring the necessary purchases. Make sure the phrases take the customer right to the product the phrase describes - make sure each ad is for that particular product and is written to entice but not to bring in lookers - and make sure your page copy is written to sell the product the ad is advertising.

Yes, it's a catch-22 - but using PPC simply to bring in traffic, does not mean it's going to bring in the right traffic if you don't use it very carefully - and it doesn't mean that you'll get the sales - which you won't find out until you've already spent the money - which is why you have to watch it daily and really, really be on top of it constantly.

[KMAKPres]

SOL say 100.

They say use 100 to fine tune your site, and they hope you are getting a sale or 2 at this point to work with. To make any money you probably need 4 to 500 hits a day.

Follow the advise given above closely and you will do better and save money.

[pioneerVicki]

Problem is I'm a bit at a lose as to what else to do to bring traffic in. I should have spend more time earlier on marketing the site; I put the time into what I thought was optimising the site & putting new products in. I do need to do a lot more linking; but as I said most link requests get ignored, so how long is that going to take to bring in traffic. I have a blog that is quite popular. Apart from tidying up a few things, I'm not even sure what else to do to optimise the site - if anything I probably have too many key words. I have H1, 2 & 3 headings & a good description of most products. Lot so information on the site that brings some traffic in; most photo are click to enlarge - what have I missed?