Re: UKNM: Cost of bringing in visitors

[Robin Edwards]

This may go some way towards explaining why so many B2C dot-coms have

struggled. A lot seem to have gone for the big bang approach, rather than a

soft launch and in depth testing phase, and the cost of acquisition has been

astronomical. That said, a carefully targeted soft launch may not be the

best indicator of a successful mass roll-out. Not an easy one to judge.


Horses for courses is a nice cover-all, but it would certainly seem that for

infrequent purchase, low margin, low value items the Internet is not

necessarily the place to get rich quickly unless you can cross-sell

significantly.


Robin

--

Robin Edwards

Clockworx

T: +44 1543 252370           F: +44 1543 420761

E:

robinclockworx [dot] co [dot] uk

   W: http://www.clockworx.com/ W2:

http://www.shopworx.net/




----- Original Message -----

From: "Martin Lloyd" <

martindomino [dot] com

>

To: <

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

>

Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 9:12 AM

Subject: RE: UKNM: Cost of bringing in visitors



I've run a couple of campaigns that got 20% + click throughs, and have heard

of a few more. They all had a few things in common, and I think these things

tend to explain why most banner ad campaigns have such a high cost of

aquisition


1 : Right place. In all these cases the ads were in exactly the right place,

keyword searches on search engines or niche sites.


2 : Right creative. Unless you've got the budget / time to do lots of

testing getting 'perfect creative' is a matter of luck. Good copywriters and

designers will usually do a decent job, but Caples comment about one

headline outpulling another by nineteen times is very true online.


3 :Small audience - and this is the killer. For most products once you've

found the 'perfect audience' that always clicks on the banner and often

converts you discover its pretty small. Every time you aim to grow your

reach you move away from this perfect audience and end up with worse

targeting and worse response to your creative.


All the 'successful' campaigns I mention above had budgets under �5000,

attempts to roll them out further stalled when an increase in reach

dramatically slashed click through rates and led to a correspondingly high

cost of sales.


On a related noe does anyone have experience of Flycast? They were

suggesting they could achieve a 2% ctr at �5 cpm which seemed like about the

right price for banners to me.



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