In this issue

Your stunning design for an e-commerce web site will enhance the merchant's brand and allow the buyer to trust the merchant.  However it may not be enough to generate business.  It is difficult to predict what customers will do once the site is live. 

It can take months for your web site to be fully up and running with traffic flowing from search engines and whatever other forms of advertising you choose.  For a very modest budget, you can find out in hours if a website is up to the task of selling a particular item - before you spend big bucks on fully developing and promoting the site.  It's not a new idea - it is called test marketing.  But we are we are going to test market using Pay Per Click (PPC). 

The Short-Cut

Suppose you're building an e-commerce site with 1,000 products based on a content management system.  Before you spend a lot of money, quickly create a 50 static page website with 50 different products on it. Keep it simple with static prices and simple formatting. Remember this is a very basic website for "testing" purposes. Link it to your shopping system as simply as possible.

Next go to www.uk.overture.com, www.espotting.com & https://adwords.google.com and sign up with them as an advertiser.

Signing up for Overture means your "sponsored links" appear at the top of MSN.co.uk, do Espotting and you appear top of Yahoo.co.uk & for Googles' Adwords, you appear on the right of Google.   You can choose which country to target. Depending on budget and the product on offer, I would advise trying UK first and then US.

Do people click on these ads? Yes. If they don't, you don't pay a penny. However some of our clients are spending £30,000 per month on these so they do work. But you won't be spending this sort of money, you can limit your spend.

Create your text "sponsored" ads with each of the above three companies. You can DIY or get them to help you at a small cost. Create an ad for every single phrase you can think of based on the 50 trial products we are using for testing purposes. Eg. If the product is "candle holder", then good phrases might be "candle holder", "metal candle holder", "candle holder gifts" etc

Google Ads are live immediately while Overture & Espotting can take up to 72 hours to go live. The ads are charged on an Auction basis so while you might bid 10p per visitor for the phrase "candle holder", your competitor may charge 11p which means he will be number 1 and you will be number 2.

By having your ads across the Internet almost instantaneously you can immediately see the demand for your clients' products and more importantly, what the conversion rate with visitors is. Then what you have to do is keep tweaking the test site and see whether the conversion rate goes up or down.

There are no hard and fast rules but if you can get 5% of visitors buying, you'll be doing extremely well.  A health warning here - a lot depends on your product. if you are selling Ferraris' on your site you may get a lot of traffic but don't expect a high conversion rate.

Tracking Results

The most important element of this whole exercise is tracking. It is critical you do it to get high-grade intelligence on what does or does not work on the site.

When you create an ad, you will be asked for the display URL and the destination URL. It is a little known fact that you can add information after any web address by using a question mark and then some content (which must not include spaces).  The information after the question mark will be ignored for all practical purposes, but will be included in the web logs.  So you might use www.yourdomain.com as your display but www.yourdomain.com/?id=google&kw=candle+holder for the destination.  Then we can pick the information we need out of the logs.  This way you can clearly track what ads/phrases led to sales.

In addition, Google's Adwords & Overture now offer good conversion tracking tools to help with this process.

Once you have the necessary ad reports and sales figures both you and your client are in a far stronger position to gauge how commercially successful the new website will be. It doesn't have to be based on guesswork!