SOLD OUT! But try this instead…

Have you ever been our shopping for a certain product only to find the shelf empty with what you were looking for? After looking around for the product and not finding what you wanted, you start to look for quick alternatives. The product right next to your empty shelf might be just the same thing with a different logo. If the price isn’t extraordinarily higher than compared to the original price of your once sought out product I’m sure consideration for this new purchase might be in order.

This correlates DIRECTLY into affiliate marketing and what is called herding. A study, recently taken, shows that people are more likely to purchase something knowing that their original intended purchase is no longer available to them.

Read more on the study taken, here

Scarcity can be a very effective marketing tool as long as it’s used properly and in moderation. Try to implement this slowly in your campaigns and see if there’s any effect on conversions. But proceed with caution, you don’t want to overuse the scarcity tactic too much or it won’t have the full effect of your initial intentions.

Whats the “Bing” idea?

While most people have heard of the yahoo acquisition of MSN’s search engine model. There’s going to be still be a lot of confusion on what/when/why/how much amongst everyone.

The thing you have to think here is that Bing although pretty relatively new there’s going to be a lot of major tweaking when going to ‘SEO’ your sites. There’s been some much great success on Bing as far as what I’ve seen. But don’t think you can take your pre-optimized page from Yahoo or Google and throw it in Bing and think it’s going to pick up traction.

The demographics are different, the results are driven different. but most of all, the content is going to be read in an entirely new format than the competition. which means, all you ‘little guys’ out there, get ready for a great ‘level’ playing field.

Let me know when your ready to talk about what is already working on this new, hopefully soon to be, great competition for the big G.

David vs. Goliath

There has been much discussion about how to stretch and maintain a good ROI while utilizing some of the smaller players in the search engine field. Not too long ago, search engines were thought to be very promising and people were seeking significant additional sources of revenue. With all of the intense high bidding wars on the main search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the lovely group at Marketing Experiments has taken a look at the smaller search engines to see if they are able to stack up to the ‘Big Boys’.
The results were a little surprising. Against seven search engines with four campaigns they found there was very little traffic compared to the monsters like Google. The conversion rate of the best performing engine was more than 50% higher than that of the second best, and almost four times than that of the third best. However, the conversion rate for the best search engine was a shocking 3.16%. That’s right, of the whopping 410 clicks generated on that search engine, there were only 13 leads generated. Overall Marketing Experiments spent $584.76 for ads placed on that specific search engine with earnings of $292.38 in a CPA (cost-per-action) model.
These results are disappointing to say the least, and show that the CPA earned from one of the smaller engines was 43.4% lower than that for Google over the same time period. They were also 59.2% lower than Overture (Yahoo!). Traffic may have a big play in these results as well, but this just goes to show you that there are precautions to be taken while getting your campaigns off the ground. If you are contemplating using a smaller search engine, some of the precautions to look for include:
• Approach smaller PPC engines with caution.
• Test everything on a few different search engines to determine which will be the most profitable for you.
• If an ad you are running on a specific search engine comes close to profitability, test different ads and see if you can increase your click-through rate.
• If you do isolate one or more search engines that can deliver a positive ROI, make sure those engines have sufficient reach. If you are achieving only a handful of sales each month, the profits earned may not make up for the cost of setting up, testing and managing that specific campaign.