Google Analytics Helps Weed Out Excess Advertising Cost
A recent post about the fraud I discovered from our Citysearch account. I have also discovered a growing trend with most referral websites. Since then I have closed our City Search account since most traffic was not coming from the actual site but from so called partner sites such as Superpages. With cost of advertising becoming a major issue it will only contribute to higher cost associtated for consumers.
Using a Gooogle Analytics has helped trim the fat from our Online Advertising Cost which ultimately results in keeping our cost of our products low. My advice to any online advertiser is to have access to reports showing expected traffic to your own site before cometing to a year of advertising. An advertiser will need to start providing estimated traffic that can be expected to your site and not just traffic to their own site. Requesting this information should be the first step and if a referral site cannot provide this information I wouldn't even consider it.
Another example of over priced advertising is from Yellowpages.com. Now this site should be considered a most likely reliable source of traffic especialy with there well known name. However using analytics to track the traffic coming form the site again we are discovering very small amount coming from them and other related sources such as yahoo local and yahoo yellow pages.
In the past 30days we have measured the traffic and the results are.
Yellowpages.com 22 visits with a 22% bounce rate
Yahoo Local 12 Visits with a 25% Bounce Rate
Yahoo Yellow Pages 11 visits with a 9% Bounce rate.
What do these numbers mean? A bounce rate is the amount of traffic that results in a visitor leaving the site Immediately. So out of the 45 visits only 37 of those visits actually continued to look at the website.
What is a online advertiser to do? Well creating other websites and using them to send traffic to our own has actually out performed the paying site. An example of this would be this site Find A Orange County Florist. This site cost us about $10 a month and the amount of visits equals 56 visits with a 15% bounce rate. That is a big a difference especially with a cost of $400 a month with yellow pages compared to the $10 a month cost for the Find A Orange County Florist.
So before online advertisers began to think about using a directory do your homework and ask the referring site to provide actually traffic that you can expect to your site and it should be part of the contract. If not I would tell them to take a hike and use the same money to create your own referring site. Online Advertisers need to start laying rules to these companies other wise the cost of online advertising will continue to grow out of reach.
Using a Gooogle Analytics has helped trim the fat from our Online Advertising Cost which ultimately results in keeping our cost of our products low. My advice to any online advertiser is to have access to reports showing expected traffic to your own site before cometing to a year of advertising. An advertiser will need to start providing estimated traffic that can be expected to your site and not just traffic to their own site. Requesting this information should be the first step and if a referral site cannot provide this information I wouldn't even consider it.
Another example of over priced advertising is from Yellowpages.com. Now this site should be considered a most likely reliable source of traffic especialy with there well known name. However using analytics to track the traffic coming form the site again we are discovering very small amount coming from them and other related sources such as yahoo local and yahoo yellow pages.
In the past 30days we have measured the traffic and the results are.
Yellowpages.com 22 visits with a 22% bounce rate
Yahoo Local 12 Visits with a 25% Bounce Rate
Yahoo Yellow Pages 11 visits with a 9% Bounce rate.
What do these numbers mean? A bounce rate is the amount of traffic that results in a visitor leaving the site Immediately. So out of the 45 visits only 37 of those visits actually continued to look at the website.
What is a online advertiser to do? Well creating other websites and using them to send traffic to our own has actually out performed the paying site. An example of this would be this site Find A Orange County Florist. This site cost us about $10 a month and the amount of visits equals 56 visits with a 15% bounce rate. That is a big a difference especially with a cost of $400 a month with yellow pages compared to the $10 a month cost for the Find A Orange County Florist.
So before online advertisers began to think about using a directory do your homework and ask the referring site to provide actually traffic that you can expect to your site and it should be part of the contract. If not I would tell them to take a hike and use the same money to create your own referring site. Online Advertisers need to start laying rules to these companies other wise the cost of online advertising will continue to grow out of reach.
Labels: City Search Advertising, Google Analytics, Online Advertising, Yellow Pages Advertising
posted by Everyday Flowers | 9:00 AM
3 Comments:
Bravo, Eric! Your numbers are very similar to our results.
Glad to know there's another florist posting about real local search results. :)
Cathy
Businesses need to check out Yellow Book. Their media consultants also take care of Google and Yahoo Search Engine advertising. The only thing they have to do with it, is presenting it to their customers across the nation. Businesses are placed on sponsored links with traffic reports that can be accessed everyday to determine effectiveness. The Search Engines gain customers by the Yellow Book team meeting with small to medium sized businesses everyday, and Yellow Book gains by positioning their advertising in print and online.
It should be intresting to see what kind of results Yellow Book Will have to offer. Will it really drive traffic to the local business that decide to advertise? Local business needs a realiable source for consumers to locate them. If these companies continue to screw around with us they will be soon fighting over Wall Mart and Costco to fund your advertising. Take care of the small business and we will continue to do business. If not our exit will come just before yours.
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