Driving traffic to eCommerce site

Congratulations & best of luck. You can plan out a PR exercise for go live. Also listing in local/general business directories.

I would have thought adwords PPC would be too expensive for eCommerce. I hear Pinterest is very good for buyer traffic.

I ran some FB ads yesterday to the fan page. Here are the results:

Campaign Reach: 7,663
Frequency: 1.1
Social Reach: 0
Actions: 4
Clicks: 9
CTR: 0.105%
Spent: $5.00

It brought 2 people total to my site out of the 4 likes to the fan page. Total cost being $5.00 in CPM. I switched over to CPC to see if I can lower the cost.

I have quite a bit of experience with PPC... I run lots and lots of data as I am a data FREAK.

I test, and test and test and test.

I have tried venues from 7search, to Google, to Facebook, to POF, to (the list is extensive).

I have never had less luck than I have had with Facebook.

Period.

Here is a common saying among a lot of advertisers on FB: "I got a lot of clicks, a lot of Likes even, but I got zero sales."

And that, ultimately, is the result most of us go for.

Actually, it's NOT adwords.

(Well, for my niche, actually) I have used adwords in the past, but I use it when I had ad extensions (with phone numbers- if I'm doing lead-gen) and if I'm constrained regionally.

My top 3 ( In no particular order) are:

7search.com
Adcenter
POF

But, don't go at it UNLESS you are data-collecting whilst running ads. If you're running ads in the beginning for sales, you're going at it the wrong way.

Run ads to DATA collect, then optimize from there every step of the way.

I've started to build an AdWords campaign, almost done with half of the products. Going to finish up the other half later including targeting brand names.

Also, I'm going to start building up a campaign on 7search to see how well that does.

Keep working on SEO and SMO definitely you will get good result.

There are many ways you can get traffic to your ecommerce site. Some are really expensive and some are good if you are on tight budget. Following are some of the best ways you can promote your store:

* Launch a blog related to the niche of your store. Use a seperate domain name for the blog. Discuss about different stuff there and promote your stuff where ever appropriate.

* Do some ebooks and distribute for free over multiple ebook stores and sites online. For example if your store has products related to weight loss, then write an ebook related to weight loss and then upload it as a free book over as many platforms as possible.

* Create related videos and upload to major video sharing networks like youtube, vimeo etc. The video should promote your store indirectly (like refer them to the free ebook done in the above step) and at the end of the day they will come back to your store with more trust factor and hence convert more easily.

* Create facebook pages related to your niche and order likes from fiverr to get the stone rolling. Then just keep sharing great info and occassionally promote your store as well. Talk as a third party over these pages. This will skyrocket the trust factor :-)

This is a really broad question so I will keep limited to the above points. PM me if you want to discuss more about this. I hope this helps you.

Oh and congratulations on setting up your online store. I wish you best of luck :-)

"Launch a blog related to the niche of your store. Use a seperate domain name for the blog. Discuss about different stuff there and promote your stuff where ever appropriate."

You say have blog on different domain. I have done the opposite and decided to add a store on already existing blog (5 years old). Rather than go with subdomain, I decided to host the store on the main domain as an extension e.g. site.com/store.

I figure it would rank product pages quicker.

Do you think its a good idea or not to host it on the main domain? Its still early enough for me to change it to subdamin or an alltogether different domain.

I started driving traffic with AdWords and I noticed that I'm receiving a lot of blank keyword queries and (not provided) as keywords in both Google Analytics and WassUp Stats (WordPress Plugin). I'm linking directly to the product and/or categories.

Anyone know the reason I'm not able to collect this data?

It depends on your budget of course however, I would recommend:

1. SEO - you can find link builders on sites like elance for less than $1000 a month. They will target 20 keywords for you and assign a full time link builder.

2. Press Releases. Sites like PRWEB help drive traffic to your site and give you a lot of SEO benefits. It can be costly, for example $2k buys you 2 press releases a month for a year.

3. Classified ads sites like Craiglist and Backpage. Be careful however, as you don't want to be spammy.

Cheers!

R

A lot of it depends on if you are looking in the short term, or long term... It seems since you are instantly venturing into PPC, etc. you are focusing on short term traffic. As mentioned previously, paid advertising must be tested very well, and consistently updated per your results.

For long term success, you must focus on SEO. From what I gathered from your original post, it appears that your on page SEO is fairly good. Make sure you make use of all of the on page tools available, such as: meta tags, image alt-tags, and descriptions in the header, etc. Make sure not to flood your site with keywords, but do include them when appropriate.
Once the on page SEO is sufficient, you need to build links. You can try services that will build mass amounts of links for you, or you can manually build high PR links, edu links, etc. Make sure to be diverse in your link building. Also, don't link everything to your homepage/landing page, but be sure to link to product pages, and content pages as well.

You can also check out bizrate/shopzilla for short term results. You will have to load a product feed that is optimized for their software, but it will get you targeted traffic, and get your products in front of many potential customers. I tried this for a short time, but did not optimize, as I should have. I did convert several sales using them though. This method depends a lot on the pricing/availability of your products. If they are very common products, and the price is not better than the competition, there is no need to venture into this route.

I hope this helps a little! Let me know if you need some clarification, or further help! I'm glad to see that you have spend the first month optimizing your page. That is extremely important!

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet but you should definitely get into shopping comparison sites. Sites like thefind.com, shopping.com or google shopping are a great place to start - there are heaps though so you should choose based on your product and region.

For our stores these are VERY profitable. The traffic is very targeted and is much cheaper than PPC (we still run PPC profitably though). They convert well because they click the product from the comparison site and land on your product page. They basically already know what they want before they click your listing and visit your store!

how about craigslist traffic.I think it is a good source.

We have a great results from:
Craiglists.
Ebay ads.
Citysearch.
Backpage ads.
Make a daily plan. Dont stop!
1 site at the time. Include your business in google places.even if is commerce
pointing to your shop platform.
Yp.com use all the free advertising possible.

I use simpleology dot com for set goals. (Free)

I would also consider looking at creating new content / landing pages, well targeted to the keywords and audience you wish to attract. I would take a look at the keyword tool as a means to develop new ideas on this.

Nice and informative thread , thanks for the post.

stop by fiverr i think you may find something there to help you out

Not if you're data collecting (especially your negative keyword list) on 7search.

Very inexpensive.

And the negative keyword list is VERY corollary to other PPC venues

Here are some recommendations about e-commerce site promotion Promoting your Online Shop / Ecommerce Website - ekmPowershop - Documentation,
How to Promote an E-commerce Website | Chron.com

Hey btyiw, I've been running an eCommerce website since 2006 and although many things have changed, I've found Facebook and Pinterest recently to be great ways to get traffic and customers. PPC is ok if you have the money to invest in such promotions when starting out. But ideally I'd go for getting listed in online shopping directories and local press releases. Best of luck.

Good job!!.You can post blogs,articles in the respective submission sites.Post classifieds according to the geographic location.

So for the past couple of weeks I've been working on driving traffic to my site through:
1) PPC
2) PPV
3) FB Ads
4) SEO

For PPC:
I started with a PPC campaign on AdWords and within a couple of days my ads were pulled from AdWords due to the unacceptable use policy on tobacco products. The items I sell can be used for a range of different things including tobacco but I don't mention anything about tobacco on my site. I spoke to an AdWords representative and mentioned that all the major competitors are currently using AdWords without an issue, while selling the same products. And large retailers like Amazon, Buy and Overstock were selling the same products without any issues. I asked her why the hypocrisy in allowing certain advertisers to publish the products while stopping others and she said she was not at liberty to speak about other campaigns. Any advice on being able to bypass or repeal the issue?

Also, I started a campaign on 7search with decent results. I've been able to pick up a lot of keywords for .01 to .05 a click. The visitors seem to be decently targeted. I'm going to have to split up the main keywords into separate campaigns, then eventually optimize them with negative keyword selections. I've been able to drive traffic with potential customers browsing multiple pages before exiting, although no sales as of yet.

For PPV:
I've been able to pick up a majority of large competitor and related URLs at .015 per view. On average I noticed around 200-300 PPV viewers on those URLs per day. I'm in the process of building an image that will target any potential customers with an offer. Any tips or advice on this?

For FB Ads:
Started campaign, spent less than $20 dollars total, drove about 20-30 new fans to the page. Noticed the fans would immediately check out the blog reviews of products I posted on the page wall. They would read the review, check out the product, browse the site and exit. No conversions at all.

For SEO:
No off-page SEO as of yet. Only on-page SEO initially and I'm getting page 2-3 traffic on certain products for certain keywords. Any suggestions on WF services that can help boost the rankings?



I haven't gotten any conversions but I've had some targeted traffic enter the site. Any idea on how can I increase conversions on my site? Live chat possibly?

For those of you who are using Facebook ads and getting lots of likes and no conversion, here's my take on it:

The goal is getting them to like, follow or subscribe to your page. If it converts, that's a bonus. But if it doesn't (which most likely is the case), it's normal because Facebook is only a platform to build rapport and branding.

When posting update, try keeping the selling of products subtle and focus on engaging the fans instead. Once enough rapport is built, the sales will come naturally.

In a nutshell, conversion does happen on Facebook albiet not immediately.

Guest blogging is also a great way to drive targeted traffic. Do a quick search on Google on blogs related to your market and most blog owners are open to guest post if you can whip up a decent article.

Nice , interesting thread .
I use to run ecommerce with success, all i did was SEO on page , i get first on google for about 47 KW and that got me traffic , targeted and converting . A lot of content , create web2.0 site s, blogs, and use fiverr for search engine submission ( go for 1000 ), backlinks pyramid ,videos, and all the free way to get traffic .
I would spend my money on it and NOT using adword or any expensive and short terms medium. As stated above buy or write articles , pressand all the likes and submit to all the sharing sites,.
Depending on the products you sell strategy may vary. Go for long terms and you will make it .
Best of luck
Frank Moreno

PPC Adwords??
you should use social media Facebook for promotion...fanspage, group, Facebook ads, and everything..that works

Quick Update: Made my first sale on the site and it seems it came from Amazon's sponsored links.

I'm in the process of writing Google AdWords to appeal their decision on my campaign. If you read above it will give you a quick explanation on what happened. I want to focus on getting paid traffic but I'm very limited in my options.

I attempted to increase customer trust by placing trust seals and a live chat option. But I'm noticing a large bounce rate but don't know whether that's attributed to untargeted traffic or something else?

Don't forget Pinterest---you not only get links but traffic. Title your pins with a quick catchy note about it. People love to share images.

I would say make a lot of videos related to different products and publish on Youtube. You can either build some links for few videos to get them ranked, or just let the videos rank naturally and bring you traffic. Or else you might also do video ppc through adwords.

I believe what you have is perfectly fine. I would discourage you to use PPC as part of your campaign as it will be too expensive but if you want to then do. I advise you to create quality content and share them to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon. These venues will give you more traffic.

You might to try Wanelo.com. It's like Pinterest but all of the "pins" are products. So everyone on there is looking to buy. It's great to get traffic to ecommerce sites.

Update:

I had Google AdWords re-review my site after removing any content or words that might be prohibited. Based on their research I was given the green light of approval that I can continue with my AdWords campaign.

Also, a second order was placed on the site. Traffic sources are primarily from one product on bing, multiple on 7search and some ppv traffic.

using SEO. Google still the king of traffic resource. PPC always eat a lot of money, if you don't have proper PPC strategy.

Update:
I made 3 sales last week but nothing as of this week.

I need to find a consistent way to drive sales on this site. Does anyone know how long it usually takes returning visitors to purchase products?

Returning visitors...I think you need to in front of them multiple times and perhaps brand yourself via blog, social media etc. Build a relationship with them, so when they are ready to order--you are the go to authority on the product they want.

I saw someone mentioned not having success with Facebook. I have to second that. I put a good amount of money into advertising on FB and never got a single sale from that traffic.

This may sound odd, but have you tried using Instagram? I use it for my ecommerce business. It is easy to target people that will follow your account based off hashtags, similar to Twitter. You can easily post images of your products, or images informing your followers of sales, giveaways, etc. I've seen a spike in traffic from the app. Might want to give it a try!

I suggest creating a blog to announce new updates and SEO your website.

This seems to be such a common question on many of the forums that I actually wrote an article about it.

Before you plunge into spending money on marketing, why not try a few free techniques? The best part of using free techniques, other than that they're free, is that they build passive traffic for you. It's also a whole lot easier to automate some of the work too.

I've attached the article so you can download it and use it as a plan. I believe you also said it's a Wordpress platform, so there's a lot you can do to automate the marketing there. I've added that one too. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I'll be happy to help.

Good luck,

Jinger

make sure that u dont get any spammy traffic

Update:
I've made 4 sales in total, collected close to 20 optins to newsletter but I'm still trying to optimize the incoming traffic. I'm using paid traffic for the time being but its starting to add up. I'm in the process of utilizing craigslist to promote the products. So far all of my sales were for 1 product even though I have 30-40 in total. And 70% of the sales were from one keyword. Furthermore, I setup the products in Google Product Listings and its been driving a large amount of traffic but no sales.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get sales from this traffic. Any suggestions on how I can increase the conversions? Anyone have a good amount of experience so we can talk in private?

congratulations, and all the best, you can keep them PR wise, later you will be benefited.

I would recommend you also try making couple of videos and list them on youtube.You can use Fiver ,someone can make them.Make sure the videos are related to your site and you have a URL in the description as well as good keywords.Then you can drive traffic to these videos or make them stand with some extra likes via Fiver as well.It worked for me ,even used to get sales from clickbank this way.Facebook adds dont work.I spent more than 500£ on them with no sale or even close to sale

Congratulation dude great