What sort of conversion rates should I be aiming for?

Hi all

I have a costume jewellery site (www.anyalondon.com) that I have been running adwords on for the past couple of weeks just to test it out.
I limited them to the UK, went for two word keywords, used negative keywords to cut down some commonly confused searches, and implemented conversion tracking. I set my CPC at around 50p and let it run.

So far I have seen around 5% click through rate, received 200 visits to the site but not a single sale. Now this could be because of the layout of the site, the pricing etc. but I want to try and work out if I am expecting something unrealistic before I start changing those things...

So - what sort of click through rates are people achieving and what sort of conversion rates are they getting, and how?

Thanks

Max

I do a lot of internet shopping and I could not detect any problems with your site,
it was clean and fast and easy to navigate.

Please note that it often take 30 days from the first visit before a customer places an order, and there are a lot of people who do window shopping on the web visiting lots of similar web-stores before they place an order, buy something from a non-internet store or do nothing. If you give your visitors and incentive to shop now then your convertion rate will go up (give them a false sense of urgency).

My conversion rates vary enormously according to keyword. Just as an example... if i get 1000 visitors from the keyword "widgets" I might get just one sale. However, if the keyword is "red wooden widgets" then the conversion rate could be 10%.

I agree with sorvoja that lots of people do lots of window shopping. For them be sure to have an obvious "bookmark this site" and use a favicon. I get LOTS of return traffic from bookmarks - and I know that they are my best buyers.

I wish Google would track toolbar users on a monthly basis, because if I sell a product form $19.95 and my PPC rate is .75

What if they window shop 4 times in the month?

Not I lost $3.00 from the sale.

Thanks for taking the time to look around my site sorvoja, I really appreciate it - at least I know it's not something there to worry about; though I will be implementing EGOL's bookmark recommendation (thanks for that!) and I have my thinking cap on about purchase incentives.

Guess I'm just a bit impatient with these things - as I am learning SEO and internet sales take time...

I have found that more specific keyprhases do better in pulling in coversions. In my limited experience, my best conversion rate is 15%. Finding those specific phrases that translate into coversions can be tough.

I have notice that 7% is the adverage. With more specific keywords and phrases you'll get a higher percentage rate, but the actual number of hits is reduced significantly.

Also, are you listing on just the search engine partners or are you including the content providers as well? I believe that would make a big difference in the conversion rate.

Currently I am listing on whatever the default settings are - I did not realise I had a choice! Will go and have a look and see what I can sort out...

Also, have been considering more specific key-phrases and was toying with the idea of simply adding "buy" to my existing two word phrases so "costume jewellery" would become "buy costume jewellery". In everyone's experience do people actually search this way when they want to purchase something or should I be looking for more obscure / focused stuff?

I also sell to a niche market in the UK and I also started my campaign with a small number of keywords. Initially my CTR was about 3% but after much refining I now have about 100 more targeted keyword "PHRASES" and about 300 negative keywords. The CTR for my more general keywords has now risen to about 7% and my highly targeted ones achieve about 50%. The higher CTR has dramatically reduced my costs because I am getting the same bid rank for less CPC. My conversion has also increased although it is very hard for me to track because most of my customers will order by telephone having found the website (I sell high value, high quality goods and people want the reassurance and added value of speaking to someone about their requirements and order). I would estimate my conversion rate has doubled from 2.5% to 5% since improving my targeting. I have also found that creating ads for specific keywords works wonders for my CTR. The goods I sell are known by different generic names so I have created different ads for each so that searchers see the exact words they searched on in the ad (I also use the {KEYWORD} feature to further increase perceived relevancy. Another thing I have done is to try to pre-qualify my clicks by refining my ads. For example, I don't sell cheap widgets so I give an indication of quality and price in the ad.

Well i looked at your site and it seems very neatly designed, so you need not to worry abt the layout or site design, But instead of using broader, wider keywords, be a little bit specific and targeted.

Another thing you should seriously consider is that, read some online Sales, marketing articles..which will give you lot of ideas how you can promote your business. And you can offer your customers a special limited time promotion offer,

I'll give you a little tip, recently i gotta an offer from a "makeup remover tissue" manufacture, who was willing to have my site name and logo on his "Makeup remover tissues" So i can give it away free to women who goes to night clubs, parties or basically any female who uses makeup. So this way you can promote your business offline while positioning your brand effectively in your prospective customers mind.

The point is you should have lot of creative ideas, when it comes to selling certain products online, So read a lot about Online promotion, sales and marketing. And if you can grab the e-mails of your customer by using a compelling and relevant freebie, then it would be an extra advantage for you, as you can follow on your visitors. But Do not Spam

Good luck and Never giveup

Thanks for taking the time to look around my site Never-Giveup; I think you're right there's definitely room for offline and more conventional marketing efforts as well, particularly if I can tie them into the website. I especially like the makeup remover tissue as it's perfect alongside a jewellery brand. Will have to look into that a bit more...

And thanks realgames for the indepth info. I was wondering whether I should really be refining it too much but I guess you're right - better to have them pre-qualified and prepared to buy even if I get fewer click throughs as ultimately it's only sales I'm concerned with. I think at the moment my ads are a little unfocused. I have used a different ad for different groups of keywords (eg I have a 'Costume' and related keyword ad, and a 'Bead' and related keyword ad etc.) but I think there's room for improvement.

How did you approach pricing strategy? Did you start with a low CPC and then up it or the other way round? It's just the testing phase can get pretty expensive before seeing results...

I am still struggling with this one myself. My problem, and I guess you will find the same being in a niche market, is that my more targeted keyword 'phrases' will not (in a very long time) get enough impressions (I think 1000 is required) for Google to use their real CTR in calculating BidRank. They are being assigned a defualt low CTR (about 2% compared to the actual 25% plus CTR) which means I have to bid high to get on the first page to compete with those using more general keywords. I think, by setting the minimum 1000 impressions threshold, Google is unfairly penalising those who are prepared to put the work in to improve their relevancy.