What’s the best way to drive traffic to a brand new ecommerce website?
Comments
2 Responses to “What’s the best way to drive traffic to a brand new ecommerce website?”
2 Responses to “What’s the best way to drive traffic to a brand new ecommerce website?”
The first thing to do is to research how people buy your products on the Web as this information can significantly affect where you put your marketing dollars. How do your target audience look for your product? Do they go to the search engines to research or do they read an industry publication before buying?
Not knowing your website or product, here are some general tips to get the traffic you need:
1. Optimize your site for natural search engine rankings. Search engines are free sources of traffic – you need to work hard to get to the top. Make sure your on-page factors are in place (metatags, titles with keywords, adequate keyword density ratio). With Google, you need to get other websites to link to you — but they have started to clamp down on what is perceived as “unnatural” links where in one month, a new website already gets 10,000 links because of an extremely aggressive link campaign (e.g. sending emails requesting for links even from totally unrelated websites)
2. Pay-per-click campaigns. Use PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords, Yahoo, or the new MSN Adcenter. MSN Adcenter allows demographic targeting but they don’t have enough traffic as yet compared to Google and Yahoo (Google and Yahoo will also both go into demographic segmentation later on). But PPC can be VERY EXPENSIVE so watch your ROI carefully and don’t be carried away by the bidding wars. Define a strategy for your PPC campaign — e.g. should you bid aggressively on your main keyword (e.g. “diamond”) to make sure you are on-top when a user starts their early shopping research OR should you bid slower on your main keyword but more aggressively on secondary keywords (e.g. “2 karat diamond earrings”. Define your strategy and measure your ROI. Use Google Analytics to help you get a clearer idea of the conversions of your PPC campaign.
3. Create the buzz for your business – do press releases (which are good for getting one way backlinks thereby increasing your search engine rankings), get your industry publications to do a story on you or at least a mention.
Get a copy of Internet Retailer magazine . I get this for free, try if you qualify for a free subscription. Another resource I strongly suggest is Webmaster World (Ecommerce forum) as they can give you lots of help in improving your sales.
1 – all clickthru URLS must have a query string at the end, like –> and each of the NUM001s would be different
2 – set a cookie on the user upon arrival that indicates where they came from (from the cookie)
3 – as the sale process is completed save the cookie data into the customer record
You should be prepared to spend money in several areas across the net and possibly off line. With your online sales be prepared to analyze all of your data very quickly as you will see trends within a couple of days of starting your campaign (switch things off immediately and be prepared to change frequently). I suggest you start with as well as the Overture version of this product. You should also find sites where your target audience frequents and pay for some links. If you have a decent marketing budget, try and maybe so that you only pay for sales/conversions.
This will take time for you to determine what exactly is working, so dont expect immediate results in a few days. There will be quite a bit of trial and error.
Source – i was the head of a division of an internet company where my responsibility was online media.