Changes Based on Conversion Results

At my company we just launched our first ecommerce store at the end of June. This is a huge deal for our market as a lot of our main competitors don’t sell their products online directly. One offers a “Where to Buy” button that send customers to distributors of their product. Another makes it look like you can add something to your cart, but when you click the “add to cart” button, it asks you to request a quote. As a consumer this is a major turn off for me personally. However, the company is leading the fall protection industry so they must be doing something right. My company sells through distributors also, but would like to move to selling direct.

In launching our new eccomerce store, we started working with a third party company that currently runs our Google Adwords campaigns along with our retargeting ads. I am the main marketing person working with the third party company. Based on our data results within the two months, we realized all of our checkout times were between 1:00a.m. and 8:00p.m.  We had sessions between the times of 8:00p.m. and 1:00a.m., but no actual checkouts. From this knowledge, we decided to stop running our ads between 8:00p.m. and 1:00a.m. to make sure we were getting the most out of our budget.

We also realized that most of our customers were coming from California, Texas, and Georgia. From that knowledge, we raised the bidding for those states. This does not mean we turned off the ads for the other states. What we did was make sure those three states got more attention than the others.

So far, by turning off our ads based on the specific time frame, we have seen a decrease in our cost, and a raise in customer checkouts. This is not to say we might not ever turn those times back on, but for right now, we are very satisfied with our results and are continuing with this plan.

As for the results of raising the bids for the three states, it has only been a week and no change in results has truly been seen in those states. We will continue to review over the next couple of weeks and hope to see better results.

The goal for both of these changes is to decrease the amount of money being spent on ads and increase the amount of money coming in. In these two cases, the metric of conversions was reviewed to see what changes would help raise sales on the eccomerce site. We based our campaign changes on when and where our conversions were happening the most. The “when” was the time frame was when we made the most sales, which was 8:00p.m. to 1:00p.m. The “where” was the three states where we had the most customers checkout in, which were Califorina, Texas and Georgia.

In the future months we plan to look at what cities in the states of California, Texas, and Georgia are doing the best and increase the bidding even more in those select cities.