The Other Search Engines

**herbal_ali** · 04:28 PM

Hello,

What is the conversion rate i will expect from a decent sponsored search position in SEs? particularly Yahoo.

(lets assume that my website has a brilliant web design, good content/products, is user friendly and has an effective site description.)

What are your opnions on this? I know you can never tell in advance but roughly where should i be looking at? I read an article (sorry, no link) that said most sites that use sponsored search in Yahoo, Google and other SEs get about 1% of their traffic converted into customers. If that's the truth then that's going to be really bad for me since bidding for the keywords i want is pretty high.

Thankyou

**herbal_ali** · 03-12-2006, 01:28 PM

i need to know what conversion rate to expect so that i can plan how much to invest onto marketing my site.

please me give me your opinions

**vangogh** · 03-12-2006, 03:36 PM

I think the only way to really know is to put your ads out there and set up something to measure the result. There are things you can do in the ads themselves to help conversion like writing a good heading and directing the link to the best page.

I think the thing though is just to put it out there, measure the results, and refine the ad based on what you find. Once you have enough statistics you should have a good idea of which ads are worth keeping and refining and which you just want to drop.

**ashish** · 04-07-2006, 02:58 AM

well for a online business, if you have a 2% conversion rate then you are doing extremely well.... big portals like amazon, ebay and so on have very similar conversion rates....

**Harvey** · 04-07-2006, 07:05 AM

Completely depends on what sort of site you're talking about, which you seem to understand.

I was in a similar position a few years back - needed some figures!

You're talking about PPC as oppose to organic listings, which makes it easier to predict.

Let's assume your site is a well known, branded, easy to navigate and prices are in-line with competitors. Obviously those would have a huge impact on the conversion rate.

Jewellery sites I've worked for have had a conversion rate of 1% - 1.5%. I once had a traffic selling site, which achieved more like a 4%-5% conversion rate.

Slightly contrary to ashish's post, some sites achieve a conversion rate of over 10%.

My advice would be to read and learn about targeting your ads precisely, creating relevent landing pages and of course spend some money (£10-£20) on a test run.