Marketing experiments can strongly impact your bottom line

Do you wish you could know in advance which promotions would work for your e-commerce site and which would fizzle?

One site, called MarketingExperiments, spends months doing controlled projects showing exactly what pays off on the Web. Led by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, a successful online marketer and television producer, the site's research studies have revealed surprising results such as these:

1. GOOGLE ADWORDS SELECT. The experimenters used Google.com'sAdwords Select program to determine how much difference a domain name can have on consumer acceptance. They placed ads for popular electronics products, with the ads differing only in the dot-com names. The result? Some names generated a click-through rate three times higher than others:

 Rate - Domain Name

 0.6% - ComputerHardwareDepot.com

 0.5% - BuyTech.com

 0.3% - TechSavings.com

 0.3% - ComputerHardwareDirect.com

 0.2% - PCPavilion.com

2. OVERTURE. Another test attempted to help a pay phone business gain traffic through the Overture pay-per-click engine. Because terms such as "pay phone" were selling for as much as $1.52, the researchers instead tried 170 little-used terms. The results were dramatic:

a. The single most popular term generated 26 percent of the resulting click-throughs, and the company is building a whole new site using this term in the name

b. The next three terms generated another 19 percent

c. The average cost for all the clicks was a mere $0.12, or less than one-twelfth of what competitors were spending

3. COMPARISON PRICE ENGINES. MarketingExperiments set up several working e-commerce sites and used them to test 13 price-comparison search engines where merchants pay for listings, such as Bizrate, mySimon, and PriceScan. Citing figures from the engine that proved to be the ninth best investment, NexTag, the experimenters found that the sites:

a. Paid an average click-through price of $0.35

b. Received revenue per click, on average, of $2.63

The latter figure doesn't relate to the lifetime value of an average new customer, which would allow a true ROI calculation. But the test indicates that some engines can be effective ways to drive traffic and increase sales.

There's so much free information at MarketingExperiments that it's hard to know quite where to begin reading. Fortunately, the developers have pulled together a step-by-step "marketing plan" that links to each of the reports in an orderly way. See: http://www.marketingexperiments.com@a2.tc/4e86

The site sells access to its reports and research projects for $34.95 per month, but there's a 30-day free trial period. See: http://www.marketingexperiments.com@a2.tc/71ae