SEM Low Conversions?

What do you do if you have a product that is converting poorly? Currently, a product I manage is getting a measly 600 clicks a week. This amount of traffic is just pathetic and I have been talking with the brand owner about increasing visitors to the site. However, the only reason I am reluctant to do this is that the conversion rate for this landing page is a horrible .15%. That means in a nutshell, if 10,000 visitors clicked on our ads and visited the site, only 15 people would make purchases. At this rate, even if our cost per click was a meager $.50 and our average order value (AOV) is $90 we would be losing money hand over foot.

(2 orders * $90 AOV) - (600 clicks * $.50 CPC) = -120

Extrapolating this data, if we increase traffic a ten-fold:

(20 orders * $90 AOV) – (6000 clicks * $.50 CPC) = -1200

Obviously, the landing page needs a lot of work. That is the biggest problem since I am only advertising to the core traffic  associated with this product. Additionally, I was trying to figure out the standard deviation of the conversion rate in order to justify not driving more traffic and I remembered a couple of concepts.

  1. Standard deviation is irrelevant in this situation because an increase in sample size could dramatically change the average. If I make my net bigger, I may catch more fish.
  2. Advertising and Marketing drive sales and not the other way around.

Obviously, what I am doing isn’t working and needs to be changed (lower Max CPC) but lowering my overall budget is not the answer. Being more creative and aggressive is.

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