After finding myself explaining this concept quite a lot recently, I decided to put it into words and post it on The Escape Blog - The Website Traffic Funnel. Worth reading, if I do say so myself.

One of the biggest issues small online retailers face is the price of the products they are selling and the balance between making sales and making a profit.

If you are selling products of low value, the cost of aquisition and the time to administer each sale will require you to sell a large volume. This may require higher advertising spending, which in turn requires further investment.

On the other hand, if your product range is priced high, you don;t have to sell as much to make profits, but you will still come across people who do not feel comfortable entering their payment details for high value, despite the fact that the value is irrelevant in terms of security.

My own experience shows the need to expand to offer a larger range of products (as long as the shop remains focussed). This approach attracts a larger number of search visitors.

The biggest advantage however, as long as your design allows, is the potential up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

So, it’s been over a week and my Facebook advert is sending me traffic. No conversions yet though and I get different results from Facebook, than I do from my stats (see below) in terms of referrals - 60 from Facebook / 41 from Hitslink.

The only anomaly I can logically think of (away from the fact that the stats may not be accurate is that some visitors clicks back VERY quickly after clicking the advert, not giving the stats code long enough to load.

My summary so far is that despite the fact the no orders have directly converted, the spend so far is $1.39 = 68 pence - affordable for me to keep buying click-throughs. An equivalent number of clicks from Google campaigns would be in the region of £19.80 (2911% more expensive).

This is a tale of caution for any small business owner. Probably one of THE most important parts of your online management - taking ownership and control of your domain.

I often sit in meetings for new web projects with clients and I slip in the question, “So, who manages your domain?”. Often, with a coy and bewildered look, I get one of the following three responses:

• “Not sure, our IT guy set it up and he’s left now”
• “Our web designer, the one we’ve fallen out with, sorted it out for us”
• “I bought it using one of those online superstores. I got it very cheap. Can’t remember which one though”

It’s infuriating to think that their biggest online asset it not being monitored, managed or controlled. I don’t get angry for me, I just can’t understand how anyone would not want to control their prized asset.

An old client of mine once bought a .TV domain online through Easily, using an e-mail account to register it that he rarely checked. The domain expired. It then cost him a lot of time, 90 days and £160 to get it back. That doesn’t include any lost business through no e-mail or website for three months.

What Is a Domain?

Your domain is like a prized personalised number plate. Mine, is craigkillick.co.uk and I use it for my web address on www, for this blog on blog.craigkillick.co.uk as well as for my e-mail address.

If I decide to move my hosting, I can just manage my domain to point it to a new server, a bit like taking a number plate and putting on a new car.

Also, as any domain I own, admittedly not this one, increases in value, it is imperative that the right legal entity owns it, whether that be a Limited company, or an individual. What you don’t want is for your domain to be legally owned by your web agency, hosting company or your IT guy that left - YOU need to own it.

Who Owns Your Domain?

You can check who owns and manages your domain using WhoIs web search tools - I tend to use www.swhois.net, but you should be able to Google “whois” and find other versions.

At the very least you need to make sure you are the owner of the domain. If you don’t you need to take steps to get it. The administrator is the first person to go to and their details should be on the Who Is information.

Managing Domains

Yes, you need some technical know-how to manage your DNS and Nameserver settings and I am not the person to go into that in great detail.

I do however use 123-reg to buy and manage my domains. I’ve never had any problems with them. It is easy to buy your domain and manage it in a control panel, transfer it to other hosting companies, or, if you have the know-how you can point your sub-domains and e-mail to any server you choose.

That said, finding a good hosting company - now that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Give me a paint brush and I know a picture will not paint itself. If I pick up the brush to paint a picture, it may be bad, but each time I practice and learn new techniques, I know that it may get better. That depends on my application - the time and effort I put into it.If I keep tracking my progress I will see results. I have all the tools to do the job, I just need to develop my own skills to create the painting.

It’s the same with an e-commerce website. There is no excuse for a company to buy a solution and not learn how it works, develop their own techniques, see what works and what doesn’t and implement their own retail knowledge into the mix.

In fact, it’s not unlike a high street shop. If the products aren’t right, there’s no advertising or marketing and the customer service is non-existence, what do you think the result will be?

So, when someone comes to me and says “My e-commerce website isn’t selling something so it’s your websites fault”, I can’t help thinking that the problems are deeper. It happened to me this week and that the person has given their solution six months with little input, before pointing the finger at me, I actually find quite amusing.

I’m not a shop keeper but I am also amazed at some of the ’shop keepers’ I meet. They can see the world changing… as it continues to pass them by. Rant ends….

Once again, I was reminded about the importance of testing your own website after discovering that some Google Analytics code was breaking some pages on a personal website I run.

Things change on the web and things change on your website. You make a change, you view it on YOUR browser and it works so you move on.

Then a few weeks later, someone tells you that a web page is throwing up an error in Explorer (the bain of my life).How many sales did it lose, how many leads did you lose? All for the sake of an extra twenty minutes.

It makes sense to do this once in a while even if you haven’t changed anything.

Yes folks, even I am not perfect.

Being a seller online, you are bound to get customer complaints (especially with Royal Mail in the past couple of months) and as time consuming and costly it is, it’s a relevant part of an online shop business to offer great customer service.

E-Consultancy continues to highlight the ongoing importance of this issue.

With my boot on the other foot, I recently bought some photographers lights from Karlu, a UK based specialist shop and it is an example of how not to do it. In fact, I learnt a lot about improvements for my own business.

The Karlu website is clear and concise and my order was easy, so from that point of view, top marks.

But the follow up has not been so good.

A few days later, I had not received my package and tried to call the ‘Sales Helpline’, which, even during working hours, was ringing off the hook. This obviously made me very nervous and I began to worry about my payment and order. So I e-mailed - with no response.

The next day, the parcels arrived anyway but two of the six bulbs were smashed. So I contacted them to ask them where I stood. Again, the phone rang off the hook. And, four e-mails and a six days later, I have still had no response and had to buy some more lamps from another shop through Ebay.

Now, I know (and understand) that Karlu were moving two weeks ago, as their website proudly states, and I can imagine how a move causes disruption. But, that is not my problem, I have my own schedule to keep.

To me it is like falling at the last hurdle.

The hard work (the sale) has been made. But, the easy second sale, which I also need to make, has been lost. Taking into account cost-per-acquisition with advertising to get me in the first place, the investment was wasted.

They could have had a loyal customer, now they have an angry one… with a Blog.

A bit like all companies selling online.

So, we are now just a few days into the Facebook advertising and I am getting results.

Yes, it’s very early to tell but the costs are negligible compared to something like Adwords so I am more than happy to keep this stream of traffic going for now having spent just 87 cents on 58 visitors (according to Facebook - Analytics has it at 37 and this could be people instantly clicking back before the Analytics code loads on the page).

No orders yet, but it’s got a long way to go to be costing the same as an Adword purchase.

Time spent and number of pages viewed are coming through as comparable with our Adwords Campaign (4.11 pages and 3.22 mins respectively) and the bounce rates (the percentage of people who click through then straight back again) are almost identical at 40.15% - until you factor in the different between the analytics and Facebook bringing Facebook’s bounce rate up to 62.07%.

Summary

I will stick with this for now and maybe update my findings in a month or so but my immediate reactions are that I am going to stick with this for now. The cost is so small (for now) that there isn’t really a massive downside.

It’s early days but after one evening, the first trend I am seeing is the very low click-through rate, which is to be expected.

Although it is targeted marketing in terms of advertising to a specified audience; unlike search engines pay-per-click, the adverts aren’t being asked for by the audience, so from that respect it’s still interruption and on the face of it no different, say, from advertising a product type in the adverts between a certain type of tv programme.

That said, it’s early days yet and I can see areas where this model could expand.

So, at last - social advertising on Facebook, which to my untrained eye is the same as Flyers Pro, is now live and I have just set up my first campaign for the Beauty Shop project.

To set up the adverts you need to log-in to your account and at the footer of the page, select Advertisers.

After creating your social advert, it is a very simplistic process in four steps.

1. Set Up Your Landing Page

Probably, you have a site you want to drive traffic to. Alternatively, you can set up your own page on Facebook. I didn’t do that so can’t explain the workings as I am looking to drive traffic to an e-commerce site.

It’s a simple screen though:

2. Set Up Your Audience

Again, a simple screen where you can begin to drill down your audience. You select keywords from their pre-defined lists that appear as you enter your definition, so these I’d imagine, tie in with peoples hobbies and likes, etc.

I am just going after women interested in beauty related things, rather going after a larger generic audience. Interestingly, the interface keeps you in touch with how big your audience is with every tick box selection.

3. Create Your Social Advert

You can enter 20 characters in the Title and 135 in the body. There is also the opportunity to upload a photo, or in this case a logo.

4. Set Your Budgets

Finally, you can set your budget and choose your advertising model. You can either choose to pay an amount per click through on your advert (ie. you only pay when someone clicks your advert):

Or, you can per per impression - (every time it is shown per thousand times):

5. Dashboard

Within minutes I am already getting page impressions for my adverts and I it is quick in terms of reporting. Time will tell if any of the advertising converts. I’ll keep you posted.