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<< Back to Interviews Homepage Download MP3 version of podcast Gareth: How does pay per click compare with natural search in your industry? John: Well I was using Adwords and my credit card expiry date expired at the end of July in 2004, and I had an email saying your card's run out and I must have been away for a week, and nothing had happened. I suddenly realized that the business hasn't particulary down turned, the number of visitors on the site havn't particulary down turned and I thought well I might just keep this going a bit longer. It was a very nerve racking time, because at this point in time the only business I thought I was getting was off the pay per click so I left it off for the whole of August and I thought I haven't noticed any difference in my business! So I closed down my Overture account and my Kelkoo and Price runner and it really went from there I suppose. I dipped my toe back in about 6 months later, because I thought we could use the extra traffic and you know pay the money and get the extra benefit but all of the major sites provide a return on investment calculator which I haven't been running on the earlier times so you apply this to the site and you start looking at what you're getting of it. It was costing me £70.00 (GBP) to get a customer and they was spending like £3.50 pounds on a printer cable or something and I'm thinking "Oh, thi is a bit expensive"! So you start doing a bit of research on average lifetime of the customer and the value of the customer over a lifetime so you're looking at the longevity of that customer, how much they spend, how much profit your making and I realized it's costing me a blooming fortune. Realistically in my business with the average sale price of about £35.00 I couldn't possibly justify it so I pulled it again.
John: Natural search costs money in it's own right because it takes a lot of time and attention. I mean I've got 3 of us virtually full time on the website working on it. Obviously we have built that over a period of time - it was me full time, then James came on and start working on the data base and Rob has joined me now, and I mean the focus is all on that web presence, but the bottom line is - that's my shop. If I was running a bricks and mortar shop I would need 2 or 3 people serving customers. Well, you got to put that amount of effort into the website to generate the business. But it's still not free. You're still paying people in terms of time to get that level of business. As I see it, the business is going to continue to grow based on the foundations we've put, in terms of the search optimization etc. Gareth: So how would you approach this situation if you were a new business going online today? John: I think is very difficult. I really do. 18 months ago we
were quite cocky and thinking "Oh, we can sell anything online"
but it's hard work, it's hard work to get your initial site set
up and anything you do it takes time, effort and energy and really
the amount of business we're doing now (we're over a £1m a
year business online) it just takes that total focus on the website,
and it really stops you on doing other projects. Download MP3 version of podcast
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