But i recently found a great article by Jared Waxman explaining why these rates are probably unattainable by many sites.  See:  website conversion rates.

Also, having worked at eBay myself I can tell you that the conversion rates for their PPC campaigns are usually well south of 2-3%.   Moreover, overall conversion rates for many of the companies mentioned in the report Mr. Waxman cites are also aided by their well-known brand names, which result in alot of people coming directly to their sites for the purpose of executing a transaction.

For smaller websites, the incidence of such navigational searches is considerably less.  For less well-known websites, trust is also an issue, which may result in more visits before a transaction takes place.

Finally, there’s the issue of how much free traffic that hits your site, but doesn’t convert before expiration of your tracking cookie.  That traffic, possibly acquired via SEO, linking or some other free source, will lower your conversion rate, but if those visitors bookmark your site and come back later, or refer your site to others, it’s still beneficial in the long run.

In short, I agree with Mr. Waxman’s rebuttal of Brian Eisenberg’s assertion that aiming for a 2-3% conversion rate is “aiming for the gutter”.  In fact, a 2-3% conversion rate is excellent for many smaller to mid-sized websites that don’t have the brand-name impact of companies like eBay or the seasonality benefit Mr. Waxman cites for companies like Proflowers.

Ad:Tech Trade Show in San Francisco.

There was a new, more subdued mood at the AD:TECH show in San Francisco this year (April 2009). For the most part, the exhibits seemed more modest and the amount of printed materials floating about was reduced. Perhaps this is a result of the current economy, state of the environment, or a little of both.

The usual suspects were there: Google, Omniture, Nielsen, Comscore, CPX Interactive, but noticeably absent from the exhibit hall were Yahoo and Microsoft. Also nowhere to be seen where the social network whiz kids of the year: Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps they don’t need new advertisers?

Otherwise, Ad Tech was similar to year before and the year before that, but still a great opportunity to meet with customers, vendors and contractors.

Companies like Salesforce.com push the so-called “Cloud” concept hard, and a number of new startups offer their products solely as a service accessed via the web. But as with the vaporware of the old days, they hype often far exceeds the reality.

I recently signed up for a free trial of a web content management system (CMS) via the much-vaunted Cloud, and experienced multiple problems with the service. After imputting my credit card, I couldn’t even access my account! After initially denying a problem even existing, the company finally agreed to cancel my account.

Although its very cool and trendy right now to blather on about the cloud and how we will all soon be floating around on it with our data, beware committing your data and resources to untried companies and their cloudy technologies. For now, I’m happier to keep my data right were it is now - on my CPU.

Beleaugered ppc  advertising engine Yahoo Search Marketing this week finally announced the availability of tools like ad scheduling (aka day parting), which Google Adwords and Microsoft Ad Center have offered for years.

This should help make Yahoo more useful to the many smaller advertisers who do not use ppc management software, and thus have not had access to advanced features like day parting on the Yahoo ppc platform.

Let’s start blogging!