Is My Online Advertising Campaign Really Working?

A lot of stores are considering if they should do some advertising on the various online yellowpage type directories, such as YP.com, Yelp, Yellowbook, etc. I often hear storeowners tell me that have a campaign already setup with a major local business directory they have no clue if they are getting their monies worth for the bucks they are spending.

Before you start any online, store advertising campaign you need to be able to view how people are getting to your website. The easy way to determine where your website visitors are coming from is by using Google Analytics (it's free) on your website. This will help you track where your website audience is actually coming including any advertising campaign you decide to try. See a simple example below...

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Notice the yellowpages.com source. What this is showing you is over a selected time period how many website visitors came from Yellowpages.com. I also added the region so you can also see where the website visitors came from. If you were a store in Massachusetts you would see that 5 visitors came from Massachusetts to your website from Yellowpages.com. Depending on the time period and advertising costs you can now better decide if it is worth it.

One thing to note: The bottom line is getting web visitors to your store (converting visitors to buyers). So if those 5 Yellowpage.com web visitors all became new customers you might find this advertising program is a great deal. It's about the quality of the leads, not just quantity.

Using Google Trends To Look At The Flooring Industry

Now that we have completed one third of 2011 I thought I would look at the trends in certain flooring industry categories again to see how things look compared to previous years. Although some things seem pretty obvious I wanted to confirm my suspicions based on conversations I had with many different flooring customers.

I like to use Google Trends because it gives us a pretty accurate picture based on searches done on Google. I will start with a couple of trend tests to demonstrate Google Trends is fairly accurate and believable. First one is based on a recent fad which is women putting feathers in their hair. This really took off late 2010 and is going crazy in salons right now across the USA. (I know this because I have a client who sells a boat load of feathers each month.) So let's see how it looks using Google Trends..

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The second test is the "Super Bowl", which should peek for a very short time span and does...

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We can see the Google Trends are fairly accurate. So lets see how Walmart and Amazon are doing over time. Notice the high peeks every year during the holiday shopping season.

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So now lets look at some search trends for specific flooring categories from 2004 to present and only for the USA.

1. Carpet..

2. Hardwood flooring...

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3. Laminate flooring...

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4. Flooring...

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I heard from many store owners that 2010 started out fairly strong and then died the second half of 2010. The Google search trends for 2010 seems to pain the same picture.

5. Shaw Carpet, Mohawk Carpet and STAINMASTER

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6. Compare "Carpet One", Flooring America" "Mohawk Flooring" and "Shaw Flooring"..

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7. SmartStrand (Notice the huge spike in searches during zoo animal promotions

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Google Trends seems to say the amount of interest and noise being made online about flooring is steadily declining. If we looked at from State to State I am sure we would see some area trends doing much better than others.