In This Issue:

• Google's New Engine: Froogle

• Determining Visitor Worth

• Is a Yahoo! Listing Still Worth It?

Google's New Engine: Froogle

On the 11th of December - the beta version of Froogle.com was launched, offering the search expertise of Google to the world of online products.

For consumers, a relevant search tool is now available to quickly and easily find products for online purchasing. For small online business owners, a new way to push products is now available.

Froogle points users to sites where they can buy actual products from the merchants that sell them. Therefore, to be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your Web site and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your Web site only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Froogle. Nor will Froogle accept a data feed under these conditions.

Determining Visitor Worth

Pay Per Click campaigns can bring large numbers of highly targeted visitors to your Web site. However, these campaigns can become prohibitively expensive (and unlike "traditional" search engine optimization, the costs of any PPC campaign are likely to increase in the near future due to the increased popularity of this form of advertising). It is crucial to the success of the campaign that you pay a reasonable price for each visitor, that each visitor is highly targeted, and that you monitor your positions to maintain your exposure over time.

Determining how much each Web site visitor is worth is vital to the success of a pay-per-click campaign. If it costs $50 in click-throughs to make a $40 sale, the campaign has failed. The formula is relatively simple, but some specific historical data is necessary. In the most rudimentary form, it is the profit from the Web site over a given period divided by the number of total visitors for the same period. If a site netted $1000 in profits from goods or services in a given period, and there were 2,000 visitors during the same period, each would theoretically be worth 50 cents (profit divided by visitors). But this is only the breakeven point. Depending on the desired profit margin, the optimal price to pay per click would probably be something much less than 50 cents. Popular keyword phrases can often run more than this, so it then makes sense to bid less money on less popular terms to pay an acceptable amount per visitor.

Is A Yahoo! Listing Still Worth It?

In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from Web sites listed in the Yahoo directory itself. Since October, sites listed in the Yahoo directory no longer enjoy this privileged status.