Paid search placement builds traffic cost-effectively at Headsets.com
Some of San Francisco-based Headsets.com’s most cost-effective online advertising has been in the form of paid search engine placements, CEO Mike Faith tells Internet Retailer. “We spend about $6,000 a month on paid search engine positions, and we’re really happy with the value we get,” he says.
The 3-year old company, a niche marketer of audio headsets, sells about $4 million of them a year across phone, mail and web channels. With approximately 50% of Headset.com’s online traffic delivered directly from the URL it acquired last year, Faith won’t say how much of the rest comes from the company’s cost-per-click deals with paid search engines Findwhat.com and GoTo.com. But it’s enough to force other forms of online advertising such as banner ads and affiliate marketing programs out of Headset.com’s marketing budget. “If you go to search engines and look for headsets, you’ll probably find we’ve got the best ranking of position. We’ve spent quite a bit of time and money figuring out which ones work and how we want to be listed on them.”
Headsets.com also appears in non-paid search engines because the engines have crawled the web and found them – a function in part of the page optimization the company now does in-house – and also because Headsets.com has taken sponsorship positions on some of them. However, Faith says, the simple pay-per-click model has been the company’s least expensive route to higher search engine rankings. “You don’t have to spend six months trying to figure out how the search engine works,” he says. “With pay per click, I know I can just be number one. It costs us, but it’s got terrific value to us.”
For positioning on paid search engines that cover a number of different keywords, Headsets.com pays costs per click that start at a few cents, but average about 70 cents, Faith says. And while he’s sold on paid search engine placement, it’s still not the single best investment he’s made to draw qualified shoppers to the web site. That designation goes to the company’s highly targeted URL. “It cost almost $1 million,” he says, “and it was the best investment we ever made.”
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