Are there plans to offer AdWords conversion tracking for the shop sites? Each sale of a model could be a conversion worth the markup. This way, it would be easy to see how much money came in per dollar spent on Google ads. To enable this, some code would have to be added to the site, similar to the Analyics tracking that's already there. Detailed info here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en& ;answer=115794 I would love to see this supported!
What you can do instead is create a new page for the model you're going to use for Adwords and change it to private - this way only traffic from your Google paid campaign will reach this page - now, use your Analitics to see how many actual uniques came through your Adwords campaign and how many of these uniques converted into actual sales (you can either check you XSL sales-file in your edit-shop page periodically throughout the day or you can get a summary of all your sales in the next morning. (the so called: Yippee email). So next, the math is simple - let's say you paid for ex. $50 for 1000 Google visitors and your Analitics counter registered 900 visitors.. (don't expect 1000) - now out of these 900 you made 4 sales.. so that's 1:225 a sale.. so if your design's markup is $12.5 - you break even , if it's more then that you profit.. - less then that you loose money.. and need to change either your ad text, model price , or.... ditch the model for another Cheers
That's a very interesting hack, but it's still a hack. I was wondering if we could get a proper integration of conversion tracking. It seems like the work for Shapeways would be very similar to what has already been done for the Analytics integration. The reason I'm bringing this up at all is that AdWords currently has a promotion where they give you an extra $100 if you spend $100 on ads and enable conversion tracking (by February 15th 2011).
Very interesting... What pops to my mind about this generous incentive.. is the fact that they suffer a great deal of click-fraudulent and by installing this new code on your website they can now better asses what is a real human click and what is a questionable one.. by combining data from Google's cookie and the cookie generated on your landing page. This could reduce null clicks, refine conversion numbers and save webmasters $$$. Perhaps Robert , shapeways CTO can add more on this. BTW, can you share your experience about Adwords campaigns for your 3d designss? are you happy with the conversions? throw us some numbers Cheers
I ran an experiment over about a month and I'm not particularly happy with the results, but I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that. I spent more than I earned during that time, but since I had a relatively low budget for the ads and not that many models to offer, this might not transfer well to other shops. So I'd say run a small experiment for yourself if you want some meaningful numbers. Conversion tracking would definitely be a useful tool.
Sales conversion tracking (not just Adwords) is an essential tool for any serious shop owners. Here is how some of the big boys do it https://support.clickbank.com/entries/22803952-Integrated-Sa les-Reporting Look forward to Shapeways implementing it since currently this is not possible here.
I just pinged Greg about this thread, and he kindly replied. I am pasting the reply here for everyone's benefit: ""Thanks for reaching out. Our investment in 3rd party ecommerce integrations give you those features plus much more. With our launch of the SW Shopify Integration in Q4 2018 this gives our community access one of the most robust selling platforms on the market. Additionally, we are currently running our beta program for our SW Etsy Integration, to be fully launched in Q2 2019. Hope this helps. Greg"
The listing fee per item charged by etsy changes the required pricing to cover expenses on a basic shopify site. I'm hoping we will get a clear determination in advance on whether each material and variant incurs the charge. (For instance my gold wedding rings have 24 sizes in 4 types of gold (24 x 4 x $0.20 = $19.20 listing fee) for just one product.) But etsy only charges $15 per month and shopify charges $30 per month for the use of the platform. Shop-owners please do all the required number crunching to see what will reasonably work for you. Etsy and shopify are probably both cheaper to sell on than ebay, but the equations are different. Crunch the numbers now folks.
There is Shopify Lite for 9 USD if you have your own website. The 30$ version is if you upload the products to their platform...