Follow On TwitterCase Study: Online Store Selling Buddha Statues – FineBuddhaStatues.com
BizSugar
I’ve been receiving requests lately to critique some of my readers’ online stores so I thought that it would be interesting to post some of my comments online for others to read. If there is interest, I may make this an ongoing section on my blog. Unfortunately I will not be able to feature all of your sites on the blog but I will definitely answer all of your emails.
The store that I’m reviewing today is www.finebuddhastatues.com, an online store that is run by someone who I’ll refer to in this article as E. The webmaster for this site initially asked me the following questions.
Dear Steve,
I’ve been following your blog for almost a year now and I really enjoy reading your blog posts. The resources that you have on this site are tremendously helpful – thank you very much for sharing them with us.
The reason that I’m writing to you is because I need feedback from an experienced and successful e-commerce store owner, such as yourself, on my online store — FineBuddhaStatues.com
I mainly rely on PPC advertising to drive traffic to my website and I get about 500 – 600 visitors a month on average. However, I only get 1 sale a month, which equates to 0.2% conversion rate.
I understand that you are a very busy person, but I would be extremely grateful if you can spare 10 minutes to look at my website and tell me what you think is missing.Looking forward to hear from you.
E
Other Background Information
After E’s initial question, I immediately asked a few follow up questions and here’s the gist of our email conversation.
- Besides Adwords, he’s also doing a little On-page SEO. However, off-page SEO has been largely ignored.
- His main concern is increasing conversion as it is abysmally low (0.2%) and would like to increase this to 1% range or higher. He’s not sure whether his site design that is the problem, or whether his (Unique Selling Proposition) is not strong enough.
- He’s averaging a 7% CTR with Adwords with only $0.10 average CPC, which makes it still profitable even after only getting 1 sale a month.
- He’s attracting 250 visitors a month via PPC advertising, which makes up 50% of the total incoming traffic.
- He currently removes keywords which result in high bounce rates (> 80%) or keywords with low number of clicks.
My Initial Observations
Since most of E’s traffic is coming from Adwords, the source of the problem can be several things. Either the Adwords Ads are not very well targeted, his Adwords keywords are too broad, or there’s a problem with his store design.
First off, E sells buddha statues so I first wanted to get an idea of what his Adwords ads looked like so I typed in a few of his keywords (Don’t worry E, I didn’t actually click on your ads). This is what came up.
Padmasambhava Statue
Extremely fine sculpture of
Guru Rinpoche. View Now!
www.FineBuddhaStatues.com
I immediately see a few problems here. For one thing, the call to action is to “view” the statue. It’s not obvious whether he is selling statues or he just has pretty pictures of statues for people to see. The other problem is that he uses “statue” as a singular in his ad. Does he only carry one statue?
I don’t know anything about buddha statues, but I might want to restructure the Adwords ad to something like the following.
Padmasambhava Statues
High End Gold, Silver And Copper Sculptures
Shop Now And Save On Popular Styles
Take the above example with a grain of salt since I don’t know anything about buddha statues. But from browsing his competitors’ stores, it appears as though E focuses on gold or silver statues which could be considered higher end. In any case, he needs to make his Adwords ads a bit more specific and emphasize that he sells buddha statues with a strong call to action. This will weed out some of the potential non-customers immediately.
My other advice is read my article on how to create a Google Analytics Filter For Your Adwords Ads. You also might want to check out Xurxo’s article on Adwords Reports That Can Increase Your Conversions. By default, Analytics does not display the exact search terms your customers are using to click on your Adwords Ads. E needs to go through all of his search terms and use negative keywords to weed out products he doesn’t actually carry. Just because a particular keyword has a high bounce rate or low conversion rate doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad keyword. In fact, he could be losing out on many potential customers by eliminating keywords based on bounce rates alone.
Conversion Rate
Even though E has some Adwords issues, I believe most of his conversion rate problems have to do with his store. To illustrate, let’s take a look at one of his prime competitors, www.buddhagroove.com. While Buddha Groove isn’t the best store that I’ve ever seen, they are doing several things right.
When I first enter buddhagroove.com, the look and feel of the store is very clean. Across the top and bottom of the page, they offer a lot of extra information on Buddha, the culture and the teachings. In addition, they also run a pretty decent blog about Buddhism.
All of this extra information leads me to believe that the owners of buddhagroove.com are very passionate about their products and their store. As a result if I were in the market for a Buddha Statue, I’d be inclined to make a purchase from them.
The main problem I see with E’s store is that the website is just a listing of buddha statues for sale. Upon entering the page, I don’t really see a compelling reason to buy a statue from finebuddhastatues.com over their competitors. What benefits does E’s store have to offer? What is his value proposition?
Action Items
Based on this feedback, I propose the following action items
- E offers an ebook on his site that is free with purchase. Instead of offering the ebook as an incentive, I would suggest either giving it away for free or taking the content and making it freely available on the site. Of these two options, I would recommend putting the information on the site for free. For one thing, the verbiage will get indexed in Google which should boost page relevance. Second of all, it will help educate the customer and might influence their purchasing decision.
- Since E has several competitors, I would pick 2 or 3 differentiating factors and plaster them right on the center of the front page by the large buddha pictures. What sets E’s products from his competitors? Is it quality? Price? As soon as the customer walks in the door, they need to know why his store is special. From my limited research, he seems to specialize in metal statues. He needs to pick a unique aspect to emphasize.
- E should also focus on writing more content. The site needs more personality, more passion. The content can be in the form of video or text but preferably it should demonstrate some amount of expertise on his products. He needs to show customers that he knows what he’s talking about and that he carries quality products. As Seth Godin would say “He needs to tell a story”.
The good news is that his competitors aren’t incredible. With some hard work, I believe that he can overtake his competition.
Readers: If you have any advice for E, feel free to post your comments below.
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After comparing the two websites, I think that E’s website is more aesthetically pleasing but I do agree that I like the content on buddagroove’s better. What would be useful for someone that doesn’t know anything about Buddha, is a description of what each Buddha is known for (i.e. longevity, good karma, prosperity, wisdom, etc) on the home page. E does describe the Buddha once in the subcategory but I think it would be helpful if one could see this sooner. Additionally on the contact us page, he should mention where he is located.
@Jennifer
You are absolutely correct. The contact page is extremely important especially if you run a small shop. Make sure you put the address of your store in addition to your phone number on your contact page. I also like your idea of grouping the statues based on terms that are easier to understand. You need to make it as easy as possible for a customer to find what they want. They are not all knowledgeable about your products.
Steve,
This is a really good section with lots of valuable information. I also have been following your updates and I try to implement as much of your tips as possible.
Just like E I also have been getting lots of site visits through Adwords with little sell through. This has been very helpful to me.
Thanks.
PS: How could I submit my site for a review?
I agree, I think more education on the Buddha statues is key. I would love more information on how and where they are made. Who makes them? Perhaps even photos or videos of a Buddha in “production” (for lack of a better term). There is a Rare Antique Jade Amitabha Statue on his site for $2,697.00, but it doesn’t give much information about it. How do we know its antique? I’m not sure how much information you can give on it, but as much as possible would be very helpful if I were to purchase one.
Hi Steve,
I agree with you that the text ads could use some work. Here are some additional tips to improve conversion rates and overall AdWords performance:
TEXT ADS
One quick way to get ideas for ads is to look at the competition’s ads that appear on the keywords you’re bidding on and improve upon them. Pay close attention of the ones that appear in the top 3 spots especially when they appear above the organic search results on the left side in the highlighted box. These ads perform well CTR-wise which is why Google displays them that way.
Here are a few lines from ads stood out:
Many Styles. Fast Shipping.
Low Prices. Buy Online & Save!
Large selection with low price.
Wide Selection Of Buddha Sculptures
From Around The World. Buy Online!
PRICING
I also visited the site FineBuddhaStatues.com and noticed that statues start at $128.88 so if E. is already getting a great CTR at 7%, then including pricing in the ads to prevent people looking for cheaper statues from clicking, will help get him/her better quality traffic and help increase the conversion rate from adwords.
For example, here are a couple of ads I put together:
Authentic Tibetan Buddhas
Fine Buddha Sculptures from $129
Intricately Hand-Crafted in Tibet.
Buddha Sculptures: $129+
Buy an Authentic Tibetan Buddha
Online. Masterfully Hand-Crafted.
LINK TO THE MOST RELEVANT PAGE
I also recommend making sure E. deep links to the most appropriate pages, so if someone is looking for an Amitabha Buddha Statue on Google, then this person should be sent to the Amitabha page on the site (http://www.finebuddhastatues.com/Amitabha). This will also help improve the conversion rates as potential clients are shown the most relevant pages based on what they searched for.
MAKE SURE THERE IS ENOUGH INVENTORY
On the flip side E. will also want to make sure they have enough statues in stock for any particular type of buddha. Often we see ecommerce sites advertising on adwords specific products and then sending potential customers to a blank product page, or a page that displays a message like this “There are no products to list in this category.” This will obviously kill your conversion rate and make your bounce rate skyrocket while frustrating visitors. The fact that you paid to frustrate a visitor just adds insult to injury.
A well structured campaign with specific adgroups for each type of statue will make it easy to pause and unpause depending on the inventory on hand, helping you to avoid frustrating potential customers and wasting your click budget.
ADDITIONAL TIPS
I’m sure there are more opportunities to improve their AdWords campaign performance, but I’d have to take a closer look under the hood to spot them.
Some additional tips I could offer would be to mine their analytics for error pages and broken links that might be frustrating visitors. Conducting path and funnel analysis might help them spot problems with their shopping cart process.
Including their phone number prominently on each page increases confidence (especially 1-800 numbers) they don’t include a number. Also I wasn’t able to locate a physical mailing address which might be hurting conversion rates as well. Despite the credibility logos on the site, the lack of a phone number and mailing address might set off alarm bells for a potential customer who is being asked to part with over $100 without any direct way of speaking with someone at the company first.
http://www.buddhagroove.com does this fairly well – 1-800 prominently displayed at the top of each page and they provide a customer service link at the bottom of the site (I’d recommend putting this information in the contact us section that already exists as well)
Hope this feedback is helpful and shows that they have some great opportunities to improve their site and campaign performance.
very cool site. hopefully all these tips help you get more out of it…
expanding on the ebook idea, make it one that helps the visitor make their purchasing decision. something along the lines of “how to choose the right buddha statue”
not sure what page the ads are driving clickers to. however, if the ad stated that they could save 10% or more on buddha statues then when clicked deliver them to a landing page that further promoted this benefit and encouraging them to act now.
even offer a coupon when they sign up for your newsletter… you’ll get sign-ups and be able to do continue to market to them. plus, they get a coupon (with expiration date) to encourage a purchase.
the idea with those is to make it easy for visitors to make a purchasing decision.
as for writing the adwords themselves, the one given in the article starts with “Padmasambhava Statue” followed by a description. typically, you want your first line to be the big benefit and the second line being the feature.
a few folks have already talked about giving more detailed descriptions. take it a step further with video talking about the particular statue, it’s history, and the perceived benefits of having the statue in your home… think Gery Vee and how he talks about wine.
This is great advice and it’s really wonderful to see how you think through the issues. I also want to commend E. for being willing to put himself out there and letting others know he wants to improve his site.
One thing I didn’t notice was any mention of using some social media. Is E active on Twitter in communities that are interested in Buddhism? This may also help to drive some free traffic.
Wow! I wasn’t expecting such insightful feedback from everybody — this is amazing!
To @Jennifer @Ruben @Carmen @ChaoticMonk @Xurxo @Carla — Thank you all for the fantasic feedback! I’ll definitely put everybody’s feedback into good use.
Thank you again Steve for posting this. You’re awesome.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by mywifequit: New At MWQHJ: I’m helping out readers by critiquing their online stores. Here’s my first web critique http://su.pr/5lZyJH…
Nice example this. Strangely enough I actually really want to own A Buddha statute and always have. I might pop over to the site.
Just an observation but I think buddhagroove has a better look than E’s site. They have nice smooth lines and earthy colours which suit these kind of products I feel.
Perhaps they’ve updated their design since the first comment was made. E’s site reminds me of a newspaper with his use of colours. I personally get a better feeling for buddhagroove when looking fromone site to the next. Perhaps a little work on the design would be helpful for conversions.
@Martin
Actually E has made some drastic changes since the review. In fact, his site looks completely different now. I’m not sure I’m in love with the new design though I will reserve judgement until he is done.
buddha statue is hard to sell through online because the it may come to some religion problem and believe.
Use google adwords is not enough while less of people will not direct find the buddha statue and buy it. They mostly may want to hear some story on your site like how to place a buddha in a correct way, what the benefit of getting a buddha at home, where you get your buddha statue from .
Because that is what they believe, so you need maybe like a case study or story and a call action to call them buy . This method may help you to increase your conversion rate.