Any Jewelry Affiliates Here?

malpais

Idiot in training.
May 7, 2009
82
0
0
NYC
www.themusicsnob.com
I've been doing some ppc for a pearl jewelry company and am finding it incredibly hard to make profitable. Anyone have serious experience in this niche and willing to offer some criticism of my LPs and campaigns?

This company essentially finances non-profit work with children through the sale of jewelry (they donate 100% of profits), so if anyone is inclined to help a good cause with feedback please PM me...

Thanks
 


one of my first PPC campaigns was with blue nile in 2002 - I lost $500 promoting engagement rings. not a single sale. that helped me realize that people don't buy engagement rings online for the most part - they want to see the diamond in the store. that's probably what is occurring in this case...people aren't interested in buying real pearls online because you can't tell what you're getting until you get it in the mail. drop the niche and move on.
 
I dabbled a bit in giving pearl necklaces to women, and it converted like crazy.
 
I've tried watches. Here's the deal with this shit .... you'll get the best conversions with long tails on product/model #s and you should use buying keyword modifiers ... "xyz discount" , "buy xyz" etc etc .... You need to get laser targetted on that shit and use expanded broad match. J

ust run a blog with a shit ton of different brands and build up some volume. Should be able to make it profitable.
 
one of my first PPC campaigns was with blue nile in 2002 - I lost $500 promoting engagement rings. not a single sale. that helped me realize that people don't buy engagement rings online for the most part - they want to see the diamond in the store. that's probably what is occurring in this case...people aren't interested in buying real pearls online because you can't tell what you're getting until you get it in the mail. drop the niche and move on.

I have worked closely consulting jamesallen.com within their search marketing department and there selling well over 20 rings / day with adwords and facebook alone. Although conv rates are 0.58% on average but thats huge.

avg sale price $2k+
 
For high ticket items like jewelry you have to make the prospect feel like they are practically in the store handling the item. This means thumbnails leading to very high quality images, video, and the ability to rotate 360 degrees around the item.

Some clothing retailers do this really well.
 
I worked in the jewelry industry for a few years and from my personal experience only older women buy pearls. Older women don't shop on the internet.
 
One of my niches is jewelry but not that type of jewelry...it's a tough niche for sure because it's not that easy to close the deal on the net unless your a super trusted company and your prices are ridiculously cheap
 
Thanks for all the comments guys. They jive pretty much exactly with what we've found. The pearls are of a really high quality and the website photography is terrific, but they sell 100 times better in person. Doing live events is such a fucking hassle, though, that the idea was to pick up some steam via online sales. But since the company isn't a household name, getting the reluctant consumer to buy online has been very challenging. Conversion rates of 0.58% via Adwords would bankrupt us (we don't have average sales of $2k. I see a lot of the same pearl websites advertising all over Google and don't know how they're making it work for them, especially when they're essentially competing on price. Our site is nicer (in my opinion), better photography, etc. but the profit isn't there. I'm going to stop the campaigns for now. We've had some luck giving data feeds to shopping portals like Shopzilla.com, where the viewers are definitely inclined to buy, but I guess the best bet is to get in more retail outlets.
 
Word. We've had small events where we'll do $10,000 in a day, which sure is a hell of a lot more than we do online. But the labor involved is ridiculous to pull that off. And not very scalable at all for a tiny company.

It would probably be best to pony up for a trade show, but that is out of the financial question right now...Going to try expanding our wholesale to boutiques, one by one...
 
i've had conv rates around .3-.5% on avg.
about 14 days from click to conversion. it can be profitable but it's very difficult, and much more competitive now than when i started.
i would invest in seo if i were you. srsly since you have a legit store.
 
I have worked closely consulting jamesallen.com within their search marketing department and there selling well over 20 rings / day with adwords and facebook alone. Although conv rates are 0.58% on average but thats huge.

avg sale price $2k+

so let me get this straight - they have an entire search marketing department and all they can generate per day is 20 leads? And with the high cost of clicks in this niche, and with their published advertised commission of 7% - and a conversion rate of .58% you're looking at an average of $140 commission per sale times 20 sales per day. thats $2800 commission up for grabs BEFORE click costs. on top of that, as an affiliate you have to compete with their own internal search marketing team. Sounds like a great niche for a newbie.

No thanks.