I?m looking for detailed information on industry
trends  / averages or standards for Conversion Rates for products that
are promoted through content driven online advertisement (the kind of
text ads that you see at the bottom of a
CNN story) and to a lesser extent Search based advertisement (such as
the ads that you see when you run a search on Yahoo.

I f you can provide AUTHORITATIVE support for your answer and you will get a
$100.00 bonus. 

In short I need documentation that says ?Conversion Rates for products
sold online that are promoted by content based advertisements are X?.

I will be looking for information as to what drives conversions rate,
specifically how conversion rates react when ads for relevant products
are placed along side relevant content. What happens as relevancy
falls? Do conversion rates fall? What are the best case scenarios and
worse case scenarios? Specific real life examples would be awesome.

Let me be clear on something though. I AM NOT LOOKING for data that
discusses Click Through Rates. I am specifically looking for
Conversion Rate data.

Here is an example of the difference of the two: 

Let?s say for discussion purposes that my company sells cat food. 

We currently run a collection of ads on Yahoo through their online
advertisement program. When somebody uses their search engine and
searches for ?Cat?s? or ?Cat Food? our ad appears. When they click on
the ad it then takes them to my site.

My Click Through Rate would be the percentage of users that Search for
Cats or Cat food and see my ad and then actually click on it.
Currently the actual daily click through rate for our ads for our real
product is about 2.8%. That means 2.8% of the people who see my ad
actually click on
it.

My Conversion Rate would be the number of those people who wound up on
my site actually BUY Cat Food from me.  Our real life conversion rate
is about 1.5%. 1.5% of the people who wind up on our site buy our
product.

All of this however speaks to performance relative to Search based
advertisement or ads that peopel see when they are using a Search engine. 

What I am looking for is information on Content based
advertisements.

Content based ads are the type of ads that you see at the bottom of an
article in the New York Times Online (www.nytimes.com ) or CNN Online
(www.cnn.com ). The ads are syndicated by the major search engines
that offer online advertisement services such as Yahoo.

These ads are triggered by relevant content that surrounds them on the page.

For example Content driven ads would show ads for Home Loans when you
read an article on the New York Times about mortgage rates going up or
home sales slowing down or an ad for Cat Food when you read an article
about a lost cat.

The big difference between the two of these is that I assume that a
user that is "Searching" for information on cats would be much more
likely to click on an ad for Cat food and make a purchase than a
person who just happend to be reading a news paper story about a lost
cat, saw an ad for cat food and then clicked on it.

Hopefully by this point you get the idea of what I am looking for.

The base fee will get paid for a detailed report, however I do not
think this is going to be that much work. There are lots of people
(supposed experts) in the industry that ?comment? on what they believe
 conversion rates are or should be.

It?s not that I am not interested in what qualified individuals have to say. I
am. If you can find real / accredited experts that talk about this
topic, I would love to have them be cited. In my mind a real expert
would be somebody like Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch or Andrew
Goodman of Page-Zero (www.Page-Zero.com )

The real trick however is going to be finding AUTHORITATIVE
documentation supporting all of this.

Thus I?m offering a $100.00 tip for substantial AUTHORITATIVE
documentation on this topic.  An example of authoritative
documentation would be an organization such as the Interactive
Advertising Bureau (www.IAB.net ). I do not know of other applicable
organizations or I owuld list them. I am sure there are plenty though.

I do not believe IAB publishes this type of information but they are
the type of organization I would be looking for to provide this data
before I would pay out any bonus.

There are a collection of sites, mainly bulletin boards where you
could get started finding this information out.

My suggestions would be to take a look at these two sites to start.

Web Master World www.WebMasterWorld.com
Search Engine Watch www.SearchEngineWatch.com

Ok, that?s it. I don?t know that I can clarify this question any
further. Look forward to seeing a really great answer. It will be
money well spent.

This is a free comment!

I believe you will find an answer pretty close to what you are looking
for on "Merchant Coversion Secrets" after that some results from
www.internetretailer.com  for more of the same just search for
'conversion rates study' no quotes and choose 	ALL WORDS under search
criteria in the same site.
  
marketlive.com/go2report 

you will need to register to download it. To get an idea of what is covered go to 
http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=17162 

"The Secret Sauce
E-retail success is not just about conversions, it`s about profitable conversions
By Lauren Freedman

We live in tactical times where it is always desirable to deliver
traffic?but conversion is essential for survival. In recent research
on conversion rates, commissioned by MarketLive...."

=========




Site search users buy at 3 times the rate of browsers, says new study

Online holiday shoppers who use site search to find products at an
e-retail web site are nearly three times as likely to buy a product as
those who don?t search, reports a new study by e-commerce technology
provider WebSideStory Inc.

Tracking millions of users at sites that use its web analytics
products, WebSideStory learned that site searchers converted at a rate
of 7.54% while all visitors converted at 2.79%. As the holiday
gift-giving deadline approached, site searchers? conversion rates grew
from just under 6% in October to more than 8% in December.

?This data shows that effective site search is becoming one of the
most critical conversion drivers in online commerce," said Ali Behnam,
senior digital marketing consultant for WebSideStory. "Helping
visitors find what they are looking for in a fast, convenient manner
significantly increases the likelihood of their making a purchase. We
only expect these conversion rates to increase as more and more
e-commerce sites engage in best of breed site search implementations."

The WebSideStory Index also showed that repeat visitors converted at a
rate seven times higher than new visitors: 13.88% vs. 1.68%. it also
showed that market share for the new Firefox browser increased from
4.65% on Jan. 5, 2005, to 8.88% a year later.

WebSideStory provides web analytics, site search and web content management. 
http://www.internetretailer.com/dailynews.asp?id=17259
=======

Calculating lifetime value

As if search isn?t complicated enough already, in the near future,
marketers will have to gain greater understanding of search?s role in
cross-channel retailing. ?A recent study showed that 92% of search
conversions take place offline,? Marckini says. ?Another way of
looking at that is that a mere 8% of searches converted at anybody?s
web site.? Retailers will come to understand that...

http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=17164
=======

You are a rock star! This is a huge help! Thank you so, so, so, much!


If a Goggle Answer-er is still out there I would still like this
question answered though.

If you can add to this answer with a detailed answer I would really appreciate it. 

Thanks!

Mike