Well, I suspected this. I posted about the Alexa traffic graph for Amazon last week, and if you look closely you’ll notice a dip right around Christmas last year. I suspected that Christmas wasn’t going to be a good conversion day, and BOY was I right.
Ready for this? Over the past 4-5 months I’ve routed 40,000 clicks to Amazon through various sites and ads. My conversion rate is an average of 12.5%. Meaning that for every 8 clicks I drive from my sites and ads to Amazon, someone buys 1 item. My lowest single day conversion rate since I’ve started doing this was 3.61% on a Saturday near the end of September. My highest was 85% on a day when someone ordered 200 student dictionaries in one pop. Totally throws my numbers off, but heck, I’ll take the commission sure.
Anyway, my conversion rate yesterday (Christmas) was a whopping 1.71%. I drove 461 clicks to Amazon yesterday and people bought 8 items. Ouch. Between not shutting down my Adwords ads and 1/30th hosting fee cost, I think I actually lost money yesterday.
Someone remind me to turn off all my ads next Christmas please. People don’t seem to buy stuff. Plenty of browsers, very few buyers.
