Coupon distribution rose 7.5% and redemptions rose 15% in 2008 Q4

Long gone are the days of affiliate marketers bidding on “Brand Name+Coupon” or “Brand Name+Discount” and being the only advertisers.  A story today in the USAToday focused on the economy being  the main player in forcing Big Brand marketers to think about coupons and discounts in their search marketing campaigns.

Remember when your mom (or maybe she still does) would go through the Sunday paper and grab every coupon available and get excited to go shopping because of all the money being saved.  Think about the commercials and press about the Christmas ToysRUs catalogs in the Sunday paper.  Coupons have always been a customer favorite but it appears to have taken a bad economy, high unemployment and a mortgage crisis for household Big Brands to start thinking that the internet was the place to market their products with coupons.

The other angle on this is the fact that consumers are now more interested in coupons and discounts than ever before because of the same reasons above: bad economy, high unemployment and mortgage crisis.  A variety of coupon sites are out there to help small business owners use and track coupons: OneMinuteCoupon.com and others are probably going to start getting more attention as small business take the same steps as Big Brands in offering discounts and coupons to keep customers coming in and buying.

If you aren’t bidding on and offering coupons or discounts for your retail store via your website than this might be the perfect time to fix it.

This said, I was reading a MediaPost article today about Marin SEM’s new multi conversion tracking software when a paragraph jumped out at me.  It read:

“A gathering last week in Mountain View, Calif. brought together a select group of retailers, agencies and clients. Barach (marin SEM’s CMO) said that’s where Google executives reminded attendees that the average ecommerce conversion rate from paid search stands at 1.72%.“

What’s interesting is that many industries would look at this number and say “that’s so low”  while other industries would kill for this type of conversion rate.  The point is to always try to improve your pay-per-click marketing campaigns and not settle or compare your conversion rates to other industries, verticals or campaigns.  If you are making money and your business is growing then you have a good conversion rate.  If you aren’t making money and your products aren’t selling like you know they should then you have a bad conversion rate. However, if it helps you sleep better at night then use the above 1.72% as a benchmark for conversions but please, please don’t be mad if you aren’t profitable at 1.72%.