Regional Daily Warns Online Shoppers…

Alibris, Abe, Biblio, and eBay agree: No OJ…

Productivity: Gimme some space!…

More on eBay’s stock and Craigslist reaffirming its independence…

Holiday Book Gift Guide…

I generally post the verbatim responses from the various marketing chiefs who take the time to read and respond to this blog, which I appreciate.  Here is Kevin Donaldson, of Biblio, in response to: Biblio Witnesses a Decrease in Traffic.
Your statement is correct but I believe that there is more information buried there that must be taken into consideration when reviewing the issue.  Your comments are definitely one side of the coin, but when you look at traffic to websites the infrastructure issues regarding the Internet can be analyzed from a different perspective.  Here is what I mean by that in two simple points:

1. If a large portion of your website traffic lands on your index page and they don’t like what they see, aren’t interested, don’t like the landing page design, or a number of other issues, the initial impression of the site may very well be ruined.  (see the article below for an extension of this example) If you refer to the “halo effect” concept the researchers found, you will see that your comments about branding may not always be correct.  Say a user comes to our home page several times through affiliates and direct links.  They dislike your site and leave each time.  The user then searches for an exact title, comes to the site again and says, “oh no, not these guys again…”  Focusing less on generic traffic that just tromps through our index page building bad impressions, we at Biblio are focusing on traffic that buys books…       
2. And this leads to the second issue that companies of our size deal with and that is infrastructure requirements.  If we continually grew our gross traffic we have to buy more and more equipment to deal with serving up pages on the web.  Innumerable page requests again and again for people who aren’t interested in what we are selling, or just don’t like the site.  If we were like a big competitor in our industry that sold you staplers and chainsaws…oh yeah, and books, then sure we would love every Tom, Dick, and Harry coming to the site because they would find something they don’t need that they would buy anyway…but again, this is not who we are.  We are trying to build customer relationships, provide them with a quality resource from quality suppliers, and make sure that out of the 40 million books we are now listing, that they are finding what they are looking for, and making that purchase.

Biblio sent out a press release yesterday stating that traffic to its site is steadily decreasing, but sales conversations have increased (press release body below). While this signals a more effective marketing strategy, in the short term, it is not a trend that will lead to positive outcomes for the site long term. What makes this even more troublesome is the fact that the online bookselling market is booming. More and more visitors are look to the industry’s sites (on the whole).

For any website fighting for space in a crowded marketplace, like online bookselling, traffic is almost just as important as sales. Traffic that does not yield sales, still helps the site increase its brand awareness and may yield sales from the same user who returns with a direct look-up of the site. In order to achieve significant growth and an increase in market share you must increase traffic - bottom line fact.

ASHEVILLE, NC — November 20h, 2006 — Biblio.com, one of the world’s largest suppliers of used, rare, and out-of-print books, has seen a steady decrease in traffic over the last few months, due to some algorithmic changes at some of the search engines. Interesting though, the bottom line conversions have increased. What does all of this mean?

“We have made huge advancements in the way our site is structured to maximize the number of pages that are indexed in the major search engines. Yahoo is indexing 200% more pages than last year, MSN, 100%, and Google is actually down, but conversions are way up,” says Kevin Donaldson, Chief Marketing Officer for Biblio.com. “Honestly you just can’t complain about less superfluous traffic from Google and more closed sales. We are doing something right.”
Biblio.com is a small company located in Asheville North Carolina that was the brainchild of the current President/CEO, Brendan Sherar. Begun in 2003 as Biblio.com, the site has attracted thousands of independent booksellers from all over the world. Biblio, Inc., the parent company of Biblio.com, takes the idea of independence seriously.
“We want the sellers on our site to be able to run their businesses without a great deal of interference from us. We are marketing vehicle for them much like an advertisement in a newspaper or trade magazine,” says Donaldson. “Being able to get individual books and pages listed in Google is just another way we make a path from the buyer to the seller. We have more than 43,000 of our web site pages indexed in Google with some reference to our independent sellers, and we work every day to get more.”