Google Beds and Mattresses

Google beds or mattresses and who do you see? Dreams, Bedroomworld, Mattressonline, Mattressman, Bensons for Beds etc etc. Alas, no Archers Sleepcentre.

So David B and I visited the 2012 Internetworld Exhibition at Earls Court last week to find out how it’s done. Three days we were there, and we talked and we talked and we talked to every SEO Company in Christendom to find the secret.

It seemed every stand had worked with a bed retailer at one time or another. “Tough market” they sagely pronounced with transcendent smiles translating to “this is gonna cost you mate”.

Pay per click (PPC) is the holy grail to bed stardom you see (there is a Bedstar selling beds btw). All you do is pay Google half a million pounds and you can be googled for beds and mattresses too.  Easy: customer clicks on your ad, you donate 50p to Google, and the customer buys your highest margin most expensive bed (every time) and it costs you just 50p.

The clever bit is the mathematics we were patronisingly told. And the big marketing effort for the PPC consultancies is how brainy their boffins are. Well. Intellectual snob that I am (BSc, PhD, MUG), I gave them all a good interrogation.

It was a re-run of the Apprentice. At least 50% of the stands thought return on investment was sales divided by ppc costs (because most retailers get their goods for free and the free delivery pixies do the deliveries). But like me, Alan Sugar is a bit of a pedant and wants a profit thrown in too.

Joking apart, only one consultancy that I questioned seemed aware of the “standard error” of the mean. Now I know all you guys do (geeks and pedants to the core). But you try to explain that the accuracy of your conversion rate calculation is inversely proportional to the square root of your sample size. Problematic. Alan Sugar knows this of course. But not our much vaunted ppc Mathematics Dons.

Now I can die happy in the knowledge that from my pauper’s grave, I will remember my fist year university statistics. I thought I slept through that whole lecture course but there you are.

Dismayed but not discouraged David B has galvanised me to take action. “Think of all the extra commission our sales staff will earn” he exhorts. “Susan can buy a bigger gun. Samantha can go drinking twice a month. Stuart can carry on making babies, and Lynn can come off her roll ups and smoke Capstan full strength instead”.

Compelling arguments for ppc indeed.

That we now have a great bed and mattress proposition. Fantastic choice and great prices. Is the other compelling argument. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Meantime have a look at our new Silentnight and Sealy mattresses. Great new ranges and great end of line bargains. Just off to empty my change jar for this ppc campaign.

Tags: bedroomworld, bedstar, Bensons, Dreams Beds, mattressman, mattressonline

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