Website tracking and advertising efforts and results.

[HappyRCFlyer]

This may be most helpful to Wayne, but it would be the same for other web sites, RC related or not.

In your control panel at your host you should be able to get view's of the stats where your traffic is coming from. I'm seeing Aloft showing up on Youtube RC groups and other random places, their paid advertisements. I highly suggest you analyze how effective these are based upon the traffic results. I've found shelling out money for online advertisements can be tossing money out the window.

When Google pay per click/exposure programs were newly started up I did try out their program on their free trial basis, you only pay after the campaign, and you owed only the length of the campaign you allowed to run. I set mine eventually to $40k just to see what kind of performance it would spit out on overdrive, and yeah, I got traffic and people filling out my contact form showing interest in my lines but when I reviewed the server logs, the web sites giving me traffic were only placeholder pages, not real web sites, just strictly there to to generate ad exposure and rack up my bill. The ones filling out the contact forms were also all bogus people, not remotely customers.

 

[Wayne]

All forms of advertising are a gamble, and managing them is a huge time suck. ROI is the metric that you are always looking at. We have more anyltics for advertising these days then you could shake a stick at. Most of it means very little to me.

We could do a lot more advertising then we do. But in the end I'm not a fan of paid advertising. I much prefer to treat our customers well with the hope they will also treat us well, and recommend us to their friends. With this said, I see new companies come in with far deeper pockets can spend a bunch on advertising and see them making a lot of sales. Some of these are overseas operations and are stealing away local customers, and the companies often times do not treat the customers well. We hear these stories all the time. Yet people get the ads and spend their money with them.

 

[HappyRCFlyer]

You have a couple of spots where it's more for validation rather then actual any kind of direct traffic, such as RC Groups and Youtube, people still are going to be looking at your Google position before they actually are sold and visit your web site. I just hope the validation is cheap enough for you to justify. I will never advertise on RC Groups due to the nature of the place being both slow and rather obsolete, but more so, I can't post my build logs or really share anything much at all without a couple or few individuals there that make a total mess out of them, I don't even have a single reference to my company URL on there for that reason, I do not want it tied to the search engine results showing them in any kind of reference to my operation.

You are correct on the Chinese advertisers and the rest, they simply cannot provide the same support our local operations can do, partially from the language and cultural barrier, partially, they just don't care, they don't take the same amount of pride we do in the west. Still, it's frustrating to compete with them when they are able to operate without our regulations, fair treatment to the workers and the rest. What has always bothered me are the Chinese bait and switch games they use, such as with Ali-Express, you have to analyze things like a computer programmer to make sure what you are ordering is actually what is shown, not just some component that you have hunt down options and selections to find the real price of things., They pull these same stunts on E-bay, which has been my primary exposure and source for sales, where people have became so accustomed to not believing what is being advertised and shown, they are reluctant to click over look into further to make a purchase.

 

[Wayne]

Our RC Groups ads should be expiring soon, i pulled the plug on them a while back. I think the majority of our ads there get blocked by ad blockers, there is poor ROI. I have advertised there on and off to support the forums. Yes, RCG has its issues, but it has had a huge impact on the hobby and has a wealth of info hidden in the threads. My hat is off to them for running it as long as they have. Seen many come and go in much shorter periods of time.

There are good companies in China, and a lot of bad ones too. No different than most anywhere.

I find it funny the different audiences from different selling channels. For example, most people that buy from our site seem to know and trust us. If they have an issue most are kind in their reporting of the problem as they know we will take care of them.

On Amazon people expect refunds and such even if our information and product is perfectly fine. They don't read the details about what they bought.

Ebay seems to have a lot of buyers that don't bother to read the listing, and they contact us asking questions about the item and I simply copy and paste back to them from the listing. Ebay customers seem to require a good bit of hand holding, but when they get a response they are very thankful. We have had some issues with bad buyers on ebay. Returning half built kits and we get stuck with the bill, that sort of thing. Not understanding they have bought a used radio and wanting their money back.. You name it we have probably seen it, and we don't sell much there!

In general we find customers on other marketplaces are sort of damaged by the experiences they have had with other sellers and tend to contact us with guns pointed at our heads. They usually settle down once they her back from us.

 

[HappyRCFlyer]

I used to be quite active at Watt Flyer, some times on RC Universe, both owned by the same place. RCG is the last one standing and the forum format has been entirely replaced with Facebook. I still post on RC groups on rare occasion, even have a few listings in their classifieds but it's still a pretty next to non existent place for sales of any kind, interaction with simple dialog is barely there, be it all of them certainly were most helpful back in the day. I have my own Facebook group, it's small but growing steadily, it's used mainly for showing the current and up and coming lines along with support and another way to reach out to me for. Still, social media is a very low return for the efforts you put into it. With E-bay, I keep my listings as not accepting returns, it eliminates the Amazon mindset with those not serious or didn't read the listings, still, I did run a short campaign just selling the files to laser cut and 3d print the Sparrow kit for a few weeks, I received plenty of actual orders but all except for one, none read the full listing so I ended up refunding the lot and closed down the listing all together, this was the end of the file sharing experiment and I point people to that example if they want files, for in almost all cases they are not willing to pay for them, they just want them for free and too often, only to try to sell them to others and never had one actually had their own design they wanted to trade files with.

I have also had some good experiences with some Chinese companies, the recent one was Sculpfun, the new motherboard on my new back up laser cutter died on me, after some length in dialog they realized I know what I'm talking about when something dies like that, have been computing/programming/etc, since 1983, so they did end up getting me a replacement, Emax, another place, had the motor I bought from them was shorting out, bad windings likely the cause and they sent a replacement motor without any hassles. It's hit or miss when it comes down to it.

You are correct on being prompt with contact on support, regardless of the size and scale of the order, people very do appreciate it when you respond promptly.