I haven’t seen my clients’ traffic decrease, although for several conversion rates are down. It varies by vertical, but I believe people are still searching – it’s just now “online window shopping” due to ever tightening wallets.
Rimm-Kaufman Group analysis (based on their largest retail clients) pointed to an interesting traffic trend. Per their analysis of clients’ brand/trademark terms, “…the main cause of decline is simply fewer people shopping…but the biggest dent has come from traffic.”
Consumer spending cutbacks are real and they are hurting the economy. I’ve seen clients’ profit margins shrinking over the last year. Now, more than ever, it’s SO important to squeeze every last penny out of the traffic you do get. I’ve been hounding clients about landing page and website optimization for several years now. It’s often such a difficult battle to get them to understand that, while I can drive all the qualified traffic in the world to their site, conversion happens on THEIR site.
Testing is critical to PPC success. It’s one of THE most important aspects of search marketing, yet perhaps one that advertisers and/or clients understand the least. You can’t improve if you don’t test and measure.
Tim Ash’s SiteTuners.com has a list of great landing page optimization resources and some case studies.
I learned a wealth of information from my recent MarketingExperiments workshop. They have extensive case study archive worth perusing as well.