Thanks for your comment and question. There’s certainly a lot of evidence that the economy is slowing down consumer spending and that consumers are researching more than they did in the past.

Review sites, shopping comparison sites and even Google’s new Shopping Onebox unit are all receiving a lot of clicks. So look to book ratios are likely to be an issue for many retailers.

I haven’t been able to find any published research on whether exact match increases conversion rates. However, I’ve had some experience here.

Exact match can often provide a lift in conversion if you’re using the right exact match terms. It all depends on the terms and how well you deliver on that term. You would likely see a very high conversion rate if you drove exact match on a term like ‘louisville cardinals comforter’ to Louisville Cardinals Comforter Set.

However, if you did an exact match on ‘louisville cardinals’ you’re not going to get that much of a bump because it isn’t specific.

In the realm of eCommerce doing an exact match with a ‘buy’ prefix often provides a good ROI. So you could try ‘buy louisville hat’, ‘buy louisville shirt’, ‘buy louisville jersey’ etc.

The great thing about exact match is that you can experiment without a large cost exposure. You can test a lot of exact match terms and know that you’re not going to get a lot of volume on any one term. Instead you’ll get highly qualified traffic and can start to understand if your site can generate a higher conversion rate through those exact match terms.

I hope this helps and thank you for reading Blind Five Year Old.

I would assume that ad placement might be more important in a bad economy, i.e. consumer checks multiple sites and may purchase from the third site if the price is the same.

On my site, clicks are increasing with less conversions. Possibly more lookers and less buyers because of bad economy.

Any research on whether using exact matching increasing conversion?

Thanks,
Bill Bodge
Cardinalville.com