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Sudden Burst of Sales February 1, 2007

Posted by Stray Dog in : Uncategorized, Adwords , trackback

I’m encountering a bit of a phenomenon on my OTC site. I have vast periods of inactivity where sales are not made. By vast I mean periods of several hours where nothing happens - certainly not days or anything like it. Then all of a sudden within a 30 to 40 minute period there are half a dozen orders. Then back to the slump. My Ad Words campaigns are not set to any specific day parts so it is nothing that I’m doing (at least not that I am aware of). Perhaps other competition is loosened up at those times and my campaigns have better yet fleeting success?? I would think this hypothesis was possible if the bursts occurred consistently enough, but that is not the case.

This is something I need to look at further. If it is something I can control then I could process many more orders…

Please feel free to comment on any thoughts you may have on this.

Comments»

1. Gary - February 1, 2007

Could it be that you have one main competitor and their AdSense account is becoming depleted for a short while so their ads are not showing?

2. Stray Dog - February 1, 2007

I don’t even know how I’d determine this. I suppose it is a possibility. There are 4 main products I target and they could very well have the same 4…

3. Stray Dog - February 15, 2007

OK - Turns out that what I thought I was experiencing I was not experieincing at all.

I am a victim of too much going on in my world at any given time. I was tracking the orders via an email I receive when one is placed as opposed to looking at the admin control area on the site for orders being placed. So finally I did that and saw several orders for which I had not received an email for. I think I checked this because I had not had any orders come in for over a day - which would be quite unusual.

Turns out that the email messages that are generated by the ordering system were hung up in the hosts mail spool. This had been happening for the past while and every once and awhile it would correct and all the email that had been spooled would go out all at once - thus making me think multiple orders were occuring in a short span of time.

So - long and short of it is:

  1. I’m kind of an idiot at times.
  2. My host has awful support as I told them about the problem and they said there was not one - so then I had to get specific so they would actually check. At which point they discovered that there was indeed a problem. GRRRRRRRR!!