Hello, guys!

Another question from me :)

What you think about average cost of one new customer?
I.e. I will put on advertising of my host about $1000, so how many new clients I will have for this amount of advertising budget?

Thanks,
Yuri.

Depends on where you advertise it on........ Some host gets 100 signups and some gets 0 heh.

Yep..It depends on where you advertise it.
Also if you offer 5-10 bucks hosting packages with alot of features, sure you will get better results.

Thank you guys!

But can you tell me: $10 estimated amount is real to win one new customer?

Originally posted by ypetro
.. But can you tell me: $10 estimated amount is real to win one new customer?


Most of hosting company offer $9.95 plan (usually for 50MB or 100MB packages).
And newbies (or the experts too) usually looking for under $10 packages.

So I would say that having under $10 plan is a must for a web hosting company, as we see that there's a huge market for this plan.

Sorry... I mean $10 to spend on advertising (not hosting plan :) to gain one new customer. Is it real?
My lowest hosting package will be $4.95

Thanks,
Yuri.

Originally posted by ypetro
Sorry... I mean $10 to spend on advertising (not hosting plan :) to gain one new customer. Is it real?
..


Of course it's real.
Let say you run CPM campaign for $3 CPM and get 2% CTR,
that means with $10 you will get about 60 clicks/ visitors to your site..and sure if you offer atractive hosting packages and best sales and tech response, at least 1 from 60 visitors will sign up yours.

The other way you may run CPC campaign or pay per lead basis (through CJ, ClickXchange..etc) and offer afiliates about 15 cents per click or $5 per sale :D

Good luck.

i would probably expect a lower CTR than 2%

That is about the average now.

The best thing to do is just buy cheap advertising, talk to people, be patient, and eventually people will come to you.

I would like to know the best places for cheaper advertising, I know of a few. But I find a lot of cheap advertising, right now, is better that so-called quality "targeted" banner advertising.

Everyone could use a website host at some point, who doesn't want to have a website? So untargetted will be cheap and you will probably get the same results.

The trick is to keep a higher ratio of those 60 people that come to your site, actually become clients. I am working on a website that will hopefully do that. Right now, it's not so great. :-/

Anyhow, off to my 100th post announcement. I can't believe I have talked so freaking much. lol

I was thinking of hosting a few selected websites for free in exchange for advertisement of my hosting company (a banner or button). I noticed quite a few hosts have a free hosting division, and I figure they would not be doing it if there wasn't something in it for them. I think it would be cheaper to do that than spend money on these web hosting directories.

Has anyone had any success with it?

Hello
We set up a free web host (cobranded) that has over 11,000 members.
I initially kept them completely seperate but started offering a basic paid option at $48 per year.
I get about one sign up per day from this.

However, I get more attempted credit card frauds from that site in one day than I get from my other two brands in a month and it can be a real hassle trying to weed out the bouncers.

On the advertising front you can guess on paying 30-50c pr click through and if every 50th customer who clicks buys from you that will be 15 - 25 dollars per sign up.

Maybe thats being cynical but most sales come through personal recommendation.

Gordon

Just out of curiousity, what is the the URL to the free hosting? You can email me privately if you do not want to post it publicly.

Ok let me make sure I understand this (I am using your stats generally):

11,000 members...let's say half of them are active, so that brings it to 5,500.

If you receive 5 pageviews per client per day (I know really low) that would be 825,000 pageviews per month.

Now if you use 30-50% clickthru that would give 247,500 - 412,500 impressions to your premium hosting site.

If every 50th person signs up, that would be about 4950 - 8250 signups per month.

Of course, the last line is where it goes haywire.

But even if every 1,000 person signs up, that would be 247-412 signups per month, which would have to be cheaper than spending $6000 for the ads on the host directories. It also gets your name out there...the exposure.

Am I figuring this way wrong? It seems that is would be cheaper (unless you let people have downloadable files) to offer the free hosting then advertising anywhere. Wouldn't the word of mouth help?

I can imagine the fraud. I would only have a very basic free hosting and the premium hosting...and keep them completely separate.

It amazes me how many people with no lives would attempt credit card fraud. It's a shame you have to waste your time dealing with that.

825,000 pageviews per month on the network

Use 50% of the pageviews for paid web hosting advertising banners: 412,500

Click through ratio of 0.1%: 412,5 click, ok, make it 413 :)

Conversion ratio of 1:50 --> 8 customers

Originally posted by Micky
Of course, the last line is where it goes haywire. Actually, it went haywire before that:
Now if you use 30-50% clickthru that would give 247,500 - 412,500 impressions to your premium hosting site.I think you misread Gordon's post -- his scenario was that you'd pay 30 to 50 cents per clickthru, not that your clickthru rate would be 30% to 50% (WOW!).

Duh!

This is proof I need about 5 cups of coffee before I do anything involving math in the morning! :) :)

Thanks for the clarification.

If there are such dismal results, why do it? There are many companies doing it. What do they get out of it? Giving something back to the community? Tax deduction...can you write that off?