Tempted to test higher prices

December’s usually a really good month for my sales, so I’ll let it pass before doing anything. As I wrote earlier, I relaunched VisitorBoost.com and TargetedVisitors.info in November with, aside from all new code behind the sites, new pricing. As my costs have risen since I set my initial prices in 2004, due to higher supplier costs, higher advertising costs and a rising chargeback rate, I kicked up the average price of most of the advertising packages by around 10%.

Despite that, sales have not dropped one bit, staying around 20-30 orders per day. At the same time, gross income from those sales has risen by more than 20% on average, which is higher than the price increases, so customers are not just continuing to buy but buying more at a time.

I’m quite tempted to test even higher prices. I’ve tried something similar before – in 2004 I ran a separate site at http://www.targetedvisitors.ws which was identical to TargetedVisitors.info except the prices were enormously higher. The site averaged only 1-2 sales per month so eventually wasn’t worth maintaining separately and the domain currently points to the main site. This time I’d like to try some prices that are only maybe 50-100% higher than what I’m charging now and see how that works out. The average order would still be less than $0.01 per impression, perhaps still appealing to customers.

The biggest difficulty is that my aggressive search advertising over the years has resulted in a large number of imitators. I use my pricing directly in the ad headlines and ad text to prequalify visitors and attract them with my best pricing at the same time. Many of my competitors have taken to doing the same thing, and have matched my prices. It’ll be harder to attract clicks while advertising a higher price for the test site, and if I don’t put any price, the quality and conversion rate of the clicks will drop as more ‘curious’ clicks will be attracted.