Profit Rank: How We Do It

Profit Rank approaches every prospective client as a potential business partner. Why? Because Profit Rank operates on a strict performance or revenue sharing basis. Although the money we spend on your behalf comes out of your advertising budget, our own revenue comes out of the sales profit we generate for you.

As a result, we will only accept a client once we have established to our satisfaction that we will have a significant enough effect on the client's bottom line to justify the investment. In order to make this determination, we require the help and participation of a confirmed expert on your business: YOU!

Setting the Stage

The first step in establishing a partnership with Profit Rank is to establish baseline metrics via analysis. Simply put, in order to project your firm's potential, Profit Rank must first establish where you are. We gather the majority of this information with our Internet Marketing Questionnaire, which obtains information about the following aspects of your online business:

• Your website's application infrastructure
• The size & scope of your online product offering
• The nature and success of current efforts in Usability Optimization, Organic Search Marketing, Sponsored Search Marketing, Affiliate Marketing
• Profit margins
• Average order
• Current cost to acquire a new customer
• Current and historic traffic levels
• Conversion rates for each online sales channel
• Discounts, coupon offerings, seasonal sales, and other promotions
• Your marketing budget and expected return for the everage new customer
• Your competitive advantage

Your firm will naturally consider much of this information to be highly confidential. Profit Rank will be happy to sign your confidentiality agreement or to provide one of our own.

Note: It is not uncommon for a prospective client to be unable to provide some of the information listed above. Not to worry! We'll do the best we can with what you can give us.

Crunching the Numbers

Once Profit Rank has a clear idea of where your company stands, we are in a position to calculate where we might take you.

The key to performing this calculation is a sophisticated mathematical performance projection that takes into account the following factors:

• The baselines discussed above
• The maximum possible traffic your site might generate from each Internet search engine sales channel if spending were not a constraint. This is based on a keyword analysis of your existing site and its content
• Your cost to acquire a new customer marketing budget, established on-site conversion rates, and your expected return per new client

The result of these calculations is a chart that tells us to what degree and how quickly Profit Rank can reasonably expect to grow your business, and what level of marketing expenditure will be required to reach this goal

On the basis of these results, Profit Rank will either submit a formal proposal for your consideration, or will decline to bid on the project

Moving Forward

Assuming that you fit our client model and your firm accepts Profit Rank's proposal, we will immediately conduct a thorough usability review of your website. The purpose of this review is twofold:

• To remove any obvious stumbling blocks that are preventing shoppers from converting into sales. Depending on the state of your website, this step can have immediate and profound results
• To ensure that you have infrastructure in place that will allow Profit Rank to collect the data we need to operate effectively. There are a number of good web analytics packages on the market; if properly configured, any one of these will do nicely. Profit Rank will assist with installation and configuration as required

Once analytics are installed, and configured, Profit Rank will begin to collect data to form the basis of future Usability Optimization recommendations. How often we provide these recommendations depends entirely on the volume of traffic your site experiences; once every six to eight weeks is a reasonable guess in most cases.

Meanwhile, depending on the finding outlined in our proposal, Profit Rank will establish and begin to operate campaigns on the Organic Search, Sponsored Search, and Affiliate Marketing channels. The specific nature of these campaigns will depend on Profit Rank's findings, but the following observations generally hold true:

• Affiliate Marketing taps the vast shopping population represented by affiliates in the large affiliate member networks of Commission Junction, LinkShare, or Shareasale.
• Organic Search Marketing creates targeted content and promotes it in a manner that makes it particularly attractive to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN
• Sponsored Search Marketing drives traffic from Pay-Per-Click sources like Google Adwords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, and MSN adCenter