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What I’m about to say is part rant, part advice, but either way it’s pretty damn simple - a fast way to improve the Adwords CTR of your website when the ads are targeted (purposely) at Canadian users - if you aren’t already doing it.
I moved to Canada a little over a year ago and let me tell you my experience with buying online thus far:
1. Most American (i.e. mainstream) companies won’t ship to me.
2. Those who will I really don’t want to because I then have to shell out about 1/4 of the retail price for duty.
3. All the search engines do a shitty job of discerning what is a Canadian site and what is a North American site in the organic results (even when searching pages in Canada).
4. Adwords geotargets to my IP, making it the most reliable (haha, let me stop to laugh for a second) place to find companies targeting Canadians (so at least number one isn’t an issue, unless they’re a moron and are randomly spending money to advertise to people who *can’t* buy from them) for specific search terms.
5. Even the Adwords results are shitty seventy percent of the time (apparently, there are a lot of morons).
So what is a girl with plenty of money to spend and no where to spend it to do?
I can tell you when I scan the Adwords ads (as a Canadian shopper, not an search marketing person) I am looking for all the regular things that say “hey, this ad is relevant”, but one thing will make me click on ad number six vs. ad number one every single time - a .ca domain and for added bonus points, mention Canadians in the ad. I find way too many .com’s who don’t ship to me listed in my geo-targeted results (morons) - enough that I have become jaded.
I was recently looking for a Canon SD550 - to buy. I’ll let you in on my thought process as I scanned the ads…
Ad mentions the product? Great. But oh no, you aren’t fooling me again or wasting five seconds of my precious time. I’m not clicking yet.
Ad mentions reviews? Great, but I doubt I’ll be able to buy it from there.
Ad says free accessories? Tempting… very tempting, but I doubt the free accessories will make up for duty costs *if* they even ship to me.
Ad says .ca, awesome. Click. What, no pictures? Screw this. Click back.
Ad says lowest pricing? What, you think it matters once I get done paying duty even if you *do* ship to me?
Ebay? No thanks. God I am so sick of seeing ebay everywhere for everything.
Ads says .ca? Wait - free shipping to *Canadians*?!?!?! They actually said something to *me*? Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Excited click. Picture, review, decent pricing and *free* shipping. Conversion.
I’m definitely not an Adwords expert by any means - talk to him or him if you want that type of expert advice. And talking to your target audience isn’t rocket science. Yet, I wonder why, as a Canadian, it is a struggle to find Canadian stores in geo-targeted ads.
[rant] Please, for the love of God, if you ship to me, especially from within Canada and you’re targeting Canadians, tell me. If you call out to me, I’ll click. I promise. [/rant]
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Rae, shopping online in Canada was the worst experience of my life. I used to buy tons of stuff in the US before moving up there and had to find new ways of shopping once I did. The prices would always seem okay, but then after shipping you would be paying sometimes 2 times the price in the US. I am talking about tiger direct.ca or whatever it is which was supposedly an online superstore and out of canada. It turns out half their products were shipping from the US and I would need to pay international shipping and duty.
I do not think it is the adwords that suck as much as the lack of superstore merchants. For electronics the best bet was always futureshop or bestbuy.ca, if you could deal with their their sub par selection and retail prices. Also I fell in love with costco.ca!
Here is my rant on buying a futon:
http://www.werty.net/2005/05/guelph-futon-in-canada.html
The 2 horror stories for me were finding a USB KVM switch and a travelpro suitcase. Both of these I ended up buying online and shipping to the US and getting them on a trade show run. Ship things to a hotel you plan on staying at!
I bought mens grooming supplies (insert joke here), from a company that offered free canadian shipping from the US on orders over $75. It took me like 3 hrs to find that store though…
Has amazon.ca started to carry everything like the US one? Last I checked they were just books and dvds, and even then the selection on dvds was weak.
PS. thanks for the link!
I’ll thank you very much for not busting out all of my Canadian adwords secret in one single post :). Just adding the word ‘canadian’ or ‘canada’ in Canadian adwords significantly increases the CTR in many cases. I’m currently testing a title of ‘Shop Canadian’ - generic as it is I’m hopeful that it will actually be pretty effective.
The problem you’re running into in Canada is that while Canadians are web savvy, Canadian companies on the whole are not. The industry I’m in is pretty dang competitive in the US - in Canada it’s a disgrace. Clients in that industry routinely tell me that they just don’t like the leads that come off the web. WTF? In short, Canadian companies just aren’t effectively online yet. And no signs of that changing.
I’ve got all the same problems you’ve seen - and I actually created a Canadian-only search engine after I spent days trying to find a place to buy servers locally. As you noted, using hosted IP address is a very poor indicator of what country a site is relevant too - particularly between Canada and the U.S. In fact when I first started crawling I used IP addresses as an indicator. Turns out that every p.o.s. US spam site is hosted in Canada :). I eventually went to a whitelist only model. Heck of a lot more work, but it was really the only solution I could find. (IIRC from a wmw posting, some of the british isles have the same problem.)
Ultimately given the ‘world’ wide web concept it’s a poor idea to assume based on IP address. A number of my clients do well in Google.ca and the canadian-only pages even though the only thing that makes them Canadian is that they’re on my servers in Toronto.
Ugh, add me to the chorus of people griping about getting crap here.
I can’t name the number of instances I had where I couldn’t get shipping here or it was exhorbitantly priced. Once, I wanted a simple pair of $12 sandals. I tried search term after search term to find someone in Canada shipping them OR a place that would ship to canada. No dice. I must have used terms for at least an hour.
If I were staying here for any length of time, I’d develop a canadian-specific adwords campaign and try to get products in that way. We considered an import business at one time. Someone could do well, I think, if they got the right supplier and didn’t have to pay insane import duties on their products.
You don’t have to pay insane import duties. Canada/US have free trade agreements so for most stuff imported from the U.S. there’s no duty (my first online business involved heavy imports from the US). The problem is the mode of transport used to import. Use UPS and you’ll get nailed all sorts of service fees and crap that people tend to think are ‘duties’ when they’re just UPS courier charges cleverly named.
Personally I maintain a mailbox in Niagara Falls NY. Ship stuff there, drive down and clear it through customs myself. I page the standard GST but that’s it; there are no other charges.
Realistically though, you’re right; shipping cross border is expensive. Try to use mail whenever possible. That’ll save quite a bit.
Rae,
I’m pickin’ up what ur puttin’ down! It is hard to find geo-targetted ads on google. I just moved back to t.dot from NYC in January and really noticed the contrast. And in general, the shopping here definitely sucks. I forgot about the GST + PST, but was quickly reminded. I’m actually running some adwords ads myself, and your tips make TOTAL sense!
Thanks for the great post, and continued success!
Geofferson
i’m having the same problem. i live in canada. i did a google search to find out who else is running into this problem and someone from another site mentioned extendasend.com …..has anyone used their services to remedy this problem we are having? there was another company, too, that only did apo box addresses, which i don’t have. any suggestions?
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