For sure, you have heard about the deadly Coronavirus. Today, almost all countries are infected with this non-curable Corona Virus. The bad news is that this virus is quickly spreading and there is not any effective treatment. We just need to maintain social distancing to stay away from infected.
Every day we are getting 10k+ new cases and the data increasing very quickly. There are not any actual or correct figure that shows how many people are actually infected (or sadly passed away). These days, almost all businesses are not functioning and it means you are also affected.
If you are an online marketer then you really want to know how this virus impacted the markers. Well, before we discuss more about this, you should be very much clear on what marketers shouldn’t need to do.
The important thing we are noticing is people keeping a try to exploit terror. I mean to say that, necessary supplies are running very much low all over the world. From toilet paper to masks to alcohol based sanitizer. Apart from these some other basic necessities are also running short in the market. You can see that there are many marketers that are buying these necessary things and then selling again them on eBay or showing their ads and selling the things for 10 to 50x the cost.
It is not entrepreneurship and it is not that kind of marketing. It is strongly suggested that you should stay away from exploiting the situation of Coronavirus to earn a quick money.
Not just is it against the rule but it is even very short-sighted. It is confirmed that you can earn some quick money, but it will not last for a long. You are happier spending your quality time on something which is ongoing.
For this kind of situation, you can understand that how Coronavirus means for business and marketers?
Different businesses are going to fight for a while
Though the virus slows down quickly as the total numbers have decreased in China, companies are going to fight for more than a year as they want to cover their losses.
When businesses such as Apple go out of business their stores to assist decrease the spread, it means less profit and less income. It is confirmed that they are highly capable to pay their workers throughout their temporary lockdown situation, but not all businesses have their bank balance and some would not be able to perform the same.
Just check the travel business. The Corona virus is predictable to lose them more than 820 billion dollars. There are many companies that asked their employees to take an 8-week without pay leave.
The ports are even vacant and you can say that first rounds of dismissals have started already. It is predicted that COVID-19 would cost the worldwide economy $2.7 trillion. Know that not just are people going to lose their money but they are even going to lose conversions and traffic.
Low Organic traffic in most of the businesses
As discussed, we are working with so many customers in different businesses, and due to COVID 19 almost all businesses are facing unacceptable problems.
If talking about correct figure or data, you should note that we are not focusing on any one country, we adopt to look at the stats of traffic from a worldwide viewpoint. We even did not contain data from different sites with below 5000 visitors per month because they tend to have radical swings from a proportion perception even once there are no worldwide issues or updates of algorithm.
We even do not have information on every business, like, we do not actually work with different restaurants nor do we buy data for that group as local eateries normally do not have sufficient budget for marketing. We have statistics on some major ones, but once more not all.
Now, from the standpoint of SEO, these days you can see big drops in organic traffic for so many businesses. In case you are dealing in financial space or news industry, your traffic climb sharply. On the other hand, if you are in the travel business, you can saw immense drops.
You cannot express by the chart, but online business was an assorted bag, as per on what websites sold, organic traffic was either down or up. Like, in case you were dealing in baby products such as wipes or diapers then you saw a good smash in traffic.
But in case you were selling costly items such as Smart Televisions you noticed a great drop in traffic.
Decreased Conversion Rate
From the standpoint of conversion rate, we can see massive drops in most businesses as well. Also, the financial sector that had immense traffic booms, throw down in conversions.
If talking about news websites, they had a great lift in conversion as some of them care for people to read their latest information.
Pay-per-click data
We do not have as enough data about pay-per-click as we normally do for SEO, but we have not seen major shifts in the cost per click, also for things such as the travel business.
We do not have a big sufficient sample size, but as discussed, costs have not come downward much. Like, though we can see great dips in total number of people looking for things such as hotels or flights, we did not see a radical drop in Cost Per Click but we did see a great improvement in cost per acquisition.
You can roughly pay the agreed amount per click, but the amount for each conversion has been going higher for most of the businesses, except you are selling supplies such as Hand Sanitizer or toilet paper.
So, what does it mean for marketers?
As a professional and honest marketer, you shouldn’t be greedy in this situation. You would see people cutting back as the financial system is supposed to get hit by 2.7 trillion dollars as well as specialists are saying that recession is coming.
We are wishing that COVID 19 passes very soon without making any drastic impact on people’s life. Stay at home and avoid crowded places.