I am an active watcher and customer of SteepAndCheap (and the parent company Backcountry.com along with its sibling site Dogfunk.com), repeatedly checking the site for quite a few years. I think their implementation of the “woot” model to sell old inventory is superb, especially now (actually integrated about two years ago) that they have implemented a continual deal model, posting a new item as soon as the previous one is sold out. The company then integrated ads highlighting discount comparison products from Backcountry.com on the left column. Then created consumer “push” features, such as IM messaging and a pop up box, to tell the customer when a new deal was available. And within the last couple weeks have implemented Google Ads on the right column.

This last addition is the only one that stumps me as these Google Ads (of course) point to competitive sites. I have heard that the markup on retail items can often dance to the 100% line, whereas ads bring in variable prices due to the site’s traffic. I would think that it would be more profitable to swap the web real estate of their comparison ads with the google ads, unless of course Steep And Cheap receives enough traffic and click throughs to outweigh their discounted inventory markup.

Google Adsense on the top right corner of the landing page.

Comparative Backcountry ads are seen when scrolled to the next page.

According to Alexa and Compete, the site sees approximate traffic of about 110k users per month creating visits totaling just over 1m, indicating that the same people are repeatedly visiting the site. (Please note that traffic numbers are extremely hard to quantify through the counting of IP Address visits.)

I mentioned my confusion to a friend who would be familiar with the details of the site. He told me some interesting facts and tidbits, but didn’t know the revenue comparison of the two ad types. I hear the advertising model pitched on a frequent basis but time and again see that it brings in substantial less revenues than expected, with many companies changing or augmenting their revenue model. If any of you readers have a better understanding of clickthroughs, revenue benchmarks that correlate to traffic (if such a thing actually exists, which I doubt), etc. I would be interested in chatting with you. I realize that the revenues will vary by site and the level of how targeted the ads are that are being used, but would welcome any comments or feedback.