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Pay-per-Click Services
Pay-per-click services allow you to bid on relevant key word phrases. If you bid high enough, your listing will appear above your competitors' listings when someone searches for one of your phrases. Your account is debited if the searcher clicks on your listing and arrives at your site.
One good guideline for choosing PPC providers is cost. Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and Google AdWords yield the most traffic, but the bidding may be too competitive for some sites. I've seen bids as high as $20 or $30 per clickthrough, although that's rare. Often a keyword which is going for $4 on one of these will be going for 25¢ on one of the lesser PPCs, or a keyword going for $1 may be going for 2¢-3¢. You won't get as many clickthroughs, but at least you'll be able to afford those you do get. On the other hand, if your key words are relatively obscure, like "flow meter calibration," or regionally specific, like "Seattle bathroom remodeling," you may not get enough clickthroughs on the lesser PPCs to use up your initial deposit, while you may be in the #1 position in Overture and AdWords for the minimum bid, and get a fairly decent stream of traffic.
If you have a shopping site with lots of products, PPCs may be ideal for you. Each of your products can be a very specific key word phrase. The title and description of each listing can be very specific to that product, and the URL in the listing can point specifically to the page where you sell that product. Since your key words will be so specific, it is likely that the bids on them won’t be too competitive, and conversions to sales should be relatively high.
Google AdWords
AdWords differs from Overture in that you create word groups with a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for each group. The higher your maximum CPC and the more often people click on your ad, the higher on the page AdWords will place your ad. Your actual cost is based on your maximum CPC and the clickthrough rate (CTR). Even if people don't always click on your ads, they see them, which provides free branding for your site. But if your clickthrough rate is too low, AdWords may discontinue your ad.
Although Overture affords more precise control over individual key word phrases, AdWords accounts can be managed more effectively by creating multiple groups for each campaign based on search term themes and relevance. A maximum CPC is set for each ad group. GoToast isolates each keyword phrase into its own ad group and provides a more Overture-like interface for determining the precise position and cost of each phrase.
Google is so popular that the exposure from an AdWords campaign is excellent, but the competition and prestige of Google tend to result in bids are that are more costly than those in Overture for the same key words. Not always though. Some of my clients have the opposite experience.
If you really want to master Google AdWords, you might consider subscribing to Marketing Smarter with Google, a bi-weekly newsletter that provides advice on optimizing for Google, selecting the right keywords, organizing them into easily managed campaigns and groups, testing your headlines and copy, tracking and measuring your ROI, and knowing what to make of Google's latest innovations. It includes case studies and glimpses into actual test results from other advertisers. The publisher offers a money back guarantee.
Yahoo Search Marketing
YSM is one of the best-known PPC providers, after. Yahoo! recently purchased Overture. Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, HotBot, Infospace, AskJeeves, and c|net derive their top listings from the top three (and in some cases the top five) Overture listings. (Overture no longer feeds AOL, which now uses Google's AdWords. For an up-to-date chart of search engine alliances, click here) Minimum bid, 10¢; minimum initial deposit, $50; minimum monthly spend, $20.
Overture's bid process includes an auto-bidding feature. Position is determined by the bid amount. The amount actually charged is one penny above the next lowest bid. The supposed advantage of this is that you never have to worry about paying more than necessary to hold your position. But I recommend fixed bidding because, using a tactic that GoToast calls "auto-gap bid jamming," a bidder can pressure the bidder above him by bidding one penny below his bid price, thus forcing the top bidder to pay his maximum bid. For this reason, and the highly competitive nature of Overture's clients, it is necessary to keep a close eye on bid positions. GoToast has a rule that enables you to employ this tactic against your competitors while monitoring your bids for you to be sure they don't employ it against you.
Overture uses human editors to review submissions for relevance and appropriateness. New listings take a few days to be approved. Bid changes are immediate. Overture's customer service is excellent. It's very easy to reach someone on the phone or by email, and account representatives are always very helpful.
FindWhat - Supplies top listings to Dogpile, MetaCrawler, c|net, Infospace, and Mamma.com. Minimum deposit, $25; minimum bid, 5¢.
Kanoodle - Supplies c|net and CBS MarketWatch, as well as 10,000+ minor search services. Minimum deposit, $25; minimum bid, 1¢.
Ah-Ha - Supplies listings to Excite, Verizon, Webcrawler, NBC, and metacrawler. Minimum deposit, $25; minimum bid, 1¢.
Keyword Research for PPC
Keyword research is as important with PPC as it is with SEO, although the approach is a little different. As with SEO, with PPC you should avoid vague, general terms. If you're a real estate agent in New Hampshire, don't bid on the term "real estate." You'll find yourself up against companies with lots of bucks and a national clientele. Bid on relevant terms such as "New Hampshire real estate," "New Hampshire Lakes Region real estate," etc. Wordtracker.com, KeywordDiscovery, and Overture's keyword suggestion tool can help you brainstorm on key words.
If you have hundreds or thousands of products, then you have hundreds or thousands of viable key words. It doesn’t matter if many of them are relatively obscure and only attract a few clicks a month. Those clicks will be very targeted traffic and multiplied by hundreds or thousands, will certainly add up. Also, since they are obscure, you won’t pay much for them.
Most PPCs recommend that you include the search term in both your title and description. This increases clickthroughs and also filters out inappropriate clicks. I usually use as many of the allotted characters as possible (190 in Overture) to describe each product. The idea is to encourage people to click on your listing if they are potential customers, and discourage them if they are not. For expensive products, including the price in the description may help filter out "window shoppers."
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