Intro
to Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
This article is for
business people new to the search marketing world. It’s no secret
that search engines are used to find products and services far more than
any other means. So if we want our product to be successful on the web
we have to learn to harness the power of these engines. There are two
distinct areas of search marketing, traditional and fee based or pay-per-click
(PPC). Before we get into PPC marketing I want to explain the difference
between the two. Traditional or Organic search engine marketing requires
you to submit your site to the engine and wait for review. This occurs
in a number of ways sometime automated by computer and sometimes by people
similar to editors. Yahoo uses people and Google uses a powerful computer.
The difficulty in traditional listings is that they usually take three
months or more to see results and there are no guarantees. In the case
of Google, your website must conform to a strict set of rules and competition
is fierce. You must not only have great content on your site but you must
have other sites linking to yours and your content must meet certain criteria.
With that said if you are looking for a no-nonsense way to shoot straight
to the top of the engines PPC is the way. We will begin by describing
the basic engines and how they work.
How
Do They Work?
PPC engines work on the principle of bidding for positioning. For instance,
let’s say you want the term “Florida Vacation” and that
terms current top position is $0.10 per click. This means that if you
click on that listing you just cost that advertiser ten cents to visit
his site. No let’s say you want that position, you can bid $0.11
and leapfrog that current advertiser and have position number one. The
current advertiser will then be in position two. This is the basic concept
of the PPC engines. We bid for the position we want and other people bid
for the position they want. As you can image it can take a great deal
of time to monitor and manage your positions. I liken it to day trading.
Who
Are The PPC Search Engines?
Currently there are three major engines and many second tier engines.
The top engines are Google, Overture, and FindWhat. Google currently delivers
the most traffic due to its position as the number one search engine.
Overture has the largest partner network; we will get to that in a minute.
FindWhat is a smaller engine but has a very good return on investment.
Partner Networks are the means by which you can get a huge amount of exposure
on the web. Basically of you maintain a Premium Listing in any of these
engines, basically a 1-5 position in the search results, your listing
is distributed on their partner network. For Instance, if you have a position
1-4 on Google for a particular term, your listing will show up on AOL.
Google has partnered with AOL to deliver search results to the AOL search
engine. Likewise if you have a premium listing with Overture your listing
will be displayed in Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, and many others. Currently
Overture boasts over 80% visibility on the major search engines. Its unlikely
people will use Overture, but they will surely use there partners. FindWhat
also has a partner network, there major partners being Excite and Lycos.
As you can imagine Google and Overture are the top dogs and consequently
they are the most expensive, in comes FindWhat. This engines does not
get as much traffic but the costs are significantly lower that the previous
two. It is only through a combination of the three engines that you get
high traffic (Google), high visibility (Overture), and value (FindWhat).
Setting
Up Your First Account
I recommend starting with Overture if you want to do as little work as
possible. They have several packages available. There Fast Track program
is $199 and they help you select all your terms and write your title and
listing descriptions. Remember unlike traditional search engines you control
your listing editorial. By evaluating your site they will help you pick
terms most relevant that will receive the most traffic. And also assist
you in writing the best titles and descriptions for your listing. Below
are some guidelines for writing effective listings.
Selecting
Your Keywords
There are many tools to aid you in selecting keywords, some are free and
some cost money. The best tool I have found is free and it is in the Tools
section of Overture. They have one of the most comprehensive keyword suggestion
tools I have seen. Another important feature is that along with the keywords
you also have the amount of searches in the Overture Network for that
term the previous month. This tool works by entering a search term and
it will give you the top searches performed that included those words.
If you enter “Florida” as a keyword it will return all the
top searches containing “Florida” Such as Florida vacation,
Florida House, Florida Beach, and so on. Remember it is in the best interest
of the search engines for you to have the top trafficked terms; they make
more money from you. So choose your terms carefully.
Writing
an Effective Title and Description
The first part of your listing is the title, this is what will grab the
attention of the searcher and must be highly targeted. If you are listing
under the term “Florida vacation” and you rent waterfront
condos your titles must say that. Here is an example: Rent Florida Vacation
Condos. Remember that these listings have a length restriction so they
can’t go on forever. They must be brief and to the point. Crafting
an attractive statement in as little a words as possible is an art. Try
to us your keyword in the listing; it’s a known fact that listings
that incorporate the term in the title get a higher volume of clicks.
Also avoid superlatives such as greatest and best, these tend to make
searchers think the offer is too good to be true. Stick to the facts about
what you are offering. Searchers are in an analytical mode when they are
searching, they want real life details. Same thing goes for writing descriptions.
Once the title is finished you can then fill in the details with the descriptions.
Here is an example of our title and description.
Rent
Florida Vacation Condos
Waterfront condos affordably priced for Florida vacationers. Free information,
limited space, no deposit required.
The function of the
description is to clarify what the offer is and elaborate on the details.
Remember that you don’t want unqualified clicks, what’s the
use of paying for site visitors when they aren’t a good fit for
your product. So be a descriptive as possible. Remember we don’t
just want volume, we want quality volume.
Payment
Options
Many of the search engines have different methods for payment. For now
we will deal specifically with Overture, Google, and FindWhat. Overture
and FindWhat have very similar models of payments. You can choose from
a couple different methods. The first method and the one I recommend for
starting out is this. Deposit an initial amount of money in the engine
and as you accumulate clicks it depletes your funds. You can usually start
out with $25-$50 depending on the engine. Once the money is gone your
listings are removed until you go in and deposit more money in your account.
This is done by using a major credit card. The method of depositing money
as you go allows you to monitor your spending to make sure you are not
exceeding you budgeted amounts. Until you get a feel for how much your
monthly spend is going to be this is the safest method. The second method
is to allow the engine to make automatic withdraws on your credit card
when the account is depleted. This is a completely automated system and
works well once you get a feel for you monthly spending.
Google has chosen a completely automated system and this is the only option.
Google will put your credit card on file and bill you for clicks periodically
throughout the month. This is a little bit more intimidating because you
don’t know what your spends are going to be but you can setup a
daily maximum spend. So you will know what the most you can spend in a
day is.
Remember to keep an
eye on your listings and their performance. You will not really have any
idea of profitability until you actually do the ROI calculation, but it
has been my experience that if you are getting a CTR of 5-15% on highly
targeted medium traffic listings you are getting a good response. I have
seen CTR of up to 20-40% on some terms but I don’t believe that
to be the norm. Make sure you experiment with your listings, that’s
the beauty of PPC advertising. Good Luck!
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