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Search Engine Pay Per Click Ads
Part 6, Buying Clicks. One partial way around the headache with search engine optimization is simply to buy clicks from the major search engines. Relying solely on free clicks from search engines is risky. Purchasing clicks to supplement your free traffic can smooth over the volatility of the search engine ranking system. An even better strategy is to spread your marketing budget over several sites to diminish reliance on one search engine (i.e., google).
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- Where to buy clicks. For me, the marketing budget starts and stops with the big 4 search engines (or, more accurately, the big two plus two mid-majors): google adwords, yahoo sponsored search (formerly overture), msn.com sponsored search and ask.com sponsored listings. It's relatively simple to set up an account: create a profile, give a credit card number, select keywords, create ads for your keywords, and set a monthly marketing budget.
- Pay per click ad content. The content of your advertisement in the pay per click scheme is important. Generally, for an ad, the search engines allow a short title, two short lines of text, then a deep link to the page designed to sell the product or service in question. Below is our google ad for the keyword "llc operating agreement".
LLC Operating Agreement
Online form customized in minutes.
$16.99 Free Trial. Sample.
www.medlawplus.com
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The title fits the keyword as closely as possible. Price is an important selling point for this form so I include this information in the ad along with mention of the free trial (another key selling point).
- Where the ads go. Go.com (later overture and later still bought by Yahoo) pioneered pay per click advertising for search engines. Their model was simple: whoever paid got their search results listed above those who did not pay. And paying search clients were ranking in exact order by how much they paid. There was a separate universe of banner advertising that went on the pages of non-search web pages. Google, the people always building a better mouse trap, came up with a better solution. Paid search advertising is separated from the standard search results in google and this format has been adopted by the industry. Interesting with google is that the ranking of search ads is not completely dependent on price. They have some sort of nebulous algorithm that determines search ad placement based upon factors of both price and the suitability of the web page you are promoting in the ad to the search term. In early 2007, Yahoo adopted the google approach as well. Thus, search engine optimization for specific keywords will help your rankings not only for standard search engine rankings but, also, paid search engine advertising.
- Setting the click price. The click price you are willing to pay is dependent upon your conversion rate (i.e., how many clicks to each sale). I've never been able to get hard data on this although google adwords claims to have a feature measuring conversion rate (it's never worked for me). Take the LLC operating agreement above. I know how many sales I get each month, I know the number of google pay per clicks each month, but how many of the sales come from google adwords versus all other sources of traffic? One way to go about it is to put a click counter on the page designed to sell a specific product or service. With the counter, you count clicks from all sources to that page. This will give you the number of browsers to your sales page per month versus sales. Theoretically, search engine traffic is of a higher quality than ordinary web surfers. The theory is that the search engine users are searching for a specific product or service. In the marketing biz, one would refer to this as a "qualified lead". Let's say your conversion rate is 1 in 50 browsers. Your product price is $100 (exclusive of tax and shipping). Your gross profit percentage is this product is 60% (meaning your direct cost for the product sold is $40). If you paid $1 for each click with 1 in 50 conversion rate, theoretically, you come out with $10 of gross profit on each sale in your pay per click campaign (selling price - cost of goods sold - advertising expense: $100-$40-$50). That might seem like a small gross profit on pay per click sales but consider other factors. This is a new customer that previously did not know about your business. Might this customer purchase other products than the one advertised for. In our legal forms business, purchasers of last wills often buy more than one (i.e., one each for husband and wife) plus often purchase a power of attorney to go with the last will. A business such as Amazon with lots of repeat business is plenty happy to take a small loss on converting a new customer for the first sale given the probability that this customer will come back for additional purchases.
- Network ads. Google did one more interesting thing with its advertising: they merged the worlds of search engine advertising and web page banner ads. As a web publisher, you can generate revenue for your web site through the google adsense program. The google ads you see in the right hand column of this page are from google adsense. MedLawPlus.com® generates more revenue from google adsense than it spends in buying clicks from all sources. If your web site has content that you do not intend to make sales from, opening it up to google adsense ads is a way to generate revenue for your own pay per click marketing. Thus, with a google adwords account, you the advertiser can place text ads on both search engine result pages and google's network of web sites. Yahoo has a similar setup.
- Click fraud. "Internet marketers facing higher advertising fees on search networks are becoming increasingly concerned about a form of online fraud that was thought to have been contained years ago." CNet news. This is a serious problem and one that merits monitoring. Over years of buying clicks, I have something of a baseline allowing to know within reason how much spent on clicks should translate into sales. When that ratio goes down, I look for unusually high traffic in any single keyword. A spike in traffic to a specific keyword without a corresponding sales increase for that product is a red flag that you are a victim of click fraud. Click fraud is mainly an issue for ads running on the web network outside of google or yahoo.
- Non-search engine pay per click advertising. Other than pay per click on the google or yahoo networks, I don't text advertise but I can see situations where it makes sense. If your product or service is centered on a special field or industry and a web site(s) cater to the customer you are trying to reach, then it may make sense to enter into an advertising arrangement with that web publisher. Yahoo's online yellow pages is another place I that it makes sense to advertise for certain businesses that are geographically centered such as restaurants and local service providers such home repair.
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