Is PPC Like Renting Traffic?
I read somewhere on another blog (don’t remember where now) that running a PPC campaign is like renting traffic. The analogy makes sense, but if you think that renting is a bad thing then think again. Renting traffic can actually pay off.
There is a difference between renting and owning, however. While PPC is like renting traffic, SEO is more like owning it. Here’s how they differ.
When you spend $100 on a PPC campaign and receive 100 visitors to your website then you’ve paid $1 per visitor to read your offer. But let’s say that you close 1 in 10 of your visitors or, to say it another way, you have a 10% conversion ratio. Each sale costs you $10. But you only pay for that sale whenever you have your PPC ads turned on. Stop the advertising and you stop the sales and the traffic.
Measuring ROI is a different thing altogether. Let’s say you sell pink widgets for $20 each. For each sale you pay $10 to obtain you also earn $20 to close. But that’s not your profit. You also have material costs. Let’s say it costs you $3 to make your widgets. Your profit is $7 for each widget you sell. There’s your ROI.
SEO works a little differently. Let’s say you pay an SEO professional $500 to optimize your website. Your conversion ratio is still 10% and let’s say that you get 1,000 visitors from the search engines each month. That means you make 100 sales every month and at $20 each you earn $2,000 on your search engine traffic the first month. That’s an ROI of $1,200 the first month and $1,700 every month after that.
Obviously, the money you can earn from SEO has a lot greater potential than the money you can earn from PPC. But, realistically, you have to wait 2-6 months for that SEO traffic to become profitable. If that $500 investment doesn’t start paying off for 6 months then you do not realize an ROI for 6 months on your investment whereas you can realize an ROI on your PPC the very same month. It’s a lot more immediate.
Question: Would you rather earn $70 additional income today or $1,700 additional income 6 months from now?
Consider that your $70 ROI will add up to $420 over a 6-month period. If you re-invest that money into other vehicles then $420 could turn into more. So don’t knock the lower numbers today that you can earn from PPC. I’d recommend that you utilize both channels – PPC and SEO – for your online marketing efforts.
BTW, the numbers in these examples are not reflective of actual sales and ROI numbers. They could be higher or lower for both PPC and SEO. Some companies actually earn higher ROIs from PPC.
PPC Is The Goldmine Of The Internet
Can you imagine Google without pay per click services? It’s really what built the search engine giant into the mega-corporation that is today. Advertisers.
There’s a reason Google can point to pay per click advertising as the backbone of its search infrastructure. Even though search technology came first, pay per click algorithms are base somewhat on search algorithms and advertisers have relied on the technology as much as Google has.
While search and pay per click do not necessarily influence each other directly, they do go hand in hand. You should supplement your SEO efforts with well optimized and well managed pay per click campaigns. That is where most successful Internet entrepreneurs make their money – by spending it on the advertising.
While search rankings can move up or down at the whim of the search algorithm, pay per click is pretty steady and is based more on quality score criteria. If you can manage your quality score then you can manage your PPC campaigns.
If you really want to succeed and make decent money online then you’ve got engage your audience through paid advertising. It’s the goldmine of the Internet.
Is PPC An SEO Killer?
Many webmasters, when they first start thinking about running PPC campaigns, want to know how it will affect their SEO. Will it kill your SEO campaigns or enhance them? Or neither?
Let’s just address the idea of killing your SEO right now. That won’t happen. Your PPC ads and your organic SEO are judged by separate algorithms so they really don’t directly affect each other. Note that I said “directly”. So I guess that answers the second question, will PPC enhance your SEO.
The answer: Not in a direct way. But it will enhance your SEO efforts if you target the same keywords or approach both campaigns in a complementary way. You want your PPC ads and your organic SEO to work together, not against each other. And if you do the proper keyword research, build a well optimized landing page that achieves high rankings and a high quality score then you can ensure that your campaigns do complement each other. Everything else is simply figuring out the score.
Why Pay Per Click Is Still A Good Choice
In an overly saturated Web marketing playing field, it can sometimes be a bit discouraging to know that your e-mail marketing, blog or other marketing tools are just as good as the next company’s but not a great deal better. The Web seems to be saturated with marketing messages and no matter how super duper your product and service is, if it just falls in line with the hundreds of other messages that consumers are ignoring then it can be a bit discouraging.
Pay per click advertising, however, is the sensible alternative.
With pay per click advertising, if someone ignores your message then they aren’t right for you. You don’t want to spend money talking to them anyway. But if you get a click from someone who found your ad then there’s a real high chance that the person is the right customer for you.
I’d rather spend money getting the right customer than to spend less money chasing the wrong customer, wouldn’t you?
That’s the difference between PPC and other forms of Web marketing. The right customer comes to you, but with e-mail marketing and other forms of marketing you have to reach out to them and many times you are reaching out to people who will not buy from you.
If you want to reach the right market for the right money, try pay per click advertising.
SEM Is About Benefits, Not Profits
Search engine marketing has as many definitions as there are marketers, and most of them are right. But what hardly gets talked about among search engine marketers is that SEM is more than just selling your stuff for a profit. You’ve got to do more than attract audiences with keywords. You are selling benefits.
No one cares about your product. No one cares about your company. No one cares about you. They want to know what you can do for them.
The question is, how can you do that with search engine marketing?
First, the two arms of SEM:
- Pay per click advertising
- Search engine optimization (organic search)
So how do you sell benefits through these two primary channels?
With PPC you’ve got to sell your benefits to get a click. Your goal is to get people to your landing page and then sell the benefits of your product there.
With organic search marketing, you use your landing page optimization to get rank your web page, build links to it, drive traffic to it and sell your benefits to your visitors to close the sale.
Search engine marketing really follows the principles of traditional marketing – sell the benefits. You just do it with modern technology.
Where Do You Get Keywords For PPC Campaigns?
If you are running any PPC campaigns and are looking for places to find keywords outside of the traditional keyword research tools, is there help for you? Actually, yes, I think there is. You don’t have to use the same old keyword research tools to find your keywords.
Here are a three places you can find additional keywords for your PPC campaigns:
- Twitter – There are two ways to use Twitter for keyword research. You can look at Twitter trends, which is real telling for what is hot right now. And then there is Twitter Search. Either way will tell you what is popular on Twitter or what is happening on Twitter.
- Analytics – Take a look at your website’s metrics. What keywords are people using to find your site? Those keywords could be ripe for a PPC campaign.
- Competitive Blogs – What are your competitors writing about? Better yet, pick the top three blogs in your niche and read the comments. What are the readers saying? They are the same audience you are trying to reach. Pull out some niche-related keywords for your PPC campaigns.
When it comes to PPC campaigns, you don’t have to be like everybody else. You have to do what is right for your business. It starts with keyword research.
Why Analytics And PPC Go Hand In Hand
To truly be successful at any kind of marketing you have to be able to measure your results. Without actionable metrics you cannot make the changes to your PPC campaigns to make them profitable. Therefore, analytics is the most important aspect of your PPC campaign.
You not only need to be able to measure the traffic to your landing pages, but you also need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your PPC advertising. That means you’ve got to know your conversion rate, both your overall conversion rate as well as the conversion rate from your PPC ads. Segmentation of your results is paramount to a truly actionable metric.
So how do you achieve that? There are a number of ways to get the best analytics results from your PPC campaigns.
- You can create a separate landing page for each PPC ad or campaign
- Make sure that your PPC ads are optimized for different keywords than your other advertising efforts
- Keep a close eye on the times that your ads run and the number of visitors and results you get during those times
Without knowing how effective your PPC campaigns are you’ll never be able to improve your results. Metrics is key to your success.
The PPC Ego Trap
Pay Per Click marketing is a great way to get results online and there are some definite advantages to PPC over organic search. For instance:
- With PPC you have greater control over your search listings
- You can get faster results with PPC whereas organic search can sometimes take months or years before solid results materialize
- More control over titles and descriptions in PPC ads
- It’s easier to track PPC results than organic search results
- PPC is a lot like traditional advertising so many organizations may feel more comfortable with this model
Despite the clear advantage to PPC advertising, there is one sure death trap for any advertiser who lets his competitive ego get in the way of good business sense. The desire to have the top ad can lead to a bidding war if two or more competitors start going head to head in order to win that top spot. In this scenario, no advertiser wins. The search engine wins and the advertisers just end up throwing good money away.
It is best to seek out the optimum ad placement for your keywords based on quality and wise keyword bidding. Don’t let your ego take over.
Why PPC Is Still The Internet’s Best Advertising
A few years ago, around the turn of the millennium, the forums were abuzz with discussions of whether display advertising or PPC advertising would win out in the hearts and minds of Internet advertisers. I guess we now know – PPC won.
But will it last?
I’m betting PPC will be around awhile, for a few very simple reasons:
- It allows advertisers the ability to control their spend. What other kind of advertising allows this? With PPC, you can set your own budget. Is it perfect? No. There are downsides, but even with the downsides, PPC still have this advantage over other forms of advertising.
- It provides a direct route from first impression to conversion. There is only one thing between the two – your landing page, or sales page. With other forms of advertising (TV, radio, etc.), there is something else that must take place – a drive, a phone call, or whatever. With PPC, it’s click, read and close.
- It’s keyword based. Yes, PPC ads can be optimized. That’s a good thing.
PPC advertising is a direct shot from first impression to conversion and the advertiser is total control. The consumer has a choice and gets to see what is being offered before committing. It provides the best win-win opportunity for all involved.
Why PPC Is A Good Place To Start
If you have a new website that you are trying to promote and believe that a targeted SEO or social media campaign is going to help you reach your desired ROI sooner then you are in for a disappointment. It’s not search engine optimization and social media campaigns don’t have value. They do. But they usually take a while before the value starts to show.
With an SEO campaign, it really depends on the competitive playing field. But if the competition is average then you are likely to wait a year before a hard-hitting SEO campaign really starts to pay off. You might get some results within that first year, but it takes a while before you achieve respectable rankings for competitive keywords. In some industries that one year becomes two or three.
With social media, it might not take that long or it might take longer. There are a lot of variable factors that can influence the success of your marketing campaigns. One of those is your choice of social media platforms. If you show up at the wrong place then you’ll find the wrong party. Plain and simple.
With PPC you have a lot more control over the outcome than you do with social media and you can achieve much quicker results than you can with SEO. The biggest problem for many advertisers is budget. But if you can get a handle on that, running a PPC campaign right out of the starting gate should get you a quicker ROI. Are you in a hurry?
Will Social Search Change Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing has been going strong for a few years now. Social search is just getting off the ground. In fact, Google has made it a point to tackle social search and lead the charge. Only, there are some people who aren’t so impressed with how they’re doing it.
But let’s say that social search were a perfect animal – like organic search (I’m kidding, OK?).
At any rate, let’s just say that social search was at least as good as organic search has been when at its best. Would search engine marketing be any different? Would social search change the nature of search engine marketing? I’m betting it would.
Remember, there are two branches of SEM: Paid search and organic search. How would each of these change with social search? My guess is that each would change in a real sense, but not necessarily in a fundamental sense.
Here’s what I mean: PPC is based in large part on the principles of organic search. You do your keyword research, write a few targeted ads, and watch your rankings based on search engine ranking factors. Social search, however, isn’t anything like that. You still might do your keyword research, but you aren’t so much concerned with rankings. You are concerned with connections. So how will that change search engine marketing?
I think one very important way that search engine marketing will change when social search reaches full maturity is that brands will no longer need to feel threatened by lesser companies who are better at SEO. Brands can actually put more emphasis on their company culture and focus on the benefits of doing business. That’s as it should be.
How To Budget For PPC
If you’ve been advertising off line for some time then you are likely familiar with budgeting expenses. There are several strategies for setting advertising budgets. Which one you choose depends a lot on your business goals and your comfortability.
One way to budget for PPC is to take a percentage of your off line marketing budget and dedicate it to pay-per-click marketing. But how do you determine that percentage? You could just pick a number out of thin air, but I’d suggest that you take a number equal to an aggregate of marketing channels that are not working for you or that have not produced any positive results in a while.
Another way to budget for PPC, and this works well for fairly new businesses, is to take a percentage of your revenues and devote that to pay-per-click. Many companies use a 20% benchmark and adjust for their costs. You might be more comfortable with 15%. Pick a number and go with it.
Pay per click marketing should be seen as any other marketing channel. If it works for you, keep doing it. If it isn’t working, try to figure out why and change it. But do budget it.
PPC And Malware: Have You Been Hacked?
A call came in and it was a client asking why he wasn’t getting any sales. A quick look at his website revealed that it was flagged as a malware distributor. The client was spending hundreds of dollars a day on PPC ads. No wonder he wasn’t making sales.
If you’ve been hacked and the hacker has inserted a Javascript code or malicious malware onto your site, its files and folders, or on your server somewhere then it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on advertising or how well written your PPC ads, Google will flag it as a malware distributor. Visitors to your site wills see a big red interstitial ad notifying them of the danger. You’ll lose money so pause your PPC campaign immediately.
In order to clean up the site you need to take a look at all your files, particularly the index files in each folder, and see if there are any code insertions that don’t belong. If so, remove them.
After you have removed the malware or unwanted code, change your passwords – to your blog, your hosting account, and anywhere the hacker may have had access to. Make them difficult to crack. Then log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and request a site review. Google will crawl the site again and if the malware has been removed the flag will be removed. You can start your PPC ads again.
Search Engine Marketing Is More Than PPC
When a lot of people think about search engine marketing they immediately think about pay per click marketing (PPC). That is a part of it, but that’s not all there is to effective SEM. Search engine marketing is any type of marketing done through search engines, and that includes display advertising.
Of course, display advertising is probably the least effective of SEM strategies. Most small business owners are beginning to realize that now. But search engine optimization ranks as still one of the most effective search engine marketing strategies, and I suspect it always will be.
In some sense, social media marketing can be considered SEM. Real-time search is definitely search engine marketing. Video and image optimization are search engine marketing strategies too. As is mobile marketing when done the right way.
So you can that you have options beyond PPC. Search engine marketing is more than tossing money at keywords, it’s really about devising a strategy for drawing in new customers through the search engines.
Can Small Pay Per Click Search Engines Make You Money?
Can you make money with smaller pay-per-click companies? You know I’m not talking about Google, or Yahoo!, or Bing. Those are the majors. I’m talking about the small companies and search engines. Some of them you’ve probably never heard of, such as:
- Miva
- Looksmart
- 7Search
- Search123
- GoClick
- Kanoodle
- AdBrite
- Enhance
This is just a small list. There are plenty more.
Most pay per click advertisers stick with the big three, but they are missing opportunities with the small search engines. The advantage to using the small PPC companies is that your cost per click will be lower – much lower. In some cases, keywords that you’ll spend $1 or more at Google or Yahoo! will cost your mere pennies at one of the smaller companies. The downside is you won’t get anywhere near the traffic that you’ll get at Google, but if you get any traffic for a fraction of the cost then it’s worth it. Right?
Yes, right. So don’t discount the small pay per click companies. They could be very profitable.
Is PPC A Substitute For SEO?
Pay per click advertising has its place. A good business with a good marketing plan can use PPC to do great things. But is it a substitute for SEO? Absolutely not.
First, you need to realize that 80% of all clicks from a search engine to a website are clicks on an organic search listing. So even if you manage a great PPC campaign you can expect to only get 20% of your clicks from PPC. That doesn’t mean you should just forget about it, however.
Still, PPC is not a substitute for SEO and it never will be. It should augment your SEO campaigns. You can target the same keywords in both your PPC campaigns and your SEO campaigns. In fact, you should. But at the end of the day, they are two different marketing tools and they are used for two different purposes – to reach two sets of the same market. You need both.
Competitive Intelligence Is As Good As Your Tools
When it comes to gathering competitive intelligence, the information you can obtain legally and ethically is only as good as the tools you use. One good tool for gathering information on your competition’s organic SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns is KeywordSpy.
KeywordSpy allows you to search for information in several ways – Domain, Keyword, Destination URL, and Ad Copies. You’ll probably use the Keyword search most often, but the others do come in handy.
When you search for a keyword at KeywordSpy you get a boat load of information on several competitors. You get keyword statistics on PPC competitors, including CPC and search volume. There is even a nice pretty graph to show you the history of your competition in PPC.
You also get an overview of related keywords, which is nice because it also shows you the CPC and search volume for each of those keywords. Then you get samples of PPC ads from your competition.
Another great benefit is an overview of your top competitors, comparing organic SEO information and PPC information on each one. You get a nice list of the keywords for each of those competitors and how many keywords they are using for PPC and SEO.
I would definitely recommend KeywordSpy for conducting competitive intelligence before embarking on any PPC or SEO campaign.
PPC: A Lesson In Exact Match
If you want to increase your quality score with Google Pay Per Click advertising, AdWords, there are several ways to do it, but I like this one best – use exact match.
Dave Davis gives you 10 ways to improve your quality score, but here’s what he says about matching options:
Our client was only using broad match for their keywords in their campaign. We added exact match and phrase match keywords to each ad group and chose which of the three had a better QS and lower minimum CPC and deleted the other two matching options. In the majority of cases, exact match won.
In our experience, exact match is almost always the way to go. Broad match keywords will show your ad for too many search queries that are irrelevant and you inevitably end up with bad clicks. That lowers your quality score and you have a downward spiral of effectiveness in your PPC campaign. With exact match, it is just the opposite. Fewer clicks, but a higher CTR, which results in a higher quality score and lower costs.
Don’t play around with PPC. Use exact match unless there is a real compelling reason to do otherwise.
Are Keywords Important With PPC?
If you are new to pay per click marketing, you might be wondering how important are keywords. In a word, they are very important. You can’t manage an effective PPC campaign without focusing on the right keywords for your campaign.
But how are keywords important?
Keywords in PPC are important in three ways:
- They ensure that your ad is shown for the right keyword queries in the search engines. Targeting. Plain and simple.
- Keywords are important for matching your ads with your landing pages. Your prospects will want to know that what they have queried is also what you are offering.
- Keywords are important for bidding and budgeting correctly. You’ll get to bid on your keywords, placing a value on each one. Consider this value carefully.
Don’t ignore the importance of keywords in PPC marketing. They are just as important as keywords for SEO.
Should You Join The PPC Content Network?
Do you know what the PPC Content Network is? At Google, the group of websites that run AdSense ads and that get paid when someone clicks on them – those are the PPC content network websites. Should you advertise on them?
Yes, The Content Network can be lucrative, but it is risky. There are all kinds of ways to lose money there – click fraud, untargeted click-throughs, overbudgeting, just to name a few. But if you can manage a PPC campaign well then you can get highly targeted ads on the right websites and see massive click-through rates.
So how do you do it?
If you plan to advertise on The Content Network, make sure you keep these basic tips in mind:
- Establish a daily and a monthly budget
- Don’t use broad match, use exact match
- Target specific sites that you know are within your niche
- Establish a window of time where you know you’ll get the highest click through rate
- Bid the right amount for the right keywords
The Content Network is a good way to lose money on PPC. But it’s also a good way to make money. Plan your campaigns and manage them well and you’ll do fine.
Is There Is An Optimal Bid Price With PPC?
Does it matter how much you pay for clicks? Pay per click advertising allows you, the advertiser, to pick your price. You bid on your keywords and pay the price that you are willing to pay for a click. But is there an optimal method for determining what a good click bid is?
The short answer is No. There really is no ONE way to determine the optimal bid price in pay per click. The primary reason is because there are many factors that can influence the market at any given time.
One such variable that is difficult to predict, particularly for new campaigns, is seasonality. If you’re in retail then chances are good that Christmas – or the three or four months prior to Christmas – will result in higher click prices for you. But other businesses might do well at other times of year. The travel industry, for instance, sees its peak in the spring and summer.
Aside from seasonality, however, other factors are important to consider as well. Obviously, you must consider the price of your product. Is it a low-cost item? Don’t spend too much on PPC or you won’t profit. How about click through rates and conversion rates? Those are important too.
Bottom line, PPC management involves constant tweaking and readjusting. You will likely not start off with the right bid price on any of your keywords. But by paying attention to what the market is doing and your own campaign performance you can adjust your aim and arrive at a bid price that is profitable and comfortable for you.
Google Is Not The Only PPC Gig In Town
Google is a great PPC provider. I wouldn’t knock ‘em. But they aren’t the only gig in town.
In fact, I’d say that there are some drawbacks to using Google alone. For starters, Google is expensive. It’s very competitive. And no matter what niche you are in you are likely to be paying good money for clicks. It will be targeted traffic, for sure. But you’ll pay.
Sometimes, small PPC providers can deliver targeted traffic for much, much less. You’ll get less traffic. But it will be good traffic. Where you’ll pay 50 cents for a keyword at Google, you might only pay a penny or a nickel at some of the other PPC providers, so it’s worth it to try to parlay those services into some cheap traffic.
The best way to win at PPC is to use a small PPC provider to test ads and landing pages where you can do it inexpensively then, when you find a combination that works, you migrate your ads to Google. You probably should also up your budget at the small PPC company. At any rate, don’t just stick with one provider. Google is good, but they’re not God.
Does Your Pay Per Click Inform Your SEO?
One of the best and most effective SEO strategies involves using PPC, or pay per click advertising, to find new keywords and optimize web pages. It really isn’t anything new. Webmasters have been using pay per click to inform their SEO for many years. It works like this.
You pick a few keyword phrases that you haven’t targeted on your website just yet and bid on those. Write your ads. Point the URLs in your ads to the most relevant page on your website. See which ads get clicked on the most for the keywords that you are targeting. When you find a keyword that attracts a lot of click throughs then you know you’ve found a good keyword for your niche.
But what should you do with that keyword? Well, you can build a new static web page for your website or your can write a blog post. You can also write articles for your article marketing efforts. Whatever you can do in the way of content development that requires keyword optimization. And it starts with a simple pay per click campaign.
How Should You Set Your PPC Budget?
When it comes to pay per click advertising, if you don’t set certain controls in place then you could lose your shirt. And I mean fast.
I highly recommend using the automated budgeting tool within your PPC account. With that tool you can set your budget in one of two ways – and I recommend doing it both ways. You can set a daily budget and you can set a monthly budget.
Your daily budget tells your PPC provider not to exceed that amount in clicks for each day that your pay per click campaign is active. For instance, if you give a $5 per day budget then when your clicks drive your spending up to the $5 limit, your ads will not be displayed any more that day.
In addition to setting a daily budget, you can set a monthly budget. The monthly budget works like the daily budget but it is extended for the entire month. So if you set a $100 monthly budget then when you clicks drive your spend up to that amount your ads will be cut off and not displayed for the rest of the month.
I recommend setting both a daily and a monthly budget, but try to set your daily budget so that if you meet the budget each day you will still have dollars left in your monthly budget on the last day of the month. You don’t want your campaign cut off mid-month.
Should You Use The Content Network?
The Content Network is Google’s network of advertising websites on which they place ads. You can actually select your websites when running a PPC campaign by narrowing your Content Network focus to keyword-based, placement targeted, or both.
A keyword-targeted campaign on the Content Network is just as its name implies. You select the keywords that you want to target and Google will place your ads on web pages that are optimized for those keywords. There are advantages to doing this, but we don’t recommend this strategy for all customers across the board. Whether or not you wish to target by keyword depends on a number of factors and if you think that your targeted keyword could be used on a number of sites where your targeted visitors won’t traffic then it will just waste your time and money. That’s what you want to avoid.
With placement targeting you can choose the specific sites you want you ads to run on. For instance, if you sell cowboy boots then you’ll want your ads to run on sites that might sell cowboy hats or other western wear, or you may want your ads on sites that attract a large traffic base of country & western music listeners.
The Google Content Network offers many more opportunities for advertisers and can often lead to more conversions and more targeted traffic.
How Not To Exceed Your PPC Budget
The surest way to ensure you do not exceed your budget on your pay-per-click advertising is to set both a monthly and a daily budget. The key is to keep your PPC ads running during peak times without going over your monthly ad spend or using all of your ad spend before the end of the month.
Let’s say your monthly budget is $1,000. If you just set your budget limit at that amount and set your ads to run then you could spend your entire budget before the end of the month. Advertisers have found their budget depleted by the 15th and their ads won’t run any more until the first of the next month. That means your ads won’t run for half the month, leaving you with wasted time and wasted money.
To prevent that from happening, set a daily budget that is lower than or equal to the prorated amount for your monthly budget. In other words, divide $1,000 by 30 days and you get $33.33. You don’t want your daily budget to exceed that amount. Set it slighly lower, say to $30, and day that you hit that amount your ads will stop running. But they’ll pick up again on the next day allowing you to run your advertising throughout the entire month without exceeding your $1,000 monthly budget.
Another way to control your PPC spend is to find out when your ads are clicked on the most and run your ads only during those times. If you find that 75% of your clicks are between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday then you can set your PPC account to display your ads only during those times. That will cut out a portion of the time when clicks are low and save your budget.
Search Engine Marketing Is More Holistic Than PPC
There’s more to search engine marketing than merely a full force pay-per-click campaign. We strongly believe that search engine marketing should be a comprehensive and holistic marketing endeavor involving various methods of marketing online. Pay per click is just one method, albeit an important one.
The advantage to using pay per click marketing in your search engine marketing plan is that you have more control over your budget and your message. You can also drive targeted traffic to your website much more quickly with PPC than you can other methods. But I’d never use PPC as the only marketing method online.
Natural SEO is still very important and you want your natural SEO efforts to compliment your PPC efforts, and vice-versa. But you might also incorporate other methods of marketing into your search marketing plan.
Usually, companies don’t think of social media marketing as a part of SEM. But it can be. If you engage your prospects in such a way that it affects your SEO and overall SEM efforts then it can be an integral part of your overall search engine marketing strategy. The key is to keep it all consistent.
How You Are Judged In PPC
Many would-be Internet marketers are a little confused about pay-per-click marketing. It is assumed that because it is keyword-based like SEO then the rules are the same. That’s actually not the case.
With search engine optimization, you are judged by how well your website is optimized by both on-page and off-page factors. You are judged by things that are both in your control and outside of your control. With PPC, you are judged entirely by things that are within your control. However, your placement on the page is judged by things outside of your control.
Let me explain.
A good PPC campaign begins with a list of keywords. You first have to build a landing page that is optimized for your keywords. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them. Next, you write an ad that is designed to drive traffic to that landing page. You set a budget and bid on keywords and let your ad go live. The search engine will give your ad a quality score. That quality score is based on how well your ad and landing page work together AND whether or not visitors to your landing page stick around – your bounce rate.
You might say, wait a minute, I can’t control what my visitors do. But before you say that, consider that your visitors are reacting to your copywriting skills. If they leave your site because it is poorly designed or doesn’t meet their expectations then it’s because of what you did. You have control over that.
But even if you do everything right and you get the best quality score, your placement within the search engines is dependent upon the search engines. You may be placed high on the list due to your quality score, but if someone else achieves a higher quality score, which you can’t control, then they may actually achieve a better positioning than you.
So your ad is judged by what you do, but your placement is judged by a combination of what you do and what your competition do. Those are some things to keep in mind when planning your next PPC campaign.
Pay Per Click: The Misunderstood Science
Pay per click advertising is the misunderstood science. Too many Internet marketers and small business entrepreneurs are under the impression that it can cost a lot of money to run a PPC campaign and get a small return. While it can get expensive, the bright side is you control the budget. So you can set your spend limit and your ads will stop running once you hit your limit.
But advertising spend is the least of your worries when running a pay-per-click campaign. A good PPC campaign is only as good as the keywords upon which it is based. And that means you have to spend the proper time doing research.
It isn’t enough to just pick a handful of keywords out of thin air. You’ve also got to group them well and pair them up with the right ad content. A well-written and optimized landing page ready to convert sales is perhaps your best asset. Drive all the traffic you want to your website, but if you aren’t ready to close them then it won’t matter. Your landing page has to be ready, or you’re not.
A successful pay-per-click campaign requires research, patience, and a good attitude. You can win if you run a good campaign and watch your budget.
The New BING On The Block
While Microsoft’s BING search engine isn’t exactly news, I thought I’d share my initial thoughts concerning it’s appearance on the scene.
Bing has brought a traffic increase to Microsoft. Exciting news for them, but don’t get excited yet! Whether you are in the business of Internet marketing or simply looking into your options for hiring an internet marketing firm, consider the following:
- Making the Switch- before everyone rushes over to BING for their marketing needs, be it Pay Per Click or not, there are a lot of facets to each engine. While Yahoo! has been at bay in the number 2 spot under Google for a long time, there are many campaigns that don’t work on Google and do work on Yahoo! Just because a site is bigger does not make it better, and while jumping on any given bandwagon may seem like a good plan, there is no rush. Should BING continue in its success, it will only further establish the engine, and thus, it will still be there later on. Still, if you’re one of the people that can’t wait to dive into a new channel and truly believes that a new engine is the way to go, there are other things to consider first.
- Duplicate Content- On a Google search, as a primary example, you will find multiple links to the same site. Between all links to the same domain, there will be home page links, interior links, and potentially file links, like .pdf files and the like. BING, however, is a different story. As of recently, the BING algorithm is designed to remove duplicate content, for the purpose of only showing the most relevant page on a given site matching the search query. This may or may not be a good thing for your site. Many sites might have many similar products or services listed on the home page or on interior pages, in which case a direct link to one product might not be optimal. For eCommerce sites, this could improve ROI since, assuming the product or service page is most relevant to the search terms, such a user would be inspired to buy the product or sign up right then and there. For some businesses, however, browsing is all part of the purchase process, so taking users directly to a product page may very well give them the impression that this is the only option they have. However, even under this circumstances, site optimization will play a role in the success of your online marketing efforts.
- Site Optimization – Another thing to consider is the layout and organization of your site. Suppose users land on interior pages but do not find what they are looking for – are they easily able to access the home page, other similar products or services, and category pages from all corners of the site? It’s often difficult to find a perfect balance between enough options and too many options – and a website can become quite cluttered with too many links and poor layout / design, so a smart plan of action is to have a professional website, designed by an experience firm that not only understands design concepts and techniques, but it familiar also with Internet marketing strategies that must be implemented on-site. Whether you BING or not, be sure you or your hired marketing firm understands how the search engine being utilized works, and optimizes the site for such engines to return the best results.
- Content- Thus far, it is rumored that BING weighs on-site content over all. This means that a site featuring picture galleries without ample description, sites lacking company’s information, and sites without rich context may be penalized for it. This doesn’t denote a negative effect on rank – just the absence of a positive one. Be sure there is rich on-site content to accompany all the beautiful pictures of your products, staff, facilities, etc. A site should read well in your language, because this is what search engines look for.
- Complaints - Despite its swift jump to #2, BING has still received many complaints about how the engine ranks sites. For example, with giving equal weight to interior and home pages on a site, it may find a lower-ranking interior page to be more relevant, and therefore return that page lower in search results, where as a search engine like Google, which displays both interior and home pages, factors in the home page rank as well when considering the position of results. Another problem that many might find with BING, although not quite an official outcry from users, is the weight it gives to interior links compared to the weight it gives to external links. In recent years, it’s always been understood that while on-site SEO is important, it should not factor into rank as much as relevance. On BING, however, it seems that proper linking structure within a site will do more for your rank and relevance than it will on Google, which is known for giving much more weight to exterior links for both rank and relevance. This might be a problem, or it might be good for those with well-optimized websites.
- Pay Per Clickon BING – As I mentioned above, BING’s algorithm is quite unique compared to Google and Yahoo, so for anyone planning to experiment with a PPC campaign on BING, approach with caution. I would not recommend ending a PPC campaign on Google or Yahoo just to replace it with one on BING. I’ve always said that exploring the options is a good way to feel things out and find what works for each business, so I would encourage delegating some budget, or even better, increasing a budget to see what BING can actually do for your company – just don’t put all of your eggs into this basket because it’s fresh and new.
All in all, I’m impressed with BING, but I can’t say I’m surprised at all. Microsoft has been around for a long time and they obviously know their way around IT. I’d say that a gradual transition is best, but even better when managed by an experienced Internet marketing firm.