Pay Per Click Management Explained

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

ACS SEO have written a white paper on Pay Per Click Management which explains the basic principles of pay per click and its benefits.

PPC is a quickly-implemented way of introducing your product or service to a large volume of people by bidding on your selected keywords. You pay everytime someone clicks on your keyword to view the webpage that you've linked it to. Your ads will appear next to related search results and on sites that have elected to show adverts relevant to their content.

Google and Overture are the current big players in the market and their programs are based on the same principles but are implemented in different ways. Most advertisers tend to use just one and not the other due to unfamiliarity.

Whilst setting up a basic campaign is straightforward, many people actually lose money as they are unsure of the technicalities, don't split-test (fine-tune) their results or miscalculate the return on investment and think they are making rather than losing money. After all, would you spend $250 and be happy to make $200 in sales?

One option is to do a lot of reading on the subject and ensure that you are sure of what you are doing, or if you don't have the time, hire an expert to do the job for you and guarantee that you will gain more in sales that you spend on your PPC campaign.

Labels: pp, ppc

Internet Marketing and the Small Business

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 3 years and has further defined itself further in the past 12 months. With Google raising $4 Billion from new stock offerings in 2005 we will see more changes underway over the next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear the small business is going to be left out in the cold in this process. Perhaps a better statement would be that the small business has already been left out in the cold.

This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to the growing problem. More so, it has been written to raise the awareness and acknowledge the difficulty small business has on the web. Certainly the small business does not receive any sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide quality information for those that are searching the web.

Let's review how the situation has been created. We have to make the assumption a small business does not have the financial resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (even though it is less costly than offline advertising) and they do not have the man-power to devote time for the non-costly methods of marketing. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely, however, the issue at hand is not expenditure but time. Time they are already spending on their business and do not have more time to spend on non-costly marketing methods on the web. What are these non-costly but time-consuming marketing methods? This would include but not limited to writing articles, maintaining newsletters, maintaining email addresses with auto-responders, submitting their articles through a variety of methods and resources over the web. Let's not forget standard search engine optimization issues and HTML coding. Oh, the best one of all is 'natural' link exchanging as defined by Google. If you have not already been there, manual link exchanging is a time consuming process even if you do decide to spend money on lost cost services that can assist. You cannot use 'link farms' as that is against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be down graded.

In order to reach top ranking on the search engines it all boils down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content. Inbound only links better than reciprocal inks. Writing content for your site, articles, news, newsletter is time consuming to properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is not easy either. Some services and software exists to help you in your submission of articles, but just like link exchange services they can only do so much. Could you create a blog and place your articles, certainly. However, you can see the 'things to do' list only keeps growing for the small business owner.

Could they engage in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you now are entering in a financial issue and one that does not necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-Per-Click campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you use it in combination with a variety of other internet and search engine marketing methods. On its own it cannot provide the returns the small business is seeking. Searching the key phrases (no longer key words) and understanding which ones to select is equally not an easy task. It requires due diligence, research and analysis to understand the information and make an informed decision. Assuming they can get past this part of the pay-per-click process, the next phase is writing the pay-per-click ad headline and content. Unfortunately we see many small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes of a quick return. They might as well go to a casino!

There is indeed another problem associated with Pay-Per-Click campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally a problem when you are supposed to keep a certain percentage ratio between the two. When search engines like Google are allowing your ad to be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense, your exposures are indeed going up, however, how many people actually click on the links? From Google's perspective probably a lot, but from the individual advertiser's perspective this is not necessarily a good situation. Google is now dictating what key phrases you 'should' bid on and ultimately consolidating the bidding war into small key phrase groups and larger number of advertisers.

Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the subject, is time to see revenues. There is no doubt that it takes months for a website to propagate through the Internet. This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations need to be set accordingly. Just because you have a website does not mean that you will see rewards anytime soon. Once again we get into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet marketing work in order to see benefits 6 - 9 months later.

Requirements set by the search engines as they seek to provide quality responses to those that are searching are making it increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the web. So, who will end up on the first page or in the top position of searches for key phrases? Unless something changes and the small business is given a chance, it will be the larger corporations that have the man power time and the money.

About the Author

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing. A internet marketing firm specializing in turn key marketing solutions for businesses including research, analysis, planning an strategy. Please visit SmartFinds at http://www.hsfideas.com

Labels: biz, internet, ppc, searchengines

Cost Effective Paid Advertising thru search engine marketing, pay per click (PPC)

Friday, December 16, 2005

Very often businesses require sales to function. Every business owner often wonders, how do I get more sales?

Most businesses often start with the traditional marketing methods such as flyers distribution, mailing of sales brochures, cold call, cold fax and of course word of mouth.

Now, is there any more cost effective marketing method? There definitely is .

Search engine marketing to lower the cost of acquiring customer and branding has effectively done so for many fortune 500 companies and SMEs, so why not you?

What is search engine marketing, pay per click? Yahoo and Google, two of the biggest search engine offers an online marketing service which you will pay to them to display your advertisement when people search for keywords related to your business.

Example

I am in the web design industry. I selected the keywords "Web design company". (There is broad base, exact match and other options when defining your keywords which I will touch on later.) Someone on the internet either uses Yahoo! or Google, searches for the words "web design company" and my advertisement in text will show up. For Yahoo!, on the top of the search results while for Google either on the top 2 of search results or the right side of the search results.

How can this lower the cost for acquiring customers?

For different industries, the cost is different, but for most industries, it costs between $0.50 to $1.50 per click to bring one visitor to their web site. Now, assume your average cost per click is $1.00 and assuming your web site is well built to convert visitors to become a sales lead. We assume a 10% conversion to sales lead per 100 visitors. So, for 100 visitors, it will cost you $100.00. In every 100 visitors, 10 people will contact you regarding your business products or services. So, $100.00 divided by 10, it will be $10.00 per sales lead. Now, isn't this the cheapest way of acquiring sales leads?

No? Consider word of mouth marketing, if you value your work at $20.00 per hour and it takes you 1 hour to get the message across for every person you meet to promote your business. Wouldn't that cost you more than $10.00 per sales lead?

The best part of search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing is targeted, people who only are interested in your products will search for keywords related to your product. (Of course you got to know what is the best keywords to advertise.) Search engine marketing budget is restrictable. You can set whatever budget you want for your marketing effort online. The process is always the same except the result is only vary by the amount you are willing to spend.

Thus, many companies who think they cannot afford to search engine market are wrong. Search engine marketing is available for every business, however, do it the right way by doing some research yourself or hire the professionals to get the best result.

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I hope this guest article explained a little bit about PPC marketing.

Labels: ppc

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Pay Per Click Management Explained

Internet Marketing and the Small Business

Cost Effective Paid Advertising thru search engine marketing, pay per click (PPC)

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