Pay per click advertising, PPC search engine articles

With all the talk of rising costs to play the PPC game, why should anyone bother? For those of you who are thinking about getting started with PPC marketing but need a little encouragement, I offer you the following advantages of the platform to consider:

• It's easy to get started: Create an account and get going! No changes to your website are required.
• Pay only for what you get: You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
• Total control over your budget: You decide what to spend. 
• High quality traffic: Users who click PPC ads tend to be very motivated to buy.
• Control over your ads: Change your ad copy whenever you want.
• Swift ad publishing: Have a new product coming out tomorrow? With PPC, you can get literally millions of eye balls looking at your ads within a day or so. Try doing that with organic search marketing! 

Search Engine Guide Editor Jennifer Laycock wrote a recent article that stands as an excellent argument for using targeted landing pages:

"[Using targeted landing pages] could mean the difference between a 2% conversion rate and a 10% conversion rate. Study after study shows that the less clicks you place between your visitor and a purchase, the more likely they are to buy. So why would you make them dig through your site when you could deliver them right to what they are looking for?

I understand that many business owners want to force their users to look at all of their products in the hopes that they will be able to upsell or cross sell their buyers. This is why the milk and bread is in the very back of the grocery store. That makes sense for a retail chain, but remember this: on the web, your biggest competitor is a single click away. You simply cannot play the same games with your customers that you can in a retail outlet. If you force your customer to play hide and seek, they will most likely seek out someone that makes it easier for them."

I couldn't have said it better, Jennifer! 

It's easy to get caught up in the rising costs of PPC marketing. Unfortunately, it's something we'll just have to get used to as recent reports indicate that PPC will only get more expensive as more players enter the field and the competition gets stiffer. Don't despair just yet, because there is something you can do: combine cost per click smarts with intelligent metrics analysis to increase your returns.

Cost per click (CPC) is the amount you pay a PPC engine for a single click to your website, and is measured differently engine to engine. With Google AdWords, CPC is lowered by a high clickthrough rate (CTR): the more relevant your ad is, the more clicks you'll get, and the lower your CPC will be. Over at Yahoo! Search Marketing, CPC is calculated by simply paying 1 cent more than an advertiser positioned below you.

In the right circumstance, lowering your CPC can actually increase your CTR for the same budget! The key is optimizing the relevance of your ads. Always choose targeted keywords for your ad copy, and conduct bid management at the keyword level. Well-written ads can outperform poorly written ads even if top positioning is not attained.

Sometimes, paying more per click is necessary if you are going after an ad position for a specific reason, such as increasing brand awareness. The big picture comes into focus here: it's not just about lowering your CPC, but increasing your customer acquisition. Afterall, what good is a heap of paid clicks if users aren't following through on your website and becoming customers? Truly, it's your conversion rate that is the most important number, not your CPC, and metrics analysis can play a huge part in tweaking your ad copy and landing pages to increase this number.

As the PPC industry matures–and gets more expensive–it's imperative for marketers to arm themselves with techniques that lower their paid search costs while increasing returns. Knowing how to effectively manipulate your CPC and analyze campaign metrics can help keep you on top of the game.

Dan Thies has posted a quick review of Boris Mordkovich's PPC Search Engine Marketing Handbook. Thies calls the paperback a "gem", and "a nice introduction to PPC, with clear and concise discussions of the standard strategy & tactics".

FindWhat.com announced plans today to re-brand its online marketing and e-commerce properties together under three divisions, all with the Miva brand name. The re-brand is expected to be complete by the end of June, 2005.

The FindWhat and Espotting networks will become Miva Media. Miva's e-commerce services, based on Miva Merchant, will become Miva Small Business. Its desktop software business, formerly Comet Systems, will be known as Miva Direct, offering search-related applications. Beginning June 13, the company's NASDAQ ticker symbol will change to "MIVA".

For more information, please see the press release. 

Dallas, Texas attorneys Joel Fineberg, Dean Gresham and Stephen Malouf have launched a new website called Lost Clicks in order to find potential click fraud victims. From the home page of the new site:

"Click fraud is becoming a significant concern for advertisers who rely upon the Internet for sales… When search engines charge advertisers and collect revenues for these clicks, advertisers get cheated. We have filed a national class action in Miller County, Arkansas against a number of the major search engines alleging that they are collecting fees for PPC advertising they’re not providing… If you have information about click fraud, have not been given answers or your money back from the search engines for suspected click fraud or you suspect Click Fraud and need to investigate, e-mail us at info@lostclicks.com."

John Alexander has a new article published over at searchengineguide.com, Easy Tips for Adding some Zest to your Click Through Ratios. While the focus on the article is the optimization of title tags for organic search engine optimization, the same principles can be applied very effectively for writing PPC ad copy.

A landing page is the page that your users arrive at when they click your PPC ads. Obviously, this page needs to convert in order to maximize your PPC ROI. What can you do to make your landing pages the best they can be?

1. Focus: Now that you have the attention of a potential customer, keep the focus and don't lose them! Your landing page should be very focused. Provide just the facts about your product or service, and a highly visible way for users to take action.

2. Customize: Create customized landing pages for your ads. Your landing page should function as an extension of the content in your ad. Make the user feel like they are in the right place by providing them with specific information that relates to the ad they clicked on.

3. Inform: Give users the information they came for! Your landing page needs to convince them that your product or service is best suited for their needs. Provide all the information that you would include in a person-to-person sales pitch.

4. Invite action: Provide a clear path to action, whether that be in the form of an "add to cart" button or an invitation to "call now". Give this path excellent visibility.

5. Provide imagery: Capitalize on the graphic delivery of the medium! This is especially important if you sell a product. In a traditional bricks and mortar store, customers have the advantage of touching products. This is not the case online, so provide excellent quality photos of your products to showcase the quality of your offerings.

6. Test: You might think you know your target audience pretty well, but it's always possible that you haven't thought of everything. For best results, try out a couple of different ideas with your landing pages–your users might surprise you! 

SitePoint have established themselves as a leader in publishing books for web professionals that are fun and easy to read, yet feature in-depth, advanced information about programming, design and marketing. Their latest release, Dan Thies' The Search Engine Marketing Kit, is no exception: The SEM Kit is comprised of more than 250 pages presented in workbook format that contain invaluable knowledge that's suited to search marketing novices and experts alike. Despite the ever-changing nature of this industry, The SEM Kit should remain an excellent and relevant resource for years to come.

While the focus on PPC in the kit is limited to a single chapter (plus references to PPC tools in the appendix), it's a power-packed segment that touches on the basics (intro, major players), intermediate info (third-party management tools, minor players, keyword matching and selection, bid management), and advanced PPC strategies (dayparting, landing pages, testing and CTR boosting).

The best marketers know that a healthy dose of "organic" or natural search marketing strategies paired up with PPC marketing results in the most powerful Internet marketing. In Dan Thies' The Search Engine Marketing Kit, you'll find it all! Plus, for a limited time you also get $150 in clicks from AdWords, Yahoo! and FindWhat. The SEM Kit is highly recommended.

• Download sample chapters
• Take advantage of the introductory offer
• Buy now!

What's the #1 mistake people make with AdWords? Too many keywords!

Google doesn't want advertisers to clog up their system with thousands of keywords, especially if the ads aren't getting good click-through. Since no single ad can possibly be a good match for all those different keywords, overloading thekeywords for an ad ruins your CTR and causes Google to put your keywords put on hold or disable them. 

The solution? Write ads just for ONE keyword. Take your high traffic keywords and put them into their own group, and write ads specifically for that keyword. This technique will often double or triple your CTR.

Remember: 95% of your traffic comes from 5% of your keywords. Therefore, optimizing your top 20 keywords can transform your campaigns' clicks!