Roadmap to PPC or Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising

by Mike Banks Valentine

The "paid placement" search results model introduced by Overture.com has become an accepted method of advertising online and should be considered a very viable and attractive option in your small business marketing budget. Get out your roadmap to Overture!

TUNE UP YOUR SEARCH TERMS

Wordspot.com offers a great tool to help determine valuable search terms to bid on by showing the number of searches in the previous month for any word or phrase you enter in the search box.

Try it yourself and see. Let's assume you are in auto insurance.

http://wordspot.com

I went there and found that "auto insurance quote" was searched 9853 times.

CHECK OCCUPANCY RATES AND BOOK YOUR TRIP

Now visit the Overture.com front page and type in the same search term "auto insurance quote" and the results page will show how much money each click-through costs the top bidding advertiser. In this case it was $1.78 by "Netquote.com" I went there to see and they seem to be a company that sells to agents and brokers, and thus are not even aimed at the consumer.

By the way, my just clicking on that link to visit NetQuote cost them $1.78 and I had no interest in them myself. The first page of results lists the top 40 advertisers and if you go to the last of them you see #40 advertiser bid is .05 cents. That is quite a range for the front page of results! You can appear on the front page of the "auto insurance quote" results for just .06 cents!

FILL UP YOUR TANK AND LOAD YOUR BELONGINGS

The way to determine what type of campaign to run with Overture is to determine how much you want to spend and find out who your competition is by doing this type of research. If I were to do this for the client, I'd charge by the hour, ($75 hourly) since it is not cut and dry stuff, but requires analysis and careful targeting of terms. Sometimes you can offer the client the tools and let them spend the time researching. Some of my smaller clients take me up on this pay per click advertising model.

Overture also offers a service at $99 where they will find and set your bids on twenty search terms and credit you with $50 in click-throughs, so they are charging you $49 for a not-very precise "we'll-do-it-for-you" kind of PPC pay-per-click campaign.

Generally though you'll get good reports from Overture and can substantiate where the money goes to determine your return on investment for the pay-per-click campaign.

Note that the second bid for "auto insurance quote" at $1.76 is from "insweb.com" and they are one of the big dogs of online consumer insurance quotes.

BUDGET YOUR YOUR TRIP

Overture claims that a number one listing gets three times the click-through rate of the number two listing and offers stats for ranking purposes to help you decide where to bid and what your budget can afford. You can beat them all for $1.79 per click-through so if your conversion rate were ten percent of click-throughs converting to paying customers, then customer acquisition on this campaign would cost you $17.90 per new paying customer. If your profit exceeds that amount and you can justify it, then you have a winning campaign!

Statistics show that the average cost to business for new customer acquisition is $30 per customer, so the example given above of less than $20 per new customer would be quite a bargain.

HIT THE ROAD AND ENJOY YOUR TRIP!

What it comes down to is, how well do you want to rank? What can you afford? What is your conversion rate once a searcher clicks through? How much is that new customer worth to you for the life of the business she would bring your company? Finally, what is your return on investment? This can't be determined until you set up a campaign and test it with them.

The value of this type of advertising is the ability to track exactly where the customer came from. If you set up a specific page on your site to receive traffic from your paid search listings, your traffic logs will verify that those new clients came from that paid listing. It is possible to create pages to accept traffic from each of the pay-for-performance resources out there. Consider a few of them and test, test, test!

Overture is not the only vehicle on the road. Road-test these!

http://www.Overture.com/
http://www.sprinks.com/
http://www.rocketlinks.com/
http://www.searchhound.com/
http://www.7search.com/
http://www.ah-ha.com/
http://www.euroseek.com/page?ilang=en
http://findwhat.com/
http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://www.onesearch.com/
http://www.simplesearch.com/
http://www.titansearch.com/

Check your mileage and keep your web vehicle in tune!

Now for those of you who don't know this, I'm going to share the secret that even many Overture advertisers DON'T know. For those of you who have heard this already, take a break. ;-)

Overture provides the top three advertisers links to dozens of search engines and giant web portals as the top three results on every page at each one of those giant portals, including YAHOO! So if you are one of the top three bidders at Overture, you become one of the top three results at MSN, AOL, LYCOS, and dozens more search engine properties. It is the fastest and easiest way to rank in the top three results and can cost far less than traditional advertising. Therefore, some categories are intensely competitive and costly to rank #1 at Overture. But if you are in a less competitive area with your web site, you can rank #1 for as little as the minimum 5 cent bid at Overture for your chosen search phrase!

Overture is very strict about editorial control on this since searchers expect relevant results at their partner sites. Don't think you can go bid on the term "Sex" if you sell unrelated products. It just doesn't work that way. Overture requires that the content of the page match the content of the search query.

This technique works for the lazy site owner as well as those of us willing to work to make our site content relevant and valuable to surfers. If you have content on your site that addresses how your product or service solves a problem, then you can bid on search terms relevant to that problem if your product is a solution to that problem.

Take a look at one of my clients who sells OAT based skin care products to see how we created pages about Sunburn as well as about Sensitive Skin to be able to bid on those terms at Overture. to see how this can work. Once you have created content that satisfies Overture for a particular search term, you will also do well with the crawler based search engines if you've followed the additional eight essential guidelines offered in your valuable member site here. ;-)

Search Engine Marketing: Special Reports from Page Zero Unleash Amazing Profits with Google AdWords Select! You advertise your product, service, or cause online. You've decided to pay for targeted traffic on a "pay per click" basis. And now you're considering Google AdWords Select. Great decision. But if you don't use the techniques taught in this special report, you could cost yourself a fortune. Use it right, and you'll clean up.

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