Pay-per-click search engine advertising is a way of getting traffic to a web site quickly. Also, in terms of ways to buy advertising, it’s relatively cheap. Put these two factors together and you can easily see the appeal. However, it is also easy to rush in and waste money if you’re not careful, and a little knowledge can make a lot of difference. This article documents four things I learned that can make for effective pay-per-click search engine advertising.
The online Google Keyword Tool is your friend here. Using this you can find out how many searches where made on any particular key phrase in the UK for the previous month (or for the month before that, depending when the update happens). Also, you can see the average number of monthly searches globally for the past twelve months. The more popular keywords will cost more to bid on that the less popular ones, so consider using lots of different long tail phrases. Also be sure to put separate bids on each of the cases where: (a) the bid keywords appear generally in the user’s search, (b) the keyphrase is a phrase within the user’s search, and (c) the keyphrase matches the user’s exact search; this way, you’ll be able to see where the clicks are coming from.
Negative keywords are the words (or phrases) that, if they appear in the search the user typed in, cause your advert not to appear. For example, if you’re selling an ebook about online marketing, you might want to include the negative keyword ‘free’ so your advert doesn’t appear when someone searches for ‘free online marketing ebook’. Given that you want to sell your ebook, it makes sense not to encourage those looking for a free ebook to click through on your advert because that will cost you money where your chance of making any is pretty slim.
Typically – and this is certainly the case with Google Adwords – if words included in the user’s search appear in the advert’s title, they will be in bold. This has the effect of drawing the user’s eye to the advert much more effectively than a generic title. Therefore, create variants of the advert tailored to the different keywords/keyphrases you’re bidding on.
Many advertisers go to great expense to get the top position, or at least a high one. I was reminded of this when I read The Ubiquity of Competition posted yesterday on his blog by Seth Godin, in which he remarks:
There are 30 places that sell bumper stickers. One shows up first in the Google ads when I do a search. Which one gets my business?
I’ve always thought it odd that, In my experience, the higher positions get better click through rates, but for some reason do not seem to convert into actual sales as well as the adverts in the lower positions; I found positions 6 or 7 on the first page of search results achieved the best conversions (but note that both click through rates and conversions suffered when my adverts where not on the first page). I can’t explain this, it’s just what I observed. It may, of course, depend on what you’re selling. I think the bottom line here is that you need to test/monitor the relationship between the position in which your advert appears, the click through rate achieved, and the conversion rate achieved.
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