If you want to promote your business and are willing to spend some money on advertising, Paid Search or pay-per-click (PPC) may be a good tactic to employ. There are many options and moving parts when doing paid search so it can be daunting to people who are unfamiliar with it. However, I will attempt to break it down in this article to make the going a little easier. If you are unfamiliar with what paid search is, take a look at the article on search engine presence.
For local businesses, the purpose of paid search is to drive qualified traffic (people) to a particular destination. There have been studies showing paid search’s impact on brand awareness as well, but that affects large consumer brands more than small businesses, so we won’t go into that here.
The purpose of paid search for small businesses is to get people who are looking for you, to your site, and hopefully make money from them and recover the money you spent. It can be an inexpensive way to get just the people you want onto your site, and the great thing about it is that like all online advertising it’s trackable so you should be able to calculate how much it costs you for each new customer you get.
Paid search ads are paid for on a pay-per-click model, which means that you only have to shell out money when someone clicks on your ad. The amount that you pay and how prominently (how high on the page) your ad appears is determined by an auction model. For each keyword you choose, you bid a certain dollar amount. The people who have higher bids will generally (Google factors in click-thru-rate when determining placement as well) appear higher on the page and will pay more money per click. The exact cost-per-click is determined on the fly based on who else is vying for that keyword at that given moment. If you’re the highest bidder at $2.00 and the next highest bidder is $.85, you would pay $.86. However, if someone else is bidding $2.01 and another person is bidding $1.99, you are the second highest bidder and would pay $2.00 per click.
The general strategy for small businesses and paid search is to use it for areas where you’re not covered by organic search. So if you sell ipods and appear on the first page of organic results for “green ipods” but you also want a presence for “red ipods” and you’re having trouble getting ranked for that, you might want to just do paid search for that term. Of course you can do paid search if you’re not ranked organically for any keywords. Paid search is often thought of as a way to buy yourself onto the front page of search engine results pages, but if it makes money for your business, that’s what’s important.
You generally want to tie the ad copy to the keyword that it is associated with as well as make sure that what you’re proposing in your ad exists on the page that you’re driving to. So if you’re advertising a complimentary estimate or gift, the page that you are sending people to should mention this offer. Here are some other general guidelines:
Keyword Insertion FormatTo use keyword insertion, include {KeyWord:Default Ad Text} in your ad text where you would like the keyword a user searches on to appear. The keyword inserted in your ad is capitalized depending on how you format the word 'keyword' in the curly brackets.
In this example, the keyword 'fast red car' could appear in an ad in the following ways:
{keyword:Default Ad Text} = fast red car {Keyword:Default Ad Text} = Fast red car {KeyWord:Default Ad Text} = Fast Red Car
The price that you bid will certainly impact how many clicks you get as well as how much you pay per click. The more you bid, the more you’ll pay per click and the higher your click-through-rate (percentage of people who see the ad who go ahead to click on it), so the more clicks you’ll get. The first dollar amount you’ll generally set is your daily budget. The daily budget ensures that you don’t spend more than you want to spend on a given day. The next dollar amount you set is the bid for each keyword. If you’ve never done paid search before, it will be a bit of a guessing game. Think about how much you’re willing to pay per click, and stay below that. For some, competitive keywords, you may need to bid a couple of dollars to even have your ad shown. Then there are some high volume keywords where you can get a lot of clicks for 15 cents per click. All of the search engines have tools to help you determine how much to bid. What starts as a guessing game will become more of an exact science later on. You eventually want to be able to figure out how much you can pay per click to make a profit. For example, if 10% of people who get to your site via paid search make a purchase, and the average purchase amount is $100, then driving 10 people to your site is worth $100 to you, so maybe you’d be willing to spend 30% of the profit to get people to your site.
There are three major search engines that people do paid search on – Google, Yahoo and MSN, with the largest proportion using Google. The Google search engine gets the most traffic, and is the most intuitive for paid search in my opinion, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the one you should go with. The high traffic that Google has also means that there’s generally more competition on it to drive up bid prices, so your results may not be as good. Therefore my best advice is to try all three and see what works. There are some people who find that Google just doesn’t work for them. MSN has the lowest search volume of all three engines, but I’ve been told that there are some niches on MSN where the cost-per-clicks are very low. It doesn’t hurt to try all three.
All three search engines provide standard click reporting – that is, how many impressions your ad is receiving, what its average position is, how much it’s getting clicked on, and how much the cost-per-clicks (CPC)are. What’s nice about Google is that they offer a free analytics program that provides post-click tracking – that is, you can see what people are doing on your site after they clicked on a Google paid search ad. You can then assess whether or not people are doing what you’d like them to do. For example, lets say the CPCs are the same for keyword A as keyword B. However, by doing post-click tracking, I can see that people who are going to the site through keyword B are 20% more likely to become a customer. That might then make me want to spend more money on keyword B and less on keyword A. As far as I know, to do post-click tracking on Yahoo and MSN, you need a separate ad tracking program, and these generally cost money.
Ready to start? Here are the sites you’ll want to visit to begin:
Google – adwords.google.com
Yahoo – searchmarketing.yahoo.com
MSN - advertising.msn.com/microsoft-adcenter