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Pay Per Click Search Engines Get Results For Your Advertising Dollars

by Elisabeth Archambault, BuckWorks

Add profitable traffic to your site, no matter who your competitors are.

Pay-per-click search engines offer some of the most cost-effective advertising you'll find anywhere. They are easier and faster to work with than the regular free search engines, which make their own decisions about the sites they'll show to searchers. With pay-per-click search engines you can pay to have your listings appear in the results for selected terms. In other words, you can buy your way to the top.

It works like an auction: the more you bid for the term the higher your listing appears. Bids for high ranking may range from one cent to several dollars. You only pay your bid price if someone actually clicks your link to visit your site. That's great value compared to other methods of advertising on the internet.

Great for Small Business Startups. Advertising in pay-per-click search engines is great for small business startups. Listings are usually online in a day or two, sometimes within hours. You can start with a minimum account and add funds as needed. With well-chosen keywords, you can get your listings in front of people who already have some interest in what you're offering. This is exactly the traffic you want.

Start with 7Search, Then Branch Out. I suggest setting up your first keyword bidding account with 7Search, then adding other search engines. I used to suggest starting with GoTo (now called Overture) as well, but they now have a minimum bid of 5¢, and their editorial "rules" about relevancy are being applied very inconsistently and illogically. If your site is effective at turning well-targeted visitors into customers you can make money at those rates, but it's good to do some testing in the search engines which allow penny bids. For a while I suggested FindWhat as the place to get started, but they have become involved in predatory advertising schemes and I have ethical problems with that. Overture and 7Search both have useful search term suggestion tools. Bid on a few terms to get started, then add more as you expand your keyword list. If you can get your terms accepted, you may get more traffic from Overture than several others together, but bids in the newer engines tend to be less competitive (read: cheaper). A small account may send hundreds of visitors before you need to add more funds. [Note: This paragraph was edited in January 2002.]

One Tool in the Toolbox. You can't hurry this form of website promotion, as you must wait until people come looking. You will need other promotions in your marketing mix, including developing reciprocal links, and fine-turning your pages for the regular search engines. (WebPosition Gold can be a great help for getting noticed by the regular search engines.) However, if you do it right, listings in the pay-per-click search engines are very cost-effective advertising. It takes work to get started, but after your accounts are set up they won't need much upkeep. They'll continue working for you, quietly sending well-targeted traffic. You just have to check your bids occasionally and add more funds when needed.

Three keys to success with pay per click search engines

Bid on relevant words and phrases -- the more the better. The more terms you bid on, the more often your listings will be seen. The search engines' keyword suggestion tools are excellent help for finding suitable terms to bid on. Use them to cast your keyword net wide! Another advantage of pay-per-click search engines is that you can bid on words and phrases that don't actually appear on your pages, as long as the concept is a good match.

Write a title and description that will appeal to your target audience. Describe your product or service as clearly as possible. You want to attract interested visitors, but not encourage clicks by unlikely prospects. (Remember, you pay for each click.) You don't always have to link to your home page; for many terms it might make more sense to link to a page within your site. The more directly you take the person to what they're seeking, the more likely you are to make a sale. Try to include the keyword in both the title and description, as this seems to attract more clicks.

Bid aggressively enough to be noticed, but know your limits. It's important to price your bids so your new traffic will pay for itself and add to your net profits. To decide how much you can afford to bid, you need to know one thing:

• How much does your average new visitor add to your profits?

For example, if a thousand visitors usually result in sales that add $200 to your bottom line, your average visitor is worth 20¢. Set your bidding limit far enough below that to ensure a profit margin, then bid on as many relevant terms as you can find. I like to bid up to about half of what the average visitor is worth, give or take a bit. If you're just starting you may need to make educated guesses here, but track your statistics so you learn exactly what is (or isn't!) cost-effective. If your product or service lends itself to repeat business, you might be willing to spend more for that first contact, in order to develop profitable long-term relationships.

For a superb discussion of these issues, as well as overall site effectiveness, I heartily recommend Make Your Site Sell by Ken Evoy. (Especially the new 2002 update! - see ad in sidebar)

Cast your keyword net as wide as you can

Your site has the best chance to be found by potential customers if you bid on lots of relevant, well-focused terms. The search engines' search term suggestion tools are essential for developing your list of keywords.

You can do your brainstorming "by hand", checking keyword ideas one by one in several search engines to see what sort of searches people have been conducting. Or, you can speed up your research enormously with an excellent software tool that I've absolutely fallen in love with: WordTracker. WordTracker checks a number of search engines for you, as well as its own database of recent web searches. It compiles the results and lets you sift them to come up with dozens or even hundreds of words and phrases that relate to your topic and (this is a critical point) they're words and phrases that searchers have actually been using. You still need to supply the judgment to choose the keywords worth bidding on, but WordTracker speeds up the mechanics and makes your research time so much more productive that it will pay for itself quite quickly if you're serious about advertising in the pay-per-click search engines. I can do in an hour with WordTracker what used to take a day or more. WordTracker has a free trial which is worth trying, but I found that it didn't do the program justice. It only showed a small part of what WordTracker can do and wasn't nearly as impressive as it should be. It was when I started getting into the real thing that I began to get excited about the power of this program!

It is important to consult the suggestion tools at more than one search engine (even using WordTracker), because they have different talents and will sometimes find different things. For example, Overture's suggestion tool does not find strings that are part of longer words (or words run together). If you queried how many searchers looked for "shoes" last month, it would find "horse shoes" but not necessarily "horseshoes." FindWhat or 7Search would show it.

You might also like JimTools, especially for your early brainstorming stages. When you enter terms, it analyzes sites that rank high in the regular search engines for those terms, and shows you all the keywords those sites used. This can be great for sending your mind in new directions. However, while this shows terms that are popular with webmasters, what you most need to know is what terms are popular with searchers. Be sure to consult the search engines themselves.

You'll find lots of terms, but be selective

Sometimes, a term can be relevant to your site but not have the right focus for the particular visitors you want. Think about whether a term will draw the right kind of traffic before you bid on it.

Example: On one advertising campaign I worked with a consultant in my city to help a ranch in our region sell their crop of young horses. Our research showed that thousands of internet searchers every month look for pictures of horses. There were lots of busy terms we could have bid on to bring visitors to the site, because it certainly had pictures. However, the client didn't want people looking for horse pictures, she wanted people looking for horses! Not all traffic is good traffic, especially when you're paying for it.

Our final list of keywords for bidding included busy, obvious terms such as horse and horse for sale. It also included many relevant but rarely used terms. Terms such as overo, eventing horse or warmblood would only be used by searchers with very specialized interests -- exactly who the client wanted to reach.

When you find specialized words or phrases that are on target for your product, bid on them even if their traffic is low. Bids on less-busy terms are usually cheap, and visitors who find your site by such keywords are often the best targeted of all. It is worthwhile to "work the fringes."

Bidding: Don't worry about being Number One

When you bid for ranking, don't assume that #1 is best. You'll usually get more clicks as #1, but they are not necessarily more profitable clicks. You must, absolutely MUST, test and observe to see what works best for you. In one promotion on GoTo (Overture) I observed that my listings got more clicks as #1, but the featured site got almost as many sign-ups when the busiest terms were in the #3 or #4 position. The lower positions were more cost-effective in part because the clicks cost less, and also because fewer clicks were "lost" on searchers who click just as a reflex to the first thing they see.

You don't need to be in first position, but do try to appear in the top ten, or at least on the front page. Otherwise your listing won't be seen very often, let alone clicked on. However, if high ranking is too costly for a particular term, take what you can get within your spending limits and leave it at that. Even though a lower ranking will send fewer visitors, at least the traffic from that term will be cost-effective.

Addendum, Dec. 2001: Now that Overture has so many partnerships that display their top few results, it's more important than ever to know your limits. Being in the premium listings can mean a major jump in traffic but if you're bidding too high (relative to sales and average value per customer) you can drain your wallet faster than ever. To end up with money in your pocket, know your averages, set your bids accordingly, and focus on strongly relevant terms.

Some search engines have a function to boost all your listings to #1 with one command. Unless you can set limits I do NOT recommend this because it's too easy to end up with bids that are too high to be profitable. Sometimes you'll see a term where a few bidders have played automatic leapfrog and driven the top two or three bids sky-high, while slightly lower positions are much less. Don't let this happen to you. Adjust your listings individually, and always, always remember what is cost-effective for you.

Watch your listings

Once your listings are in place, they are easy to look after. Do monitor your bids, though: bids ebb and flow, so sometimes you can reduce a bid and still keep a good position. This is especially true near the end of a month, when advertisers on fixed budgets may drop out for a few days. Watch so you'll see when you need to raise it again. It is not worth fussing this way for cheap, low-traffic keywords, but for busy, expensive terms it can be worthwhile. It's beyond the scope of this article, but a growing number of companies are offering software tools to help with such monitoring.

Hint: if you're on a fixed ad budget, don't use up your money on high bids then let your listings go offline. You'll get more traffic for your money if you set your bids a bit lower and keep your listings online all month. The ideal would be to keep your listings online and finish the month with about 4¢ left!

Observe your account's activity to watch for keyword gems worth targeting for the regular search engines. (WordTracker offers analysis tools for predicting this, too.) Example: After I saw how many clicks I got for a certain misspelling I bid on in GoTo (Overture), I built a page which made strategic use of that misspelling as it described a certain affiliate merchant. Part of me shuddered about doing that, but the page ranked fairly well in a couple of search engines for that "word". The spelling was wrong, but the term was well-targeted, so when people who found that page clicked through to the merchant, it was quality traffic. Result: a few more customers for the merchant and more dollars on my affiliate check!

Here's something else to watch for: many advertisers seem to set their bidding limits at round numbers, so bids often cluster at levels such as 10¢ or 25¢. Bidding an extra penny or two to get past them could significantly boost your traffic from that term, even if it does shave your profit margin a bit. Go for it, as long as you stay within your safe spending range.

This is most of the upkeep your accounts will require, once you have them set up. Just add funds as needed, to keep sending profitable new traffic to your site.

Have Fun!