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What is Pay Per Click?

In 1998 Overture pioneered the idea of selling search ads. You could buy search results for as low as a penny or two per click. This system has quickly evolved into one of the worlds most competitive marketplaces.

Why Use Pay Per Click?

Sometime you can not afford to…or simply do not want to wait. Pay per click search engines allow you to list atop search results quickly. This will allow you to:

• Prototype ideas to track demand before you invest into a new business model or are stuck footing the bill for a new site.
• Quickly gather feedback on market conditions.
• Split test to a live audience and gather results in real time.

You can use Google AdWords to offer a free white paper about some topic from a one page website. If nobody is interested in downloading your white paper or you can not seem to get enough clickthroughs then odds are:

• the market is not yet ready for your product
• or you are marketing it from the wrong angle
• or you are marketing it to the wrong people

Who Should I Trust in Pay Per Click?

There are a few major players in the pay per click arena. Overture (as of writing this) currently has network partnerships that span Yahoo!, InfoSpace.com, AltaVista.com, AllTheWeb,com and many other partners. Google AdWords has a larger distribution network across Google, AOL.com, About.com, Earthlink.com, and many others sites…even a few of my own. Microsoft is a new player in the market, but their limited syndication network means their traffic quality is high.

For the sake of this article I am only going to cover Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter.

Amazon.com allows you to advertise contextual ads on their site via ClickRiver. There are also a few other pay per click search engines (Ask, Business.com, Miva, Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive, 7Search, Findology, Search123, Epilot) that may be well worth a look after trying Google, Yahoo! and MSN. While beginning pay-per-click advertising, I would recommend only using Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter.

When you use large pay per click search engines you guarantee you are getting at least some good traffic, and that your business model is scalable.

Smaller engines provide slower feedback loops, and some may not even provide quality traffic.

Why Use Large Pay Per Click Search Engines?

When you use large pay per click search engines you guarantee you are getting at least some good traffic, and that your business model is scalable.

Smaller engines provide slower feedback loops, and some may not even provide quality traffic.

• The results will be scaleable.
• The feedback will be quicker.
• They offer many great tracking and targeting features free.
• Larger pay-per-click search engines generally present higher quality traffic and are less susceptible to fraud.
• It is less complex managing two or three accounts versus 100 accounts.
• It’s easier to track the ROI on 2 accounts than on 100 accounts.
• Many of the extremely small search engines never have real traffic. You are wasting your time registering with them.
• Even some of the better second tier search engines may waste a big hunk of change. In early November 2004 I tried using LookSmart.

It sent me twice the traffic as Yahoo! Search Marketing and traffic from LookSmart had a 95% bounce rate. That means that 19 of 20 site visitors from LookSmart immediately left and I paid for garbage traffic. The quality of traffic from smaller engines will vary from term to term, but its best to go with the biggest guys off the start, and then, if you have spare time, try some of the smaller engines.

Case Study: the Ignorant Bidder

If a term does not convert well for you then it may not be worth it to rank near the top for that term.

Not too long ago a person was bidding on an eBay ad for “SEO Elite Software” at over $1 a click. Assuming I can get a 1.5% conversion rate I can afford to pay that much, but this person was just throwing away their money.

Just to test the waters I placed my ebook on eBay and it did not go for anywhere near what I usually sell them for.
I find it hard to believe the person who was bidding a dollar a click was making any money. They later lowered that bid to 21 cents. In some markets there will be dumb companies that rotate in, lose money, and then go bankrupt. By the time they go bankrupt others may soon take their money wasting market position.

Some terms are not worth buying at the price the keywords go for. And if they are valuable they may have more value at a lower position.

Landing Page Tips:

Conversion is a large part of how successful a pay per click campaign is. A few tips to improve landing pages:

• Remove navigation: unless it is necessary remove other options. Let people do what you want them to do, and don’t give them many other options.
• Make link text appealing: people tend to glance over copy instead of deeply reading every word. Since links are action points people tend to pay more attention to link text. Make sure link text is appealing since it is far more likely to get read than most of the page copy.
• Give them a clue they have found the correct page: Place the words they searched for in large text at the top of the page to show them they are in the right location. If you are a large merchant with many products maybe use something like ‘search results for: their search term’. Typically it is best to point people at a landing page instead of the home page.
• Other ideas: some of the other concepts listed throughout this ebook (such as using short paragraphs and concise subheaders) also apply to landing pages.

Corey Rudl constantly retested his landing pages. You can learn a good amount by seeing how he changed his landing pages over time, by looking through how they changed in Archive.org. MarketingSherpa also has a landing page handbook for sale.

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How to Improve Clickthrough Rate and Slash Google AdWords Costs to Maximize Profits
Microsoft AdCenter - Pay per click advertisement from Microsoft
PPC Resources - Pay per click resources, links and free tools.
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