So you’ve got a website. It looks good, your customers love it and you’re making sales through it. It works - but you need to find new customers and make more sales. Where do you find them?
Well, you know that customers are using search engines like Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves to help them find the products you’re selling. But how do you get them from the search engines to your website? That’s the key.
You want to connect with potential customers without spending months optimising your web page content and tags. You want to be able to switch search engine traffic on and off at the click of a mouse, only paying for the traffic you receive. And the CEO wants you to do this by the end of the week. It just doesn’t seem possible - and yet every time you (and the CEO!) check, there’s your main competitor, sitting on the first page of results at Yahoo! How do they do it?
They’ve discovered a valuable tool for any website owner or marketing manager - pay per click advertising. The idea is simple: search engines auction-off space at the top of their results, under the heading ‘Sponsored Matches’ or similar. Websites wishing to advertise in this space decide which search words they want to appear for - so for example a site selling new cars will bid on words like ‘cars’, ‘new cars’, ‘import cars’ etc. If two sites want to appear on the same word, they can out bid each other to appear at the top.
This allows you to specifically target the right consumers - the ones searching for the products or services you offer. These are the consumers who, of the thousands using search engines at any one time, are most likely to get their credit cards out and buy from you. (The PPC engines provide keyword research tools that show you what words and phrases people are actually searching for).
So pay per click advertising lets you target exactly the consumers who are your potential future customers. But pay per click has an added strength which is implied in the name; you only pay for the visitors to your website you receive, as you are only charged when your advert/link is actually clicked on - hence pay per click (PPC, also known as cost per click, CPC). So you can limit your advertising spend by targeting keywords that will generate new sales, whilst still bidding high enough to stay at number one or two in the results - ensuring you get a good return on your investment (ROI).
Starting out
So how do you start to build pay per click campaigns? First of all you need to understand that the search engines sell the ‘Sponsored Matches’ space on their results through third parties, known as PPC search engines. These engines do deals with different search engines, major ISPs and major destination sites to place their ’sponsored’ links at the top of the results pages on their sites - so when you advertise through PPC engines, you gain access to a whole distribution network. In Europe, the leading PPC network is Espotting which drives traffic to over 10,000 companies including British Airways, Orange, eBay, Direct Line and Procter & Gamble. Through Espotting, you can have your company listed on some of the web’s leading sites including Yahoo! Europe, Lycos Europe, AltaVista, Tiscali, Ask Jeeves, Looksmart UK and Netscape. Through its search network Espotting powers over half a billion search requests each month across Europe.
Other PPC engines include US-based Overture, which is slowly pushing into Europe, and Google, which has recently started a PPC form of advertising on its site (although this works in a different way).
Understanding relevancy
All of the pay per click engines have style guides and relevancy rules which cover the way they expect adverts to be presented and how they (and you can) determine what words are relevant to your website.
The general rules on style are that you should use normal English grammar and a normal writing style, as you would in an essay or letter. So, avoid excessive capitalisation and exclamation marks - (don’t use ‘FREE!!’ or ‘Buy Cars Here Now!’) - the PPC engines have human editors who will change or reject this. Their aim is to make the adverts fit in the style with all of their partners’ websites - so this sort of thing is guaranteed to get you noticed by them for all the wrong reasons.
Relevant words are those which describe, or relate closely to, the products or service your website offers - so a site selling socks and shoes can bid on words like ’shoes’, ‘new socks’ and ‘footwear’ etc, but not ‘clothes’ - because they only sell a small selection of what could generally be called clothes (i.e. socks). Relevancy rules are based on the idea of providing a straight forward, good experience to the consumer (so that they feel confident about getting their credit card out whilst at your site).
The general rule to help you decide if a word is relevant is, if you were a consumer and typed that word at search engines, would you be surprised to see your advert (because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the search) and would you be able to quickly see why it is actually relevant by clicking through to your website? If the answer is no to either, then it seems likely the word is not relevant- and even if you are allowed to bid on it, may produce poor results.
To help you design and implement a PPC campaign, here are some guidelines: Decide on your aims: do you wish to promote your whole site, only a certain product category or even only one (well designed) page?
Research your keywords in line with your aims, using the tools provided by the PPC engines, so you are only bidding on words consumers are actually searching on. Don’t focus on just the big traffic, generic words (like ‘cars’); these are important but are the most expensive words and often provide the most traffic with the least conversions. Research those less popular, cheaper words (e.g. ‘car import new’) that suggest more about what the consumer is looking for. If you meet this need, they are more likely to become a paying customer. Don’t expect to find every single keyword in one go; find the obvious ones, start a campaign and then research more - you’ll find you think of synonyms over time.
Avoid thinking like an industry insider and research words that the average consumer would use to describe your products/service, not those an inside expert would use. There are more consumers out there than experts!
Espotting’s Keyword Generator can help you plan your campaign. The tool allows you to type in a keyword and generate other keywords that include the original. The tool brings up the most popular keywords that consumers have been searching for across the Espotting network within the past 30 days and shows how many times each word has been searched for.
Make your titles work for you. Put the search word in every title (change the word order if it makes it grammatically correct), e.g. for the search ‘new uk cars’ - ‘Buy new cars at Car Sales UK’.
Why? This clearly demonstrates to the consumer what your website offers. It can encourage more clicks from people who are looking for what you offer - and discourage those who are looking for something different. Think of putting the keyword in the title as a filter; it attracts good traffic to your site and deters bad traffic which is unlikely to convert into customers. All the PPC engines suggest this; some insist, so it’s easier to do this from day one - especially if your competitor hasn’t. Your campaigns may well outperform theirs for just this reason.
The five first words in your description are the most important as these are all consumers see on many of the major search engines (because of the way they implement results). So get your brand name, domain name or something about what makes your service or product unique here. So with a title of: ‘Buy new cars at Car Sales UK’, use a description like: ‘Quality new car imports from Europe - cheaper than in the UK, all right-hand drive models and ready to drive today.’
Deep link. Do not send all the traffic to your homepage (unless you have an incredibly small site). Send the clicks to the exact page which details the service or product related to the search terms used. Make it easy for the consumer to find what you offer - or they will click ‘back’ in their browser, and possibly end up at your major competitor’s website.
Monitor your bids. Increase them to stay in position one or two (as the search engines only use between 2-5 results from the PPC engines, you need to stay in these positions). But if you find the campaign too expensive, lower your bids on one or two generic high traffic words and research more cheaper, less traffic (but more specific) terms.
Conclusion
Pay per click engines will drive highly targeted traffic to exactly the right page of your website that the visitor requires; this will lead to increased conversion rates, turning more visitors into new customers. You only pay for the traffic you receive and reach potential new customers across the major search engines. As the signup fees are relatively low compared to the cost of full scale optimisation services, this means that SMEs can start to advertise their services and products alongside multinationals with large online and offline advertising budgets - making PPC your bottom line’s new best friend (and hopefully the CEO’s new best friend, too!).
