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Europe markets at three-year peak
European shares hit a fresh three-year high on Friday,
helped by a rise in the Dow to three-month highs
overnight and unperturbed by surging oil prices.
East Europe asks EU to keep door open
Aleksander Kwasniewski, president of Poland, yesterday
warned fellow European Union leaders attending the
Brussels summit not to bow to public pressure and
close the door on future EU enlargement.
Europe: Rising crude lifts rising markets
European markets were all steaming ahead Friday,
looking set to close the week on a high as rising
crude prices lifted sentiment.
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 WebProWorld Search Forum |
How to do SEO with a MySQL/PHP Backend
A group of us have created a new (LONG overdue) "open" human-edited directory aimed at overcoming the pitfalls associated with others.... everything is in place but now we need content for our volunteers to edit.
Hight in Yahoo, Low in Google
I have a web site thats been running for a few months now. I've tried to follow as many guide lines as possible to get my site listed high in search engines.
What is the fastest way to get listed?
I have a bit of a problem in that a Classified Ads site my company took over and redesigned recently was previously listed in google and for some reason the pages listed on google are still the old ones.
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06.17.05
Tips For Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
 By Eddie Machaalani
Pay per click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest
methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to your website.
While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for
some, it's actually quite easy and can end up becoming that
one marketing method that you can't live without.
What I'd like to do today is provide some tips and techniques
that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ad's.
Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing
endeavors.
Experimenting With Different Search Engines
There are many PPC search engines, with some being better
than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously
known as Overture. It's a good idea to start your PPC campaigns
with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different
search engines to experiment and see where your target market
may be lurking.
Generally speaking, I've found Google Adwords is better for
more technically orientated products or services, including
software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand,
is better for general consumer products, including insurance,
toys, music etc.
What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and
you should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they
are performing their best. We'll discuss this in detail a
little later in the article.
Selecting the Right Keywords
The keyword selection process is probably the most important
of all when it comes to creating your PPC ad's. You'll need
to select keywords that are specific to your product or service
offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords
that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds
sooner than expected.
The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just
one question:
"If I was searching for a product just like mine, which
words or phrases would I search for?"
Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can
then use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your
keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.
To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply
try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side
for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it
to your list.
Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the
overture search suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords,
including the number of times that keyword has been searched
for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!
There's often a fine line between selecting keywords that
are either too specific or keywords that are too general.
Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted
PCP funds.
A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently
for our latest product, TrackPoint, which -- not coincidently
-- is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking
tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet
marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually
impossible to compete with the other advertisers.
The term "internet marketing" is searched for 825,674
times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge
number of different advertisers that target this keyword,
the top bid for "internet marketing" on Google AdWords
is $13.84 per click! With an average of 240 clicks per day,
a single day of advertising alone would cost $505!
Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of
visitors to sales, or you're selling a high priced item that
usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting
more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall
competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase
the chances of turning your newly found web site visitors
into customers.
Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my
keywords. One keyword was "ROI tracking", which
is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has
a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also more targeted
to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage
of people clicking on my ad should turn into customers.
It's also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not
always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate
great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.
Attracting People to Your Ad
Now that we've selected our keywords, we need to get those
searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in
them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing
our product.
One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use
their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has
been proven to increase click-thru rates on ad's by over 50%.
Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for "ROI
Tracking" and the title of a PCP ad begins with "ROI
Tracking", then their attention will be grabbed instantly.
He or she doesn't need to know much else, other than that
the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.
One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create
a more relevant title by combining your different keywords
into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something
like "ROI Tracking PHP Script" as the title of my
ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate,
but definitely caters my ad more to a specific audience. Once
again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.
Another important technique to attract attention to your
ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In
our particular case, the majority of our competition offer
hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their
servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.
Our product caters to a different audience, those that want
more control over their software, as well as those not wanting
to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the
title of my ad "Pay no monthly or per traffic fees".
Next -- and this is where experimentation is extremely important
-- we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will
attract the potential customer and let them know that our
product is exactly what they are searching for. To do this,
I start my ad's description with "Track PPC, campaigns
& search".
Finally, it's good practice to add a "Call to action"
at the bottom of your ad. If you're not familiar with this
term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do
something, such as "Click here to view a demo",
"Download Now", etc.
Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs
to be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we'll
add this line to the end of our PPC ad's description:
"Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!"
Read
the Rest of the Article
About the Author:
Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project manager.
He's most recently been kept busy helping out with the interface
design for Interspire's ROI
and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint. To see
how TrackPoint can help boost your revenue, go here: http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint
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