Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing

Index

What is PPC Search Engine Marketing?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine advertising is the purchase of clicks/visitors to your site from text ads placed in a sponsored links section of the search results page. These are usually located on the top or right hand side of the page. With pay-per-click, marketers compete for top positions for their ads by bidding on each keyword, where the higher the bid price the better the ad placement for that keyword.

Today, Google and Yahoo are not only the largest search engines, but the giants in pay-per-click search marketing as well. Each provides paid search listings to smaller engines, so that advertisers running campaigns on these get tremendous exposure. Depending upon your offering, your market and the audience you’re targeting, one engine may provide more cost effective leads then the other, so testing on both then balancing your budget accordingly is important if you want to maximize your PPC search engine marketing spend.

Why is PPC Search Engine Marketing So Popular?

Pay-per-click search engine marketing offers very attractive lead generation characteristics:
  • PPC delivers some of the most targeted visitors because they are specifically looking for information, products or services related to the keywords they entered and that you provide.
  • PPC delivers visitors with the most immediate needs - they’re actively looking for information or products right now.
  • PPC produces a steady flow of visitors and leads over the course of time - a flow that you control.
  • PPC has a cost per visitor that is known, controllable (i.e. whatever you bid for the keyword click) and often much lower than visitors delivered from other forms of online and offline marketing.
Why is 1-for-All a Great Choice for Your PPC Search Engine Marketing Campaign?

There is both an art and a science to creating successful pay-per-click campaigns. 1-for-All’s best practice methods include:
  1. We Create Comprehensive "Keyword Baskets": Creating a large keyword basket that encompasses much more than just the two or three dozen top-of-mind keywords you might come up with is one key to keeping your average cost per click low while maximizing traffic potential. Unfortunately, those two or three dozen most obvious keywords are the same ones that your competitors thought of and compete most heavily for. They usually have bid prices driven up well beyond the search engine minimum. In a number of market segments, paying $20 or more per click for a top ad spot is not unusual.

    Using various tools and a well honed keyword discovery process, 1-for-All will minimally identify several hundred keywords that your target audience is actually using in their searches. With many of these keywords, it’s often possible to achieve top ad positions near the search engine’s minimum bid price. Taking this approach, 1-for-All is able to generate thousands of search engine visitors each month for you with an average per click cost of cents versus dollars.

    Another benefit of having a comprehensive keyword basket is that many of the keywords uncovered are much more specific to the product or service being offered, so that visitors using those keywords are much more qualified.

  2. We Rank Keywords: All keywords are not created equal. Some keywords will generate more qualified leads and sales than others. For those, it’s worth managing more closely and paying more per click. Working with the client, "best bet" keywords are flagged up front and managed especially closely. Over time, after actual keyword performance is known, keywords are re-ranked as necessary to ensure that clients receive the biggest bang for their PPC marketing buck.

  3. We Create "Keyword Targeted" Ads: Ever run a search and noticed ads that seemed somewhat if not way off topic? That is typically the result of a "one size fits all" strategy to ad creative and is guaranteed to cost you traffic. And on Google, which sets individual minimum keyword bid prices based in large measure upon ad click-through effectiveness, money.

    1-for-All starts by placing related groups of keywords into categories, then creating unique sets of ads for each category. We then employ another best practice aspect of ad creative by utilizing individual keywords in ad titles and ad copy. While more labor intensive than creating generic ads, studies have consistently shown that ads that include the exact keyword entered by the searcher get much better results.

  4. We Design "Keyword Targeted" Landing Pages: Once you’ve paid to bring a visitor to your site, you naturally want as many of them as possible to take action, whether that’s to make an immediate buy, pick up the phone and call or fill out a form. A sure way to fail in that goal is to send your PPC search engine visitors to a home or product information page.

    Creating customized landing pages targeted to each keyword category - and specifically crafted to get the desired action - is critical to optimizing campaign success. These type pages can achieve 2-5X the conversion rates over using a product page and 5-10X or more over using your home page. Why is this?

    • Taking the visitor to your home page is almost guaranteed to require them to navigate your site to find what they’re really looking for. Many visitors won’t bother or will be unable to quickly find exactly what they seek and leave before taking the action you want them to take.

    • While better, sending visitors to a typical product page is still sub-optimal since most aren’t designed to generate immediate action. Before a prospect leaves your site, you want them to at least provide you with enough contact information so that you can continue marketing to them. Well designed landing pages make that happen a much higher percentage of the time.

  5. We Take a "Hands-on vs. Autopilot" Approach to Bid Management: Search engine provided and third party offered tools to help manage PPC keyword baskets can be real time savers, even a must when managing large keyword bundles. However, to get the most out of your campaign, you need a live human expert at the helm on an ongoing basis. 1-for-All blends automation with the personal touch to achieve the best results.

  6. We Provide Budget Balancing Between Engines for Optimum Impact: Automation tools also fall short in their inability to balance bids and dollars spent between search engines. It’s a case of "penny wise, pound foolish" if you’re saving $.03 per click for a keyword on Google, yet paying $.10 more per click there then on Yahoo and not balancing your spend accordingly.

    At 1-for-All, we handle all bid management activities for you, optimizing your spend not only between keywords but between engines.

  7. Our Rigorous Approach to the "3 Ts" - Testing, Tracking and Tuning: No keyword bundle, ad set, bid strategy or landing page will produce optimal results the first time out. Only a campaign that explicitly includes testing, tracking and tuning of each of those elements on an ongoing basis can ensure that you’re getting the most for your marketing dollar.


Find Out More

To find out more, please call us today at 858-642-2502 or e-mail us at


Free Appraisal and Free Tools

1-for-All would like to offer you a FREE PPC Campaign Appraisal and a number of FREE PPC Tools to assist you in your pay-per-click search engine marketing efforts. Click here to find out more.



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