pay per click – Micro Business Specialist

How To Keep Google Adwords Costs In Check

You can get significant marketing results with Google Adwords but unless you are careful and manage your results well, it can become quite expensive. That said, it can be a powerful and quick way to drive traffic to your web site. Ideally, you want ads with high click through rates, lower costs, and better response overall. We will discuss several of the best ways to take charge of your pay per click expenditures in the paragraphs that follow.

Experiment with cost per click AND cost per thousand impressions.

Some websites (and yours may be one) have highly targeted traffic to a particular offer. If that’s you, you can buy in volume on a cost per thousand (CPM) instead of cost per click basis. Do use “CPC”; (cost per click) in addition as well, but try CPM as well, to lower overall costs.

Keywords Matter
In almost any competitive niche, you will dicsover that the most obvious keywords tend to be very expensive. Be careful, because you don’t want to bid on the keywords that are really expensive – you could go broke pretty quickly. It is often better to search out less expensive keywords, and to organize them into effective ad groups wtih matching ad copy. You want to get the highest possible position at the lowest possible cost per click.

Adwords in not a set and forget game. You must constanly monitor your results and treat it from the beggining as an ongoing experiment. Start with a good keyword tool to identify a wide range of possible keywords. The free Google Keywords tool is one of the best out there, but you can find others that may add additional insights.

Long Tails Can Bring Good Results

There is ofter less competition and thus less cost for phrases of two or more words. Longer phrases also tend to be more narrowly targeted to your niche do whiel fewer people will search for them, those that do are more likely to be interested in your offer. The real payoff is that they are usually much cheaper clicks. I like to focus my capaigns as much as possible on three word keywords, and you should be sure to add a goodly number to your campaigns. Then watch and see not only which get clicks, but which convert into sales.

Now It’s Time To Start Selling

The ad your searchers see need to grab their attention and get them to click. If it doesn’t work well enough, Google will start charging you more when it does.

Your ads should:

• Uses your keyword phrase as often as possible, especially in the title
• Offer a benefit in the first line (not a feature)

• A call to action is good if you can fit it in

• Remove Objections with a Promise

• Use the keyword in the URL

The better written your ad the more clicks you will get. This in turn imporves your quality score and Google rewards you with lower costs per click.

Writing good ads in such a limited amount of space is a challenging art form, but the importance of well written ads requires on on going effort to constantly improve the ads you use.

Start with long tail keywords. Focus on well ritten ads and constantly try to improve them. The net result will be more traffic at lower cost per click.

[tags]Adwords, Google Adwords, Pay per click, PPC, Lower cost per click costs, Online advertising, PPC Ads[/tags]

How Much Is A Top Google Listing Worth?

I bet you have taken the time to search for your businesses web site on Google just to see where it ranked. When you searched for it by name using your url or most of the words of your domain name it probably did pretty well. However if you are a bakery, and search for “Bakeries”, the odds are that you are in the nether regions of the 13,900,000 listings.

A lot of small business people have given up on their websites as a result of this apparent invisibility. The gallop to the internet was all the rage before and after the dot com bust. However, for most small businesses, it has had little if any positive effects for their business.

The alternative that was easiest to figure out was to buy pay per click ads. They cost money, but at least they had an active prospect on the other end – usually. When some one did click on the ads, they were shown your offer and either did or didn’t buy.

At first a lot of keywords were real cheap, as little as a dime or less. Some still do, but many clicks these days run from $2-5 each and some go well beyond that into the $20 -$50 each and even much higher. You really need to know what you are doing to spend that type of money. And yet it can be well worth it.

Initially the pay per click ads were on the right side of the “organic” listings. The term organic listings refers to the free information that Google would find relevant to a searchers keywords. These free organic listings are the target we are shooting for when we try to get a top Google listing. Eventually, Google added some ads on the top of the left side as well, but we are still referring to the top organic listings.

When thinking about the value of this top organic spot, we can compare the value by looking at the equivalent cost of the top ads for the same search term.

It would cost $25 for 100 clicks to the advertiser. And this would be the equivalent value for 100 clicks on any of the organic searches.

Thus if a business were to get their organic site listed so that it got a hundred clicks a day, that listing would be worth the equivalent of $25 a day to them.

Now multiply this out for higher pay per click rates of say $2-5 each or much higher. Some keywords get a lot of searches every day, and this could multiply the value. The term “dog training” for example gets over a half million searches every month in the US alone. Dog training is a competitive word that would cost you $2.44 on average if you wanted to get the maximum pay per click volume for it. According to Google’s Traffic Estimator, if you were the top advertiser, you would expect to get 358 people clicking on your add every day, costing you $895.28. [Note that estimate of 358 people is 2% of the daily traffic.] (550,000 / 30 / 358) = 2%]

On the surface this would seem to indicate that have a top organic listing for Dog Training on Google would be worth almost $900 a day, assuming that the top listing got the same number of clicks as did the top ad.

It does not.

It probably gets a lot more.

Some time ago, as many as a fourth of all visitors would click on one on the ads on they typical results page. Recently, that number is closer to 18%

Industry experts suggest that a whopping 43% of people will click on the top organic result. This is significant.

It is even more significant when we understand that the percentage of people clicking on ads means those clicking on any of the ads.

Thus the top organic search result is getting between 8 and 22 times as many clicks as the top pay per click ad!

Calculating the results for our Dog Training example where the pay per click ad was worth about $900 a day, our top ranked listing should be worth roughly anywhere from 7 to 20 thousand dollars!

And that is why, getting to the top of Google’s Organic search is so valuable. As a result a whole new consulting industry has emerged to deal with this potential for value creation. Getting a listing to the top of the search engines is a worthy goal.

There are some additional caveats that need to be taken into account, but the central thrust of the above still holds true. People who choose the ads may for example be more actively looking to make a purchase compared to those who click the organic results who may be more interested in getting information.

Being the top organic listing may be meaningless, if the page people are taken to does not result in a desired action, etc.

That said, it should be obvious that getting a top organic search result is worthwhile.

[tags]Google, google Ranking, Organic Search value, top organic search, SEO, SEO Value, Why do SEO, Search Engine Optimization, pay per click[/tags]

Boost Seminar – Take Aways

Last weekend I attended Jeff Mills Boost Seminar in St Paul, Mn. which is so close to my home in South Minneapolis, I almost felt obligated to go.

The event was three days and on each of the days there were four presenters who shared with the gathered crowd about 90 minutes each. I found several of the presenters more personally useful than others, you may have found others more significant than I, depending on your particular interests and level of experience online.

My intention of to share some of the takeaways I got from the event over the next week or so, intermixed with my ongoing series on Product Creation. Otherwise I risk losing too much of the material.

As it is I will just be hitting some of the key points I learned, it would be too much work to redo all my notes and probably not fair to those who paid to attend the event and the speakers.

On the first day, the presenter who most impressed me with his willingness to share useful information was Greg Cesar.

His presentation was called, “How to Identify H0t Profitable Markets and Use PPC Advertising Like a Pro.”

Now I dip into and out of Pay Per Click from time to time, but it is not my main focus.

In today’s post I just want to focus on one key point that Greg hit home, that applies in many ways to many markets, media and circumstances, and that is what he called “Mind Set Questions.”

He is of course talking about prospects who might be clicking on a Pay Per Click ad, be it Google or some other. The question is where is that person, about to do the search in terms of their mindset. Are they just beginning a search for information, or are they about to make a buying decision.

I discuss this concept in another way on my blog on Top Public Speaking Tips as well. Whenever, you are selling or promoting an idea you need to not only know your product, but your audience.

You want to know who they are, what they are looking for, where they are going to get it, why they want it and when do they need it.

This of course is easier to say than to do. But in terms of Pay Per Click advertising a person searching for the keyword, “Digital Camera’s” is far more likely to be in the early information gathering stage than the person who is searching for: “Nikon Colorpix 4600”

Thus it makes sense to be creating keywords that are aimed at the prospect who is about to make that buying decision, doesn’t it?

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Well let’s add one more for today: some keywords can get pretty expensive for pay per click advertising. But if you are willing to be creative you can come up with alternative words by thinking out of the box.

Here’s two ideas to get you started.

Rather than searching for keywords to substitute for Golf or Golfing, consider setting up local searches for the names of local golf courses to find your local niche interested in golf. Many will have few if any competitors and you should be able to find lots of local traffic that will be open to your golf related offer.

Another idea, I have implemented was to search on Amazon for book titles that were relevant to a particular topic. By looking for the top two or three book titles I choose one in one of my niches that was being searched for by word of mouth, and found that the only other advertiser for the title was amazon itself. My alternative product is now being seen and getting clicked on for much less than many of the long tail keywords I had previously been using.

[tags]pay per click, Greg Cesar, Keyword, keywords, Jeff Mills, Boost Seminar, long tail keywords [/tags]

Meta Tag Tweak – Small Business Web Page Blunders

As I have been working with small businesses in the off line world, I have discovered that most of them have poor to non existant keywords in the hidden meta tag code of their web sites. Since Google apparently doesn’t give these much weight these days, it appears some web designers skip over them. That’s a mistake. While Google is the big daddy out there in search land, it has at best 60% of the search market, and the other 40% of the guys do use meta tag keywords to find your site.

I don’t know about you, buy I can’t afford to miss out on 4 of 10 customers.

This is particularly important for small businesses in the current slow economy. I’ve made a special offer to my friends in the Home Staging industry, where I have done some fairly extensive research in the past and offered them a special deal. My advantage is that I have already researched the keywords appropriate to the industry, and it’s easy to massage them to meet each individual’s circumstance.

I am open to doing additional work along these same lines for other industries as well. A solid set of meta tag keywords can also serve as a good start on pay per click advertising as well.

Drop me an email at enetwal@gmail.com for more info.