First, familiarizing yourself with your website’s conversion rate

What is the percentage that a sale will be made with 100 unique visitors to your website? Let’s assume that only 1 visitor will make a purchase. That means your website has a conversion rate of 1%.

Although the traffic quality that you get from a pay-per-click search engine may differ from that of a traditional search engine or any other advertising measures, familiarizing with your website’s conversion rate will definitely give a better gauge to how much you are going to bid than a calculated guess.

Let’s take this for an example: assume your conversion rate is 1%. You’ll need 100 clicks to your site before you can make 1 sale. Convert it and its $10 if your bid is Overture’s minimum bid of $0.10 per click.

Using this as a gauge, you can estimate if your advertising cost is going to be covered back by that 1 sale. If so, then would you be willing to increase your budget to increase your clicks and sales? Will this make you a bigger profit or a loss?

You will be able to use this to test out your marketing strategy and thus maximizing the profits while cutting down on costs.

Second, are you using the right keyword phrases for the search?

The key to more sales is to target the right market with the right product. On the internet, using the right keyword phrases for the visitors to search for your website is absolutely crucial.

This is because if you use the wrong keyword phrases, you ended up with lots of unwanted traffic that costs you your bidding money. But if you use a keyword phrase that no one searches for it, then even worse, you ended up with no traffic at all.

So using the right keyword phrases will determine the type and quality of your visitors that will indirectly influences your sales and income. Always use the Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool to help you in finding the right keyword phrases for your business: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Third, finding the best bid position for the greatest value

Most people tend to bid for the #1 position in the search listing for their keywords. Though the top 3 listings will definitely get the most traffic but you can still get good quality traffic from links in the first 30 listings.

Some people even claim that these visitors are more qualified as they took more time browsing through the description and choosing the most appropriate for them before they click on it.

Another great thing to take advantage is the gaps between each individual bids.

For example, at the time of this writing, Overture’s listings showed the following bids for the search term “fashion”:

#1 position - $0.76 #2 position - $0.47 #3 position - $0.46 #4 position - $0.45 #5 position - $0.40 #6 position - $0.39 #7 position - $0.32

As the bids are separated by a few cents differences but you can still save up quite a bit on bidding money if you know. Let’s see, if you wanted #1 position then you would have to bid for $0.77, that’s quite a big bid but if you were to settle for a #2 position instead, you ended up paying only $0.48. That’s a savings of 29 cents!

Then if you were to bid for #7 position for a mere 33 cents only, although this may not seems very much but comparing the difference of bidding position #1 and #7, you can end up saving a whopping $44 for every 100 clicks! This savings can be better utilized after you have decided whether if you should pay the extra cost for that position.

Though pay-per-click search engines are not the cheapest method to advertise your online business, but they can be a great addition to your whole marketing strategy. Remember it is how much return on the investment that really counts rather than the amount of money you are willing to fork out.

About the Author:
Affiliate-Network Marketing Success Secrets: Get Richard Lam’s 3-part special report on How You Can Save Tons on the Downsides of Pay-Per-Click Search Engines and other cost savings methods. Send an email to: ppcdownsides@getresponse.com to get the report now.

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