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In past issues, I've discussed the pro's and con's of advertising on PPC engines
like Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks, and others. I've mentioned how Overture has
the advantage of offering you the most traffic for your positions. However,
you'll often pay more for the same keyword position on Overture than you will
on nearly any of its competitors. In some cases, you will pay two or three fold
more on Overture versus the same positions on less popular PPC's like Sprinks
or Ah-Ha.com.
So why do people continue bidding on Overture when you can buy the same position
elsewhere for less? Part of it comes down to the hidden cost of PPC's: The time
to manage your listings versus the traffic they can bring you. Some PPC's offer
only a fraction of the traffic that Overture commands. However, if you combine
the half dozen or more "second-tier" PPC's, they can drive even more
traffic to your site than Overture does. However, you may have to spend six
times more work to secure and manage those listings since each PPC has their
own bid manager interface.
What makes matters worse is that the most popular keywords tend to cost the
most and produce the least targeted audience. You'll convert a higher percentage
of visitors to sales when you bid on keyword phrases that are very specific
to your Web site. Unfortunately, the more specific you are, the fewer people
who search for that particular keyword. This problem can be counter-acted by
bidding on large numbers of focused phrases that people search for. As I've
mentioned in the past, the WordTracker service (http://www.wordtracker.com/freetrial.htm)
can help you in finding the best words and phrases to target.
You can make the most money per visitor by bidding on higher numbers of FOCUSED
keyword phrases on the half dozen or more smaller PPC's. The problem comes from
trying to allocate the time to manage all these extra placements. For example,
you could bid 20 cents to secure a top position on a certain keyword currently
topping out at 19 cents. Quite often the bid below you will eventually drop
out leaving what is called a bid gap. If this gap is more than 1 cent, you are
paying too much for that position!
Often times the bid gap can be significant, particularly if you don't notice
it for a while. Ideally the PPC engine itself would inform you of the gap and
automatically lower your bid to be one cent above the bid below you. That would
save you money, but it would cost the engine money. Consequently, most PPC engines
are reluctant to offer a feature that costs them money.
The professionals, and increasingly, new search engine marketers are taking
advantage of one of the many PPC bid management services available. Nearly all
of these services will report bid gaps to you. In fact, WebPosition will track
your rankings and by reviewing the Detail reports, you can spot bid gaps. A
few bid management services will not only report bid gaps, but will automatically
reduce your bid the same day the gap occurs, saving you money.
Some of these PPC managers allow you to setup a link to your accounts at all
the major PPC's like Overture, Sprinks, FindWhat, etc. You can then control
all your bids through a single integrated interface. That way if you decide
that a certain keyword phrase is not working for you, press a single button
and eliminate it on ten or more PPC engines. In the same way, rather than manually
adding a new keyword to ten different PPC's, you can enter it just once in the
PPC manager. The PPC manager will log into each account you have at each PPC
engine and update your settings as needed.
If you manage more than a handful of keywords, a good PPC manager can pay for
itself quickly in time-saved and in the money saved through automated bid gap
management. We spent the last few months trying different PPC managers. We found
that many offer bid gap reporting only. Bid gap reporting is nice, but we found
that it quickly becomes tedious and impractical to log on and lower your bid
by a few cents in dozens of different places each day. We all have better ways
to spend our time.
The PPC managers that include fully automated bid management often support
only a few of the major PPC's. Since the greatest value comes from efficiently
combining bids across an array of less popular, yet far less expensive PPC's,
we eliminated these PPC managers from our consideration. We reviewed the remaining
candidates and eventually chose ClickPatrol for offering the best quality and
feature-rich service for the money.
We now use ClickPatrol for our own PPC management. In addition, after choosing
the service we liked the best, we approached ClickPatrol and negotiated a 10%
perpetual discount for all WebPosition customers and MarketPosition subscribers.
Ten-percent may not sound like a huge discount, but since ClickPatrol is a monthly
subscription service, it can certainly add up over time.
ClickPatrol offers a free trial so you can decide for yourself if they are
worth the money. To receive the 10% discount when you purchase, you'll need
to sign-up through the link below:
http://www.clickpatrol.com/intro/wpdiscount.par
(Note: The pricing on their site reflects their regular pricing before the
discount is applied).
Let us know what you think about ClickPatrol, good or bad! Our ongoing goal
is to pass on tips, techniques, and advice to improve your visibility on the
search engines. We want to review and recommend only the best tools and services
available to help you succeed.
If we learn of a great new service or optimization technique, we want to pass
that on to you through this newsletter, or through WebPosition. On the flip
side, we aren't afraid to give it to you straight if something is not a good
deal (i.e., LookSmart's recent "draconian" business practices).
About the author:
Robin Nobles is the Director of Training of the Academy of Web Specialists, which teaches online training in search engine marketing. She is also a trainer with Search Engine Workshops, which presents on location workshops in search engine marketing at various locations across the country. Please visit our site for more information about online training and other resources. |
