Commercial-In-Confidence Web Marketing Pay Per Click
1 Overview... 3 2 How it Works... 3 3 The Major Players... 3 3.1 Commonality... 3 3.2 Google Adwords... 3 3.3 Overture... 6 3.4 espotting... 7 4 Good Adverts... 7 5 Good Bidding... 7
1 Overview This document describes the various pay per click engines available to web marketers wishing to promote their web site. 2 How it Works Pay per click has become a major method of promoting web sites in the past 12 months and whilst they all vary a little in how they work the basic fundamental is that you bid for a keyword or phrase up to a maximum and the bid determines your position in the listings. When a user clicks your advert and is redirected to your site, you pay either your max bid or just a bit more than the next highest bidder. You do not pay for each advert impression, only for actual visitors. 3 The Major Players There are many major pay per click companies but only 3 big players relevant to the UK at the moment. These are Google Adwords, Overture and espotting. We ll discuss each of these in detail. 3.1 Commonality The major players have some features in common. You can select which geographical markets to pitch to (UK, Germany, US etc.) Define a heading Define body text Define the URL to point to Define the display URL Adverts must be targeted. These ad campaigns have editors who will review your advert against various guidelines and one of these is relevancy. So you can t just advertise on popular search terms which are irrelevant 3.2 Google Adwords http://www.google.com Google is the largest search engine on the web, if you are optimising your web site the google is always the first target. They currently have 2 advertising campaigns Premium and AdWords. Premium is based on a per impression basis and is being phased out by the end of the year. If you visit http://www.google.com type in a search for lingerie
The lime coloured link at the top is a premium ad. The boxes on the right are adwords adverts. When the premium ads are replaced the top 1-2 adwords ads will become premium listings in future (it s possible to achieve this today if no Premium advertisers have the keyword). For clarification: Google PPC ads start from as little as 4p per click as a minimum. Google s advert positioning is based on your bid and how popular your advert is, so a lower bidder with a popular ad can in theory go up the rankings. See below for Google s description:
One thing that differentiates Google from espotting and Overture is that an advertiser on espotting and Overture must have an exact phrase match. So if I advertise on Overture for the keyword Lingerie but the user types in french lingerie I will not match but on Google I can buy the lingerie keyword with fuzzy matching (it s the default on google anyway). This is a disadvantage and an advantage because it saves you thinking up every phrase a user might type but it also saves your competitors too and the lazy marketer with a big budget can just take everything. The other major advantage of Google is that they edit your adverts after they have gone live, so your ad can be up and running in seconds. ESpotting and Overture review the advert before letting it go live. Google ads appear on Google.com and Google.co.uk as well as many engines that are powered by google so the reach is pretty far. A big differentiator for Google is that they allow you to set a daily budget. This can keep costs in line but if you set it too low, your ad will not appear every time so that your budget doesn t get busted. 3.3 Overture http://www.uk.overture.com Overture adverts are displayed in the UK on search engines such as Yahoo.com, msn.co.uk, aol.co.uk, freeserve, ask.co.uk, lycos, altavista and more. So you can see that overture is an important prospect too. One advantage over Google is that Overture ads on most of these sites look more like standard listings.
Whilst it clearly shows that they are sponsor results, the average user just sees it as a top listing. Typically overture powered sites have the first 2-3 listings at the top of the page, sometimes 2-3 at the bottom and as the user pages through the listings subsequent ads can be found. The biggest opportunity with Overture is to pick up complete phrases that other advertisers have not yet found. Recently however Overture introduced a tool based on the past 30 days searches which makes this a lot easier. As with Google s inclusive fuzzy matching this tool is both an advantage and disadvantage. Overture keywords are plural insensitive so you need only bra to get bra and bras. Bidding starts at 10p per click. 3.4 espotting http://www.espotting.com espotting is similar to overture but with less reach. It supplies adverts for yahoo.co.uk (as opposed to yahoo.com in the UK powered by Overture), alltheweb, ask, easyinternet, netscape and more. espotting offers similar exact phrase matching to Overture but additionally is plural sensitive so you will need to bid on both the singular and the plural. For most terms users search on the plural but there are some exceptions. Bidding starts at 10p per click. 4 Good Adverts The following are a few simple guidelines to help you create good adverts. Include the main keywords in the title and body of the advert. On most search engines the keywords get set to bold or another colour to make them (therefore your advert) stand out. Additionally if a user types in Darjeeling Teas she is more likely to go to an ad for Darjeeling than an ad for generic Tea Dealer. This means you will need to create 1 advert for nearly each and every keyword phrase you use. It is worth the hard work. Have a call to action that differentiates you in some way. Free offers, discounts, exact price if you can beat all the competitors. This needs to be done carefully as each PPC engine has rules about what sort of words are and are not allowed. Keep the advert relevant. 5 Good Bidding If you find phrases that are not bid for you can have the #1 spot for the minimum bid so it s worth seeking them out. For the popular terms the bidding may go over 1. To bid in this league you need to be sure that you can get a return on investment or be confident that you can make an ROI given the lifetime of the customer. We would recommend taking minimum bids initially and work out what your conversion rate of visitors into customers is. Then knowing your profit margins you can establish your maximum bid on the keyword.