PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES
Pay per click search engines are those charging for each click-through they direct your way. The more you pay for a keyword, the higher it will rank on the pay per click search engines, and the more traffic you'll achieve. Using the service is straightforward, and the approach has become very popular. Many searchers prefer these engines, knowing that the listings are better maintained, and that advertisers are paying good money to appear.
Pay-per-click search engines will help you to:
test the market for a new idea or product
sell a book or service in a crowded marketplace.
Perhaps you're thinking of writing a popular account of linguistics, with special reference to native American languages. Publishers contacted are not enthusiastic, however, and you're not sure yourself whether it will be worth the effort. Why not do what all sensible marketers do? — test the proposition. Put up a couple of webpages, the second (buy me page) saying the book is not yet available. Offer the book through a brief pay-per-click campaign. If response is favourable you'll have data to convince sceptics, and if not, well, at least you've saved yourself months or years of work. (You can do the same on eBay, of course.)
Pay per click search engines may also be helpful if you have actually written and are self-publishing a book through a modest website. If that website achieves a 2% conversion rate, and you pay 5 cents/click-through, then your selling costs are $2.50 per book, which compares very favourably with other marketing methods.
For many e-merchants, in fact, the days when they could get decent sales from 'free' listings on Yahoo, MSN or Google are distant memory. Competition has sharpened, and the search engines themselves have stepped up their fees. Unless the site has lots of useful and possibly unique content — time-consuming to create and maintain — paying for click-throughs may be the only hope of getting Internet traffic.
Unfortunately, there are now over 600 pay-for-click search-engines to choose from. Successful campaigns tend to be expensive: the larger companies employ experts, and shell out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in click fees every month. Special software or services have to be employed to optimize the strategies, and to monitor results. The keywords themselves are often overpriced, perhaps kept purposely so by the big companies wanting to close down the competition. Some hostile 'customers' may generate clicks automatically with robots, and traffic logs need to be kept to get a refund from the search engine(s) concerned. And, if that weren't enough, the accompanying site descriptions can be rewritten by the pay-for-click search engines, requiring e-merchants to adjust their budget upwards or their traffic downwards.
You can still succeed, but you have to know what you're doing.
Submission is usually straightforward, and Overture's (now Yahoo's) is typical. You first open an account and deposit some money, usually through a credit card. Next you fill out the Overture Simple Signup form, bidding on the keyword phrases where you want your site to appear. You also specify a title (max 40 characters) and a description (max 190 characters). Your title and description can vary for each keyword, even if linked to the same page, but keywords must relate to your linked page. Since results depend upon the title and short ad description, you may wish to employ a professional at this point.
Campaigns need to be planned, usually with these overlapping objectives:
1. Search for optimal keywords, either with the tools provided by Google, Overture, Teoma or with Wordtracker. Understand what visitors are looking for under various keywords (your own website traffic statistics will help). Find out which keyword gives the best ROI (rate of return on investment: not necessarily the most click-throughs). Experiment further to see how ranking affects ROI (traffic may be four times higher at the #1 ranking than at the #5 listing, but the bid price may be more than four times higher). Compare bid prices across search engines with Pay Per Click Search Engine Top Bid Analyzer or CompareYourClicks.
2. Organization of keywords by the buying cycle: research words (e.g. widget review) are usually less expensive than sale closers.
3. Add filters to keywords (e.g. bulk supplies) to eliminate unwanted traffic.
4. Get sufficient results to test your campaign by bidding high for the first few days, lowering the bid later in line with your marketing budget. (With Overture, moreover, a top three ranking will automatically give you a top ten ranking with Yahoo and other partners.)
5. Use 3-4 different keywords (changing title and description accordingly) and monitor results. Keep experimenting.
6. Vary the ad copy to a. distinguish your product, make it memorable, and filter out unwanted visitors.
7. Create special pages (landing pages) for your visitors that meet their expectations and drive them to the sale. Keep experimenting with landing pages. You'll probably need some client-side tracking program/service to monitor results.
8. Repeat the above with different pay-for-click search engines, making sure (different landing pages or with site tracking services) that you can differentiate between results. The less popular search engines are cheaper, but customers sent by them can be less 'serious', i.e. lower conversion rates apply.
A lot of work, but pay-for-click search engines do have helpful features, notably: