It’s time to ratchet up your pay per click advertising and you are looking for the most effective way to use your ad budget. Maybe you’ve just begun PPC advertising and need help. Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to optimize your search marketing ad campaigns using Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.
PPC and the Big Three
Don’t stray far from the proven winners — stick with Google, Yahoo and MSN for the best results. The Big Three are now offering very similar PPC services. These services all include being able to geo-target ads, set ads to turn on and off during peak times, and split test ad copy. Also, you have quality scores to optimize with each. The large majority of search traffic still belongs to Google, but each offers opportunities.
Google AdWords
Google drives more quality traffic than ever, but you still need to be careful about monitoring your results with frequency. Either do this yourself or hire a professional PPC management company.
One of the main problems with Google is that it is not only becoming more and more competitive, it is also getting more and more difficult to master. With “Quality Scores” playing a more important role these days and more bids coming up “Inactive for Search,” it introduces more variables into the equations. If you are willing to put in the time to continually test and monitor your keywords, you can maintain a healthy Google account. If you don’t, you get penalized. You’ll see bid minimums raised or forced to pay higher prices, or even be purposely priced out. The good news is that with consistent effort, you can actually fine tune and tweak your ad campaigns to the point where you are actually paying lower prices, but getting higher ranks than your competitors.
With any of the PPC engines, you need to make sure you separate out your content network advertising from your search advertising and track those separately. If you don’t in Google, bad keywords are probably leaking your account right now.
Are you an advertiser with a big monthly budget? If so, you can’t afford to put down your guard with Google — it can be costly. We recommend either dedicating more time, allocating more staff and hours or using a professional management company.
Yahoo Search Marketing: Still Essential
Yahoo Search Marketing (Formerly Overture, which was formerly Goto.com) underwent a major change early in 2007 with their Panama update. This overhaul was in direct response to what Google had done in the PPC marketplace. While they no longer dominate the pay per click arena as they had years back, they are still a very worthwhile place to invest.
Similar to Google, Yahoo has a “Quality Index” … and again, this is something that you have to pay attention to. Continual testing is a must. Yahoo won’t hit you as often and as strongly as Google, but your campaign will suffer if you don’t frequently split test to fine tune your ad quality.
With ad copy testing, you want to focus on the three C’s: Customer, Competition and your Company. What makes you special from your competition? What makes you more relevant to your customers? Test different ad concepts. Then, when you find a winner, use that as a control and refine your ad with small changes to variables. The key is to consistently test to crank up that Yahoo Quality Index.
MSN AdCenter
MSN is a late comer to the PPC game, but still a player to consider. MSN’s AdCenter has some excellent quality traffic and some unique targeting tools. AdCenter lets you manage the same geo-targeting type of local pay per click campaigns as the others, but you can also take it up a notch and target user demographics. If you find that you have high conversions for a certain demographic segment, you turn up your bids when AdCenter identifies those potential customers searching your specific keywords.
An important new feature from MSN allows you to import your Google AdWords accounts with much more ease. Note: Make sure your Google campaigns are as optimized and finely tuned as possible, or you will be making the same errors twice by importing them. And unless you have time to monitor them both daily, it might better to smooth out your problems in Google first. If you have large Ad Groups with huge lists of keywords, you need to condense those down into smaller, more manageable ones. Doing this will allow you to pinpoint the keywords with more relevant ads. And, again, keep testing and re-testing your targeted ads over and over.
The Others
With others like Ask and Looksmart, we’ve seen varied results. You can launch a campaign, see it succeed short term, then absolutely bottom out and put you in the hole. You can’t afford to mess around with these results for too long…your budget may not survive. Miva can also have up and down results. Be very cautious with high bids and don’t ignore your account for days at a time. Should you still venture into these other search engine markets? Not if you are struggling with managing your other PPC accounts. The good traffic is attainable, but you have to double your efforts on tracking and keep a tight eye on results since things can turn sour fast. Beyond these PPC engines, don’t waste time on all the others.
Most PPC advertisers find the Big Three to be more than enough work to keep them busy — or, at least they should. If you are not running daily split tests with your ads, if you aren’t tracking results down to the keyword level, if you aren’t searching for the profitable keywords that your competitors are on, then you are missing out on some tremendous bang for your buck with the big three.
Taking Care of Business
Ignoring the daily management needs of your PPC accounts will most likely result in bad keywords depleting your funds. On top of that, good keywords are getting more and more expensive because your quality scores are slipping compared to your competitors. Under-performing campaigns cost advertisers a huge chunk of potential business. It’s up to you to protect your investment with effective, intelligent supervision of your in-house PPC marketing or by outsourcing this essential work to a professional pay per click management company.
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