Lesson #17 Intro to Pay Per Click SE Marketing
Written By Cyndalie

Pay per click search engines offer a good way to find out how well your site will convert with qualified traffic. It is often difficult for webmasters to find out why their site does not make more sales than expected (or hoped). If your site does not convert well (or at all) with at least 400 unique hits a day, could the problem be the sources of your traffic or is there something about the quality of your site design, content, or products offered? Pinpointing exactly where your sales come from and where they are lost can be an art form, but knowing can dictate the overall health of your business and long term success as well. With this in mind, pay per click engines can offer some insight into how a user searches and buys, can help you improve your site to be better converting, and can help with your everyday search engine marketing campaigns.

Since getting high rankings in the search engines can feel like a gamble, pay per click engines provides a level field to "pay to play". You can test the waters when it comes to selecting keywords to target in your regular marketing campaigns to see how much they are really worth working to attain rankings. High rankings do not always equate to high traffic, just as high traffic does not always equate to sales.

Pay per click search engines work fairly simply. You create an account and deposit some funds to get started. If this is your first time using a pay per click engine or ad campaign, start with test campaign of about $50. Especially for Google Adwords, making a large first deposit when setting up your bids can result in an accidental misuse of funds because you are not familiar with the settings and options you have selected. Learn to use the system, understand the terminology, and understand the billing cycles before making a large deposit.

Here is an example: You may feel that your adult toy store should target keywords like "adult toys" and "sex toys" which are very competitive in the organic (unpaid) results. You may feel that those who have these rankings are doing the most business in your sector if the industry, so you mimic or try to compete to bee seen where they are.

You try out a pay per click campaign and see that because these keywords are so competitive they cost ten to thirty cents per click or more. Now people who search for "adult toys" are usually just surfing or find a site (portal) and then looking for a specific product or title. (More often "adult toys" is simply a phrase used in conjunction with other keywords like "female adult toy".) Keywords for product names or titles could be cost 3 cents per click, so you may want to consider seeing how well these keywords convert in a pay per click engine and therefore add them to your list to optimize for in other engines (there will most likely be less competition too!). This is an example of targeting, and extreme targeting can go so far to reduce the room for error in going from search to product that you can have each keyword targeted ad listing point direct to the most relevant page on your site.

If we use made up numbers as a test case, it is easy to see how one may target keywords, not for traffic but for sales, in a goal to gain the most highly converting traffic for the lowest overall cost (high ROI). In scenario one, we spend 10$ on targeted traffic for the exact phrase "adult toys"; this results in 200 hits and 2 sales. In scenario two, we spend 10$ on targeted traffic for the exact phrase "jackrabbit vibe"; this results in 40 hits and 5 sales. Scenario 1 resulted in $60.00 in sales, minus cost for a profit of $50.00. Scenario 2 resulted in $300.00 in sales (Jackrabbits being a high cost per item), minus cost, for a profit of $290.00. Then subtract cost of item if you are a wholesaler, or if you are an affiliate, calculate your payout based. It is easy to see that direct targeted, albeit more menial, results in a higher ROI. This does depend on what you are selling of course. Tangible items are the easiest to micro-target. Advertising services for leads can be more complex, and with paysite sales being a frequent hit-or-miss, the micro-targeting on niche and features is key.

Campaigns will take some time to setup. What I found was that creating a different campaign for each featured product or section of my site and sending keyword related traffic from that listing directly to that area of my site incurred less clicks for the surfer to get to what they want on my site and fewer clicks reduces overall bandwidth bills and a better experience for the user. Setting up campaigns this way is also easier to manage.

Knowing which products or keywords convert the best at your site with pay per click traffic will also tell you that marketing in regular search engines for those keywords per page of your site will do just as well or better in the long run. Also if you are promoting a new product, hot model, web site name, or whatever, you can market for it with instant ranking results rather than waiting a month or two to see if you made a good ranking.

Trends: PPC campaigns can be key to achieve high rankings FAST for keyword trends. One investment brokerage caught a wave of investors after gas prices hiked after an active Hurricane season, for example.

Pay per click campaigns can take some maintenance, but I have found that when all else fails, you have a good chance at making your money back and more when you work on and tweak campaigns for the long term.

PPC engines worth considering are Google Adwords, Kanoodle, EPilot, Sex.com, SearchBoxxx, Yahoo/Overture, Ah-ha/Enhance and FindWhat, Email me if you would like more information on my contacts at these engines.

Overall I highly recommend you try a PPC campaign and read more articles on this topic, as there are many ways to get a lot of targeted traffic from "unclaimed keywords" in these engines.