Paid-for 'clicks' or visitors?

How to use pay per click advertising for maximum success?

Sometimes called the pay for performance model pay per click advertising runs on all the major search engines - but only three major advertising companies feed ALL search engines. Those companies are described below.

Google
Google is the biggest and most important of the three vehicles. It's ads or pay-per-click boxes or sponsored links appear on Google itself - but also on Ask Jeeves and then on numerous other smaller sites.

Overture
Overture is an American company which feeds many search engines including AOL, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Freeserve, Lycos, MSN and Tiscali and well as numerous smaller sites.

Espotting
Espotting is a British company with a European emphasis and supplies ads into Yahoo, Lycos, and Kelkoo.

How to drive your Pay Per Click Strategy

Focus on three key measures:

1. Clicks per month
2. Average cost per click
3. Conversion rate per phrase

Here's why....

1. Clicks per month
Set a fixed budget per month and aim to increase the number of clicks month on month. If you or your agency are clever enough you can do that even despite the escalating bid prices. And you want to know that your business is generally growing and that enquiries are not going to fall off a cliff too.

2. Average cost per click
Don't look at individual phrases. Work out how you are going to achieve your target orders per month by looking at the conversion of clicks into orders. If you focus on the cost per click - you will take out the phrases that are proving highly expensive and where the bidding is ludicrously running away with them. Beware! Your competitors may have taken the decision to bid you over your limit. Never bid on sky high phrases however much they may appear to be worth in terms of order generation.

3. Conversion rate per phrase
Why isn't cost per order or ROI included? Simply because if you have the cost per click and you remove phrases that are not converting you are looking after the cost per order anyway and your strategy will be right too. If you spend too much time looking at return on investment against individual phrases - you're actually missing out on the true potential. Instead - set a minimum conversion rate after 500 impressions - and pull out of the phrase if it's not working for you.

Here are a few additional rules of thumb to guide you:

• Try to focus on phrases that are clearly relevant to your business. Customers using phrases that clearly indicate they are looking for your products or services are much more likely to convert.
• Always include Google in your portfolio - or your reach is much reduced.
• Don't focus on achieving the maximum 'click through rate' - make sure your ads explain clearly what you offer - then the clicks will be lower and so will the cost. However, those that do click will convert at a higher rate and so your RETURN - which is what really matters - will be much higher.
• Be happy to have the maximum possible number of phrases under bidding. The more phrases you are working on, the lower your average click costs will be because you can pick and choose.
• Set a fixed budget - and set targets to increase the number of clicks for the budget.
• Move out of phrases the become too expensive - and go for more words in the phrase. You will earn more business by doing this because you'll keep the cost per click down. And the relevancy will be higher.
• Take out every possible spelling and misspelling of your company name - usually noone can bid against you on that anyway - and it does make sure that your customers can find you - whatever they type!

Finally, if you are spending more than £1,000 per month on pay per clicks - pick up the phone now and get your web site optimised for the search engines - or you're simply throwing money away!!

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