-Guest Post by Jason Lancaster of Spork Marketing-

The elegance of the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising concept is striking. There aren’t many forms of advertisement that give you the ability to put your ad in front of exactly the right person at exactly the right time, and for that reason PPC advertising is very alluring to business owners.

To ensure that your marketing dollars are well spent, there are several questions you want to be able to  answer before you dive into pay-per-click advertising .

5 Questions You Must Answer Before Starting a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

1.What are your specific, desired results? Do you want your PPC ads to generate a telephone call? An email lead? An order for a specific product? Answering this question as precisely as possible is a key first step in the process.

2. Do you have precise tracking in place? One of the main benefits of PPC advertising is that it lends itself very easily to precision tracking. With tracking in place, you can determine:

• Which keywords are most likely to generate a lead or result in a sale
• Which ad text is most compelling
• Which landing pages and/or calls to action have the best conversion rate
• Which days of the week or times of the day are most profitable
• …and dozens of other useful stats that can help you improve your return on investment

Remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure: a good tracking system is an absolute requirement for any PPC campaign.

3. Do you have a landing page? When many businesses begin a PPC campaign, landing pages (the page on your site where you direct your PPC clicks) are an afterthought. Yet the landing page is the most important aspect of your PPC campaign. A good landing page will:

• Clearly identify your business and the service you’re providing
• Have content that matches the keyword the user typed in and the ad they clicked on
• Have a clear description of your product or service and the key benefits
• Connote trust through the use of recognizable symbols and logos
• Have a clear call to action

If your landing page has all of these items, your PPC campaign has a very good chance of generating a profit.

On the other hand, if your landing page is lacking, a good percentage of your pay-per-click visitors will “bounce” (a term used to describe a visitor who views your site and leaves in less than 30 seconds). As you can imagine, the return on investment of a PPC landing page with a high bounce rate isn’t very good.

4. What keywords will show your ads? If you’ve paid an SEO consultant for professional keyword research, then you should have a nice stack of keywords you can use for your PPC campaign. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to hire a PPC or SEO consultant to do some keyword research.

If you’re on a budget and paying for professional keyword research is out the window, you’ll want to dig in and do some keyword research yourself. SEOMoz has a Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research that is a great starting point.

5. Who will create and manage your PPC campaign? Pay-per-click advertising is deceptively complicated. While the concept is simple, the practical application requires knowledge, training, and experience. Whether or not you’ll want to hire someone to create and manage your PPC campaign will depend on the answers to the following questions:

• Are you buying ads on competitive keywords – are more than 3 or 4 people advertising on the terms you want to try?
• Is your average cost per click going to be higher than $1?
• Are you spending more than $500 per month?

If the answer to any of the questions above is “yes,” you should consider hiring a professional PPC ad manager. The reason? People who are new to PPC advertising platforms usually make mistakes, and the cost of these mistakes can ad up to hundreds or thousands of dollars in the circumstances listed above. By hiring a professional PPC manager, you’re saving yourself money in the long run.

Pay Per Click Advertising Works When Done Correctly

Bottom Line: Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most effective forms of advertising on the planet because it offers precision targeting and unparallelled tracking, both of which allow for continuous improvements in ROI.  If you answer the five key questions above before starting a PPC campaign, your odds of success are greatly improved.

Finally, remember that while the concept of PPC is simple in theory, it can be very complicated in practice. If you intend to invest in PPC advertising, you should seriously consider hiring a professional to setup and manage your PPC campaign.

If you’re looking for someone to help you with your PPC campaign, Google has a network of certified PPC advertising experts that you can search here. Of course, you can also contact Spork Marketing to discuss their PPC ad management services too!

About the Author: Jason Lancaster is President of Spork Marketing, LLC, a Denver Internet marketing company offering PPC ad management services.

-Chris

You Can’t Just Digg Your Way to the Top Anymore

Digg announced today (9/2/09) that it is now applying the no-follow attribute to any links that are deemed untrustworthy, effectively ending the constant stream of SPAM that is posted to Digg daily.   While they did state that they are going to continue to allow link juice to flow to “trusted” articles, and they are not adding the no-follow attribute to all links, they did not specify what would constitute a trusted article.   Links on user profiles, comments and not-so-popular posts will get the no-follow tag, meaning it won’t pass along link juice.

John Quinn made the announcement regarding the changes on the official Digg blog:

“We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community. These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content. We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.”

From what I can tell initially, any articles that make the front page of Digg avoid the no-follow attribute, therefore allowing the social community to effectively police the articles that are posted to Digg.   If an article gets enough votes from the community, it earns the trust needed to garner the link juice that comes from Digg.

Seems fair to me…

Minimal Impact on the SEO Community

This really shouldn’t affect the good SEO’s too much.  Sure, you lose an easy source of links that can be built with keyword based anchor text, but Digg seemed to be cracking down on link spam in general, so this just takes it one step further, and does so in an orderly fashion.  This will really only affect the spammy SEO’s that are simply posting article’s for the single Digg link.  If you are writing good content, and it includes links to true subject matter experts, you will still earn your link juice, they’ve just made it much harder to game the system.

Secondly, the no-follow attribute doesn’t completely eliminate the passage of link value, it simply dilutes it.  How much?  No one but the folks at Google really know, and they’re not going to show their hand.   The best you can do is read up on Matt Cutts blog post about no-follow and link sculpting, and draw your own conclusions.  For the purpose of continuing to use Digg for SEO, you should have a quality copywriter that can captivate an audience with a great article (or at least a great title), and you should build your network of friends, thereby increasing your chances of hitting the front page.

Other Social Sites Soon to Follow?

It will remain to be seen, but the social media world is a copycat arena.  Twitter was strong-armed into adding no-follow to all of their links, and now Digg has gone the same route.   Digg has said that ” This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields” and one can assume that the experts included Google.

If other social sites start to get the overflow of Digg spammers, they too may start evaluating their own links and whether or not they should follow links.  And you always have the possibility that Google will “help” them figure out how they should handle their links as well.   I think there’s a good probability that more social sites will follow suit in the coming months.

If This Hurts You, You Need Better Link Sources

This is a good thing for SEO.  It will force out some of the spammers that can’t, or won’t put in the effort to find their own natural link sources, and will reward those who have spent the time building their profiles and interacting on the site.   Great content is still going to get Dugg, and will still have the potential to make the front page, while your quick and easy link-spamming will deteriorate, although it may not come to a screeching halt.

Get that copywriter going, get back to writing good content, and seek other link sources.  They are out there, you just have to stop being lazy.

-Chris

Yahoo Search Marketing recently announced that they are launching their Rich Ads in Search program with a few household names to test the integration of video and images into the Paid Search Results. They are calling this program Rich Ads in Search, and it allows an advertiser to place images, video and custom search boxes into the paid search ad.

A limited group of advertisers tested it in the fourth quarter of 2008 and saw click-through rates rise by as much as 25 percent. They’ve also seen improved brand exposure and conversion rates. It remains to be seen how this can improve the results for the small to mid sized business, who don’t have the same kind of brand recognition as the trial companies, but the editor of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s blog, Jeff Sweat, is very enthusiastic about the results:

What can rich ads do?
The Rich Ads in Search program is being shared with a small number of brand advertisers such as Pedigree and Esurance and agencies such as Razorfish. The program lets advertisers:

• Post images and video, which can increase the branding impact of search advertising. Pedigree has added video to its campaigns, for instance.
• Create deep links to relevant pages, which can help drive conversions directly from the Yahoo! search results page.
• Include boxes within the listing that lets users search for their desired product or a store location directly without additional navigation. Esurance’s listing lets users enter their ZIP codes from the results page for insurance quotes.
• Show their logo, which enhances user trust.

Rich Ads in Search is currently by invitation only to a small group of our brand advertisers, but we will update you as it opens up. In the meantime, start thinking of what your search ads could do for you.

With an increase of 25% in conversion rates, it’s going to be labeled as a success. I wouldn’t argue that the initial results are positive. I would be cautiously optimistic about the potential. Why am I not ranting about the potential to use video and images to improve Paid Search?

Three Reasons I’m Not Ecstatic About Rich Ads in Search:

• Clicks to See the Model, not the Product – Remember the Paris Hilton commercial for Carl’s Jr? While that ad was definitely eye catching and memorable, I never got the urge to go and buy a hamburger. It helped me remember the name Carl’s Jr. but didn’t result in a sale. While this may be part of the advertising strategy, and I agree it will definitely lead to higher click through rate, I don’t know that this is going to positively affect purchases, which is the ultimate goal. A portion of your PPC budget gets wasted anyway, due to click fraud and other errant clicks, and I am just concerned that images may cause people to click so they can see an image, not necessarily buy the associated product.
• Helps the Big Guy, Hurts the Little Guy – I think that this will result in higher cost per ads as more big name retailers start to see Search Engine Marketing as a viable advertising model, and this is just the ammo that their ad agencies need to sell them on the idea. Ultimately I think this will work best for big brand names and companies that already have an existing brand following. I think the little shop with no corporate branding will be hurt, as they will lose the ability to compete in paid search with the large corporate budgets. Time to go back and work on that SEO strategy?
• Paid Search is Inefficient- I am not a big fan of paid search in general, as I feel it serves the Search Engine well, and is a great revenue model, but it doesn’t have enough safeguards to adequately protect the advertiser. Launching these ads reinforces my general belief. Yahoo! knows that images generate more interest, and will get more click-throughs, great for Yahoo!, maybe not so good for the advertiser. Since they can’t guarantee is that there will be more sales as a result, the only guarantee is that they get more clicks on the ads, and they generate more sales. Therein lies the problem.

I think that this was bound to be the natural progression, and I welcome the changes. Videos and images have been showing up in the natural results for some time now, but this is the first use in Paid Search. It definitely adds an interactive element to the results, and can provide a greater user experience in the end.

Whether this turns out to be good or bad for Internet Marketing, one thing is true, the traditional TV ad model is eroding, and they are losing serious ground to new media on the Internet. I would be very worried if I was one of the big conglomerates that runs the media stations.

I will do a follow up post on the positive aspects of this new feature, and the reasons I should be ecstatic about the launch of Yahoo! Rich Ads in Search.

-Chris

Pay Per Click Advertising

There are two ways to get your website ranked on the search engines: organically, and through paid search campaigns.  Which is better?  Each method has it’s own advantages, but the difference really is determined by your time horizon.

Paid Search campaigns Pay-per-click) offer immediate gratification.  You simply bid for keywords and if you’re the highest bidder your site will come up first for that keyword.   Very simple and easy to understand.

Organic Search listing are more complicated.  Organic Search results are not influenced by the amount of money the business is willing to spend, they are a collection of natural search results and processes.  Because of this, organic results take more time to develop, but they offer a higher return on investment because they are free.

Contact one of our consultants to get a more detailed explanation of the differences and your options as a business.

-Chris