Intro to Pay Per Click Search Engines

Intro to Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

This article is for business people new to the search marketing world. It's no secret that search engines are used to find products and services far more than any other means. So if we want our product to be successful on the web we have to learn to harness the power of these engines. There are two distinct areas of search marketing, traditional and fee based or pay-per-click (PPC). Before we get into PPC marketing I want to explain the difference between the two. Traditional or Organic search engine marketing requires you to submit your site to the engine and wait for review. This occurs in a number of ways sometime automated by computer and sometimes by people similar to editors. Yahoo uses people and Google uses a powerful computer. The difficulty in traditional listings is that they usually take three months or more to see results and there are no guarantees. In the case of Google, your website must conform to a strict set of rules and competition is fierce. You must not only have great content on your site but you must have other sites linking to yours and your content must meet certain criteria. With that said if you are looking for a no-nonsense way to shoot straight to the top of the engines PPC is the way. We will begin by describing the basic engines and how they work.

How Do They Work?
PPC engines work on the principle of bidding for positioning. For instance, let's say you want the term “Florida Vacation” and that terms current top position is $0.10 per click. This means that if you click on that listing you just cost that advertiser ten cents to visit his site. No let's say you want that position, you can bid $0.11 and leapfrog that current advertiser and have position number one. The current advertiser will then be in position two. This is the basic concept of the PPC engines. We bid for the position we want and other people bid for the position they want. As you can image it can take a great deal of time to monitor and manage your positions. I liken it to day trading.

Who Are The PPC Search Engines?
Currently there are three major engines and many second tier engines. The top engines are Google, Overture, and FindWhat. Google currently delivers the most traffic due to its position as the number one search engine. Overture has the largest partner network; we will get to that in a minute. FindWhat is a smaller engine but has a very good return on investment. 
Partner Networks are the means by which you can get a huge amount of exposure on the web. Basically of you maintain a Premium Listing in any of these engines, basically a 1-5 position in the search results, your listing is distributed on their partner network. For Instance, if you have a position 1-4 on Google for a particular term, your listing will show up on AOL. Google has partnered with AOL to deliver search results to the AOL search engine. Likewise if you have a premium listing with Overture your listing will be displayed in Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, and many others. Currently Overture boasts over 80% visibility on the major search engines. Its unlikely people will use Overture, but they will surely use there partners. FindWhat also has a partner network, there major partners being Excite and Lycos. 
As you can imagine Google and Overture are the top dogs and consequently they are the most expensive, in comes FindWhat. This engines does not get as much traffic but the costs are significantly lower that the previous two. It is only through a combination of the three engines that you get high traffic (Google), high visibility (Overture), and value (FindWhat).

Setting Up Your First Account
I recommend starting with Overture if you want to do as little work as possible. They have several packages available. There Fast Track program is $199 and they help you select all your terms and write your title and listing descriptions. Remember unlike traditional search engines you control your listing editorial. By evaluating your site they will help you pick terms most relevant that will receive the most traffic. And also assist you in writing the best titles and descriptions for your listing. Below are some guidelines for writing effective listings.

Selecting Your Keywords
There are many tools to aid you in selecting keywords, some are free and some cost money. The best tool I have found is free and it is in the Tools section of Overture. They have one of the most comprehensive keyword suggestion tools I have seen. Another important feature is that along with the keywords you also have the amount of searches in the Overture Network for that term the previous month. This tool works by entering a search term and it will give you the top searches performed that included those words. If you enter “Florida” as a keyword it will return all the top searches containing “Florida” Such as Florida vacation, Florida House, Florida Beach, and so on. Remember it is in the best interest of the search engines for you to have the top trafficked terms; they make more money from you. So choose your terms carefully.

Writing an Effective Title and Description
The first part of your listing is the title, this is what will grab the attention of the searcher and must be highly targeted. If you are listing under the term “Florida vacation” and you rent waterfront condos your titles must say that. Here is an example: Rent Florida Vacation Condos. Remember that these listings have a length restriction so they can't go on forever. They must be brief and to the point. Crafting an attractive statement in as little a words as possible is an art. Try to us your keyword in the listing; it's a known fact that listings that incorporate the term in the title get a higher volume of clicks. Also avoid superlatives such as greatest and best, these tend to make searchers think the offer is too good to be true. Stick to the facts about what you are offering. Searchers are in an analytical mode when they are searching, they want real life details. Same thing goes for writing descriptions. Once the title is finished you can then fill in the details with the descriptions. Here is an example of our title and description.

Rent Florida Vacation Condos
Waterfront condos affordably priced for Florida vacationers. Free information, limited space, no deposit required.

The function of the description is to clarify what the offer is and elaborate on the details. Remember that you don't want unqualified clicks, what's the use of paying for site visitors when they aren't a good fit for your product. So be a descriptive as possible. Remember we don't just want volume, we want quality volume.

Payment Options
Many of the search engines have different methods for payment. For now we will deal specifically with Overture, Google, and FindWhat. Overture and FindWhat have very similar models of payments. You can choose from a couple different methods. The first method and the one I recommend for starting out is this. Deposit an initial amount of money in the engine and as you accumulate clicks it depletes your funds. You can usually start out with $25-$50 depending on the engine. Once the money is gone your listings are removed until you go in and deposit more money in your account. This is done by using a major credit card. The method of depositing money as you go allows you to monitor your spending to make sure you are not exceeding you budgeted amounts. Until you get a feel for how much your monthly spend is going to be this is the safest method. The second method is to allow the engine to make automatic withdraws on your credit card when the account is depleted. This is a completely automated system and works well once you get a feel for you monthly spending. 
Google has chosen a completely automated system and this is the only option. Google will put your credit card on file and bill you for clicks periodically throughout the month. This is a little bit more intimidating because you don't know what your spends are going to be but you can setup a daily maximum spend. So you will know what the most you can spend in a day is.

Remember to keep an eye on your listings and their performance. You will not really have any idea of profitability until you actually do the ROI calculation, but it has been my experience that if you are getting a CTR of 5-15% on highly targeted medium traffic listings you are getting a good response. I have seen CTR of up to 20-40% on some terms but I don't believe that to be the norm. Make sure you experiment with your listings, that's the beauty of PPC advertising. Good Luck!