Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Companys Web Site [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Paid Search Opportunities

Every search marketer ought to at least consider paid search opportunities. For some, paid search will not be cost-effective, but many search marketers find paid search to be more valuable than organic search. It all depends on your site and your situation. We help you decide whether paid search is right for you, and, if it is, how to make the most of it.

But first, let's review some of the main benefits of a paid search program that we introduced in Chapter 3, "How Search Marketing Works":

Highly qualified visitors will come to your site.
Just as with organic search, paid search referrals produce highly qualified visitors. If your Web site sells products carried by shopping search engines, you might find a way to attract those transactional searchers at the moment they are ready to buy. Even if shopping search does not fit your site, however, paid placement can generate sales, leads, and any other Web conversions that drive your site's success.

You see immediate results.
As you have seen, organic search success requires painstaking attention to detail to get your site indexed and to optimize its content for both search engines and for visitorsall of which can take months. Paid search, conversely, can require upfront work on landing pages and with trusted feeds for shopping engines, but often it can be initiated in a few days with an instant impact on your site.

It's inexpensive to get started.
As you learned in Chapter 1, "Why Search Marketing Is Important … and Difficult," paid search offers one of the lowest costs per action (conversion) of any form of advertising. And, unlike organic search, there are no expensive upfront costs. Anyone with $100 can experiment with a paid placement campaign in Yahoo!.

You pay only for visits to your site.
No matter how many times your paid search results are shown, you pay only when searchers click through to your site. If you design your site to efficiently convert searchers who click through, your return on your paid search investment can be very profitable.

You can target your audience.
Whereas keyword planning enables you to target searchers by their interests (for both organic and paid search), paid search provides more pinpoint precision. Shopping search isolates transactional searchers ready to buy, and paid placement can identify searchers by geographical locationboth of which might be important to your business and well worth paying for.

As you have journeyed past Chapter 3 in this book, you have discovered that paid search offers other benefits, too:

Unlimited keyword targeting.
As discussed in Chapter 11, "Choose Your Target Keywords," organic search has a natural limit in the number of keywords that can be targeted. Although it is best to use existing pages on your site as search landing pages for both organic and paid search, inevitably you will find the need to add new landing pages as your keywords become more obscure. For example, you might find that your conversions increase when you write a product description page for your digital camera specific to an audienceserious photographers as opposed to gadget freaks. As you add landing pages for more and more keywords, each new page becomes very similar to other landing pages. You can imagine that the landing page for the serious photographers and gadget freaks must contain a lot of duplicate material, because you are expecting each visitor to read just one of them. Because organic search landing pages must be deeply linked into the navigation of your site, the constant repetition of similar landing pages damages the user experience and ruins your conversion rate, because your visitors will see links to the photographer and gadget pages (and might look at them both). With paid placement, however, you can create many more of these landing pages that link one wayinto your siteso that searchers are guided from the search engine to your landing page to the core navigation of your site. That way, queries you think are coming from gadget freaks ("8 megapixel autotouch camera") are directed to a different page than those from serious photographers ("slr digital camera optics"). Your core site need not link to the repetitious paid search pages, so your visitors are not distracted by themthey see only one landing page and never link to another one after they reach your site. This enables you to target as many paid search keywords as you can justify the investment for.

Unequalled adjustability.
You have learned how difficult it can be to make changes to your Web site to support organic search, especially if you have a medium-to-large site. If your inventory runs low on your best-selling product, your organic search results will keep pouring visitors into your site. If you put a product on sale, it could take weeks for the organic search results to reflect the new price and weeks more to go back to normal after the sale ends. Paid search, on the other hand, can adapt to these changes as they occur. You can stop buying the keyword for an out-of-stock item in paid placement, and you can remove the item from your trusted feed to the shopping search engine. You can change your paid search ad and your shopping search trusted feed to reflect price changes as they happen. You can ratchet up your investment during your busy season and taper it off at other times. What's more, you can constantly monitor the return on your investments and make changes each day to increase conversions. Paid search is probably the most flexible form of advertising available today.

Near-total message control.
As you learned in Chapter 12, "Optimize Your Content," organic search requires your pages to be designed to please both search engines and visitors. Organic search engines will present only the pages that are considered the best matches, and searchers will not convert unless the pages appeal to them. With paid search, you must of course entice your search visitors to convert, but there are very few restrictions on the content of your message. Paid search offers far more message control, because the message can be directly targeted at searchers, with little concern about what the search engines wantyou need only abide by their simple editorial guidelines, which we review later in this chapter. In fact, you can continually tinker with your message to test which ones get the highest conversionmodifying your copy, your offer, your price, or anything else. You can change the content in your trusted feed every day, and modify your paid placement ads even more frequently. You can also change the content on your landing pages at will. Your ability to control your message is unmatched by any other advertising medium.

Despite all these advantages, paid search is not for everyone. If you sell low-priced, low-margin products, you might find that the cost of advertising is more than you can justify in return. If you are unable to place any monetary value on your Web conversions, it will be hard to justify paid search spending. Many noncommercial and nonprofit sites find that paid search does not help them sustain their operations. For businesses, however, especially businesses that are trying to attract prospective customers to their site, paid search increasingly has a place in even the smallest marketing budgets.Chapter 3, "How Search Marketing Works"), paid inclusion (in Chapter 10, "Get Your Site Indexed"), and paid links (in Chapter 13, "Attract Links to Your Site"). Each of those techniques is important, but the two biggest paid search opportunities are in paid placement and shopping search, which we concentrate on in this chapter.

Paid Placement

We covered the basics of paid placement in the first three chapters of this book, but there is more that you should know to run a successful program. You recall that paid placement allows search marketers to "buy" a keyword by bidding an amount they pay each time their advertisement is clicked. As a result, paid placement is sometimes called cost-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-click (PPC) search.Chapter 3 (in Table 3-2), we listed the leading paid placement vendors. Keep in mind that you work with the paid placement vendors directly, but that your ads might appear on many different Web sitesGoogle's ads appear on AOL Search, for example. Although Google and Yahoo! deliver 97 percent of all paid placement clicks between them (at least until MSN Search gets its paid placement into gear), some of the second-tier vendors have strengths, too. FindWhat (www.findwhat.com) is an excellent vehicle for reaching highly targeted niche audiences, as its ads are presently shown on CNET and some other popular sites. Espotting (www.espotting.com) has a large European network. Two growing vendors are Enhance Interactive (www.enhance.com) and ePilot (www.epilot.com). Each of these minor vendors drives far fewer clicks than Yahoo! and Google, but their per-click rates tend to be significantly cheaper, so they might be worthwhile for inclusion in your paid search mix.

Beyond these vendors, some very small programs might also make sense for you. These micro-vendors collect very few clicks, and lack the reporting of the big guys, but their high degree of specialization might deliver extremely qualified traffic. The best resource for locating these engines can be found at www.payperclicksearchengines.comit has a list of more than 600 sites that accept paid placement advertising. It has reviewed a number of these programs to help you select the ones most appropriate for your business.

IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT: IS FIXED PLACEMENT FOR YOU?

Paid placement is actually a blanket name for just about any technique that gets your message in front of searchers for a fee. We concentrate in this chapter on auction-style paid placement, by far the most predominant form, but an older form, called fixed placement is still around.impression rather than per click, so you must pay the negotiated price each time your ad is shown, not each time it is clicked. And it is typical to buy 100 percent of the impressions, rather than having your ad rotated, although this is negotiable. Buying all of the impressions blocks your competitors from being shown in your spot. Although this sounds more expensive, it can often be cheaper if your per-impression cost is low and your click rate is high. But not all fixed-placement contracts are charged that wayyou can negotiate per-click or even per-action (conversion) pricing sometimes. In fact, negotiability is another major difference between fixed placement and auctions. Savvy marketers can negotiate price, of course, but they also frequently receive throw-ins as part of the deal, such as extra impressions for the same price (perhaps in return for a longer monthly commitment).Chapter 2, "How Search Engines Work," the biggest difference between Google and Yahoo! is how they rank the paid search results. Yahoo!'s Precision Match program uses a straight auctionthe highest bidder for a keyword gets the #1 position. (All paid placement engines besides Google use that same basic technique.) Google's AdWords program, in contrast, has a patented ranking algorithm that weighs both the auction bid and that ad's clickthrough rate to decide which one will provide the most money to Google. In doing so, not only is Google richer, but listings with higher clickthrough rates rank higher, raising the value to the searcher. Although this difference in ranking methodology might seem esoteric, it has major implications for your paid search marketing program, which we cover in depth throughout this chapter, but here are a few highlights:

Predicting Google costs can be more challenging.
With Yahoo!, you can look at what others are bidding and assume that if you bid high enough, you can take a high spot. You can then examine keyword demand and estimate your clickthrough rate and voilà, you "know" your costs (as shown in Chapter 8, "Define Your Search Marketing Strategy"). With Google, however, you have no idea how much to bid to take any particular spot, because you do not know your click rate or your competitors'. So you can neither easily estimate how many times your ad will appear nor how many visitors will come to your siteuntil you try it.

Yahoo! rankings are more volatile.
Because bidders can raise or lower their bids at will, Yahoo! rankings can move up and down with alarming speed for competitive keywords. Because clickthrough rates tend to be more stable, Google's rankings tend not to be as erratic even if bidders make many changes. As a further consequence, because bid changes have less of an effect on rankings, that also reduces the incentive for bidders to make so many changes.

Yahoo! bid management is more complex.
Because competitors can see each others' bids and because those bids directly correlate to paid search rankings, gamesmanship ensues. Powerful software tools monitor competitive keywords looking for bid gaps, perform bid jamming, and several other interesting tricks that we explain. Google's algorithm renders these tricks ineffective.

Generally, a Google campaign is more difficult to accurately plan, but a Yahoo! campaign is more work to manage after it is up and running. Later in this chapter, we show you how to succeed at paid placement programs, but before we do, you need to understand two relatively new twists in paid placement called contextual advertising and local search.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is an increasingly popular offshoot of traditional paid placement (if you can call anything in our young search marketing industry "traditional"). In its most basic form, contextual advertising depends on the paid placement vendor striking a deal with an information site to show ads on the information site's pages. Any site that draws heavy traffic is a strong candidate to display contextual adsthink CNN or ESPN or weather.com or CNET. Every article on these sites offers possibilities for contextual ads. As Figure 14-1 shows, an ESPN story about the Yankees might attract Yankee fans who want to buy Yankee tickets, so why not advertise Yankee merchandise from your store on that page?

MapQuest (www.mapquest.com) further illustrates the use of contextual ads. When people search on a specific location at MapQuest, they not only get maps and directions but also ads for hotels, shops, and restaurants along the route. MapQuest and other information sites could easily sell advertising directly, without any help from the paid placement vendors, and some do. But because their content changes so rapidly, some of them are unlikely to be able to charge high prices to show the adsthey could sell only banner ads that do not promise what content will be on the same page as the ad. You would undoubtedly pay less for an ad for your Yankee tickets that might appear on the same page as a tennis story, because the readers of the tennis story are less-qualified buyers for your baseball tickets.

However, paid placement vendors already know how to display different ads depending on what the searcher enters, so why not apply that same technology to rapidly changing information sites? In the example in Figure 14-2, Google has already indexed the page on PetPlace.com (www.petplace.com), so it knows what the page is aboutin this case, dogs. Google can easily select ads related to dogs to be displayed on that page alongside the story. Readers can click the ad to go to the advertiser's URL, just as with paid placement. The advertiser pays for the click and PetPlace.com and Google both take a cut. You can also see how ScubaBoard (www.scubaboard.com) uses Google contextual ads, too, but those ads are on a very different subjectscuba diving. Each information site might place the ads in different spots on their pages, but they all attempt to drive qualified visitors to the advertiser's site.

In these image-conscious times, where your ad is placed reflects upon your company. So you are probably concerned about exactly which Web sites and exactly which pages your contextual ads will appear on. Snap Electronics would not want its digital camera ad shown next to a somewhat risqué article that advised using photography to spice up your sex life, even if it was a mainstream men's magazine. The search engines are quite aware of the sensibilities of their advertisers, and they take great pains to avoid embarrassing situations, but neither Google nor Yahoo! offers any ability for advertisers to choose ad venues, the way you can with other media buys.

Not only that, but they do not even report where your ad ran after the fact. Why? If the vendors disclosed where your ads were appearing, they fear that you would make fixed-placement or banner deals directly with those sites and cut the paid placement vendors out of the action. Although this is frustrating for your public relations team, it is not likely to change and it is one of the costs of doing business. It is also one of the main reasons some companies opt out of contextual advertising.

Yahoo! and Google compete strenuously for the best information sites to display their ads. Google's AdSense program signs up information sites willing to display contextual advertising; Yahoo! fights to add similar sites to its Content Match network. Google is even exploring whole new services to serve as attractions for its contextual ads, such as the free Gmail service (gmail.google.com). Each side touts the quality of its advertising network to persuade you that highly qualified visitors will come to your site after clicking your contextual ad.

Contextual advertising programs work like any other paid placement program in which you pay for each person that clicks your ad. Google and Yahoo! both offer contextual advertising programs, but they take different approaches. Yahoo!'s Content Match program allows advertisers to use the same or different ads as they do in the Precision Match search paid placement program. Bidding for Content Match is separate from Precision Match, and those contextual bids tend to be lower.

Conversely, Google uses the same program for both paid placement and contextual advertising, AdWords. If you want to place contextual ads with Google, you must participate in Google's search paid placement, too. Search paid placement advertisers can opt out the contextual part of the program, but if they want to syndicate contextual ads, they must bid the same per-click prices as for paid placementthere is no separate bidding. Because AdWords is both the paid placement and contextual ad program, the ads served are identical for both.

Google's approach has been controversial among advertisers who believe that people who navigate pages and click contextual ads are not as highly qualified as those entering a search query. As a consequence, those advertisers believe that contextual ads should not cost the same per-click fee as search ads. Both sides agree that far less traffic is driven from contextual ads than from paid placement, but Yahoo! allows separate bidding so the market will reach its level, whereas Google has responded by automatically adjusting pricing.

Google's "Smart Pricing" might reduce the cost of clicks from contextual advertising when Google believes that the conversion rate for those clicks is lower than expected. Google offers an example that caught Snap Electronics' attention: "A click on an ad for digital cameras on a Web page about photography tips might be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras." Google's approach follows its normal game plan of being harder to plan for but reducing work for the marketer. Yahoo! uses an easier-to-predict marketplace method to ensure contextual ad clicks are priced lower (because they are less valuable), whereas Google lowers its prices without asking the marketer to bid separately. Whether you appreciate one approach more than the other might depend on whether you can handle the extra work and whether you can find any advantage in separate bidding against less-savvy competitors.

Contextual advertising is perfect for products predictably related to certain kinds of information. For example, if you make camera lenses, you want to advertise on the most popular photography sites, especially camera review sites. The lens maker can show contextual ads only on relevant sites that cost nothing until the reader clicks.

Despite the promise, most advertisers are convinced that those who click contextual ads are not as highly qualified as searchers. Moreover, contextual advertising's biggest challenge is the quality of the pages where the ads appear. Many contextual ad sites are highly relevant sites for your ad, but not always the most popular destinations. Those popular destinations often find they can sell ads directly to advertisers, without giving the paid placement vendors a cut. Contextual advertising, in the minds of some marketers, is associated with sites that, although relevant, are not of the highest popularity or quality.

But better technology might already be changing the quality of contextual traffic. As search engines do a better job of targeting contextual ads to the content it appears with, click rates and conversion rates might increase. Kevin Lee, co-founder of paid search management company Did-it.com, has found that improved targeting and lower prices for Google's contextual advertising are yielding contextual returns that rival search paid placement for some clients.

To see whether contextual ads are cost-effective for your keywords, you can run a test in Yahoo! with one campaign that uses your keywords in the traditional search paid placement and a second campaign with the same keywords enabled for contextual placement only. Yahoo! will report each campaign separately, and you can compare to see whether the contextual campaign delivers enough value to be worth your while. Some search marketers report that contextual advertising has been a gold mine, whereas others have been disappointed; so test it for yourself. In spite of some challenges, contextual advertising continues to grow each year and might be appropriate for your search marketing mix.

Local Search

If your Web site attracts visitors from an entire country, or from multiple countries, paid placement works just fine. You can choose the countries for your keyword purchases and target your searchers effectively. But what if your business is local? You do not want to waste your budget paying for clicks from searchers outside your area. What do you do if your Web site is for a retailer that operates in a single region within a country, or for a business with just one location?local search. As discussed in Chapter 3, several of the major search engines, as well as traditional Yellow Pages publishers, offer local search engines that help searchers find companies within a particular geographic area.

Your business can benefit from the huge increase in searchers' propensity to think local. Research conducted in 2004 shows that more than one fourth of all searches are for merchants near home or work"more than twice the rate previously reported. Seventy-four percent of all searchers say they have conducted local searches, with 45 percent of local searchers intending to buy. Some large businesses can benefit from local search, too, such as a retailer that wants to make it easy for customers to find the nearest location. geographic targeting is a way for paid placement advertisers to purchase general-purpose keywords (for which searchers have specified no place names), but show their ads only to searchers at a particular location. We talk about this opportunity later in this chapter.

Whether your business takes advantage of local search, contextual advertising, or any other form of paid placement, you are employing only some of the paid search programs available to you. Next we explore the other significant paid search prospect.

Shopping Search

Paid placement is not the only paid search opportunity. For some companies, shopping search is a much more important part of their paid search budget. If your business sells the kind of product online that is offered by shopping search engines, you might find it very profitable to be listed. In fact, many advertisers say that shopping search is their most consistently profitable marketing program.Chapter 1 and showed the market share of each one in Figure 1-14. Now let's look more deeply at shopping search in general and at the leading shopping search engines in particular.

Shopping search engines are primarily designed to offer "one-stop shopping" for a particular product. A shopping searcher has already moved past informational searches and is ready to conduct a transaction. The searcher has decided, for example, to purchase a digital camera, and knows the desired features, but might not know exactly which camera to buy. Or the searcher has chosen a model, but is shopping for the most favorable price or the quickest delivery. The numbers back up these assumptions. One study showed that searchers at shopping.com are twice as likely to buy and they buy twice as much as searchers at traditional search engines.