Paid Search

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For those of you who do a lot of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, this is "old hat," but for some of you, this is your next step in online promotion. I've been immersed with PPC advertising over the last few weeks -- partly to increase my understanding of PPC Bid Management Software. Here's the first in a series that walks you through some of the bidding strategies of a PPC campaign.

Before I begin, let me touch on the basics. By the way, I'm using "keywords," "keyphrases," and "search terms" synonymously. Bidding on a keyword (such as in the area of mustang horses) means that:

1. Display. You instruct Google AdWords to display your ad when a searcher puts in certain keywords that you specify (such as "mustang corral" or "mustang roundup"). These ads show up at the top or right side of the "natural" search results under the heading "Sponsored Links." They have no effect on "natural" search ranking for your site.
2. Rank Order. The amount you bid will determine your ad's position above or below other ads. If you place a maximum bid of 10¢ and your competitor bids 11¢, he has outbid you and his ad appears above yours (all other things being equal).
3. Cost Per Click. You only pay when your ad is clicked on. Your ad could have been displayed 42 times, but if it is only clicked on 4 times, you would owe 4 x 10¢ = 40¢.

It's more complex than that, of course, but hopefully these three principles will introduce you to PPC advertising. Now let's explore a couple of strategies.

Graph posted by Danny Sullivan in "Search's Long Tail," SearchEngineWatch Blog, March 14, 2005.

Bid on a Large Number of Keywords. The key to success in many PPC campaigns is to bid on hundreds of keywords, not just the ones with the most traffic. The high-traffic (and higher-priced) keywords may generate a lot of the traffic. The rest -- preferably 50% to 70% -- will come from the "long tail" of obscure keywords that get only a few searches and fewer click-throughs. But since there's so little competition for these, a bid may be only a few cents. Some of these infrequent keywords may eventually be disqualified by Google, but those low-priced "tail" words that remain will help balance out the higher cost of the high-traffic keywords. You can build a list of appropriate keywords by doing research at Wordtracker (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/wordtracker.htm) for about $8 per day.

Negative Keywords. Use negative keywords so that your ad isn't displayed at all for searches that have nothing to do with your products or services. For example, if you're advertising "mustangs" you'll probably want to have a list of negative keywords, such as:

-Ford
-car
-auto
-P-51
-shelby
-cobra

You get the idea. If any of these negative words is included in a person's search phrase, your ad for mustang horses won't even be displayed. Incidentally, negative keywords work in Google AdWords, but not for all PPC search engines.

I'll stop there for today and pick this up again soon with more PPC campaign strategies. To learn more about advertising with Google AdWords I recommend Andrew Goodman's comprehensive book Winning Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2005, ISBN 0072257024, 352 pages, paperback).