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Winter Pay-Per-Click Advertising Tune-Up
Andrew GoodmanMany of you know that pay-per-click advertising offers a great opportunity for the niche marketer.
But are your campaigns performing as well as they could be? If you've been neglecting your Overture campaign, you probably aren't maximizing its potential. I recommend going over the checklist items in the following "winter tune-up."
1. Have you taken advantage of auto-bidding?
Overture now has a "bid gap discounter" that ensures you never overpay to maintain your ad position. In the past, if a bidder dropped out at 90 cents and the next lowest was 60 cents, and you were bidding 91 cents, you'd still pay 91 cents no matter what the next bid was. Now, assuming the 90-cent advertiser drops out of the bidding, you pay 61 cents, not 91. But this discounting doesn't happen unless you change all your Overture bids to "auto."
2. Do you track your sales?
It is not particularly complicated to put a tracking code on your URL's that can be tracked with inexpensive software or some in-house code, so that you can tell which sources your sales are actually coming from. Overture is absolutely right in that you should use a tracking URL like www.mysite.com?source=overture. These won't do anything unless you've got a tracking solution in place, of course. Shop around. 3. Use "categories" wisely.
You can group families of similar keywords into categories for easier campaign management. This might help you further narrow down your sales conversion data, too, if you use codes for these categories in your tracking URL in conjunction with your tracking software.
4. Delete the junk.
Chances are you've got some ad copy and keywords that were selected in the old days when you just wanted to bring traffic to your site. Is the pitch still accurate or relevant? Are the keywords helping you attract customers, or just tire-kickers? If it's yesterday's news, remove it and stop paying for useless clicks.
5. You might not be bidding high enough.
An overly -restricted calculation of ROI might ignore the lifetime value of a customer. Preferably your online marketing campaign is designed to build a customer list that will have some long-term loyalty to your business.
6. Are you invisible on Yahoo and MSN?
The first three Overture ad positions give you premium placement on most Overture partner sites, and the first six get you on the first page of Yahoo results. It can be expensive to compete for the premium positions, but if you can't succeed with a few high bids, you might need to rethink your business model. 7. If you haven't already done so, set up a pay-per-click advertising account with Google AdWords Select.
It has numerous advanced features and great reporting capabilities. It can be tricky to use, but can you afford to ignore Google? Adwords is the #2 pay-per-click advertising service behind Overture. Ads appear near search results on Google.com, AOL, and other leading search destinations.
You may wish to speed up your learning curve
(and save yourself a lot of money and frustration)
by purchasing my special report,
"21 Ways to Maximize ROI on Google AdWords Select."
http://www.ustoday.net/pz.html
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a Toronto-based consulting firm, and author of 21 Ways to Maximize ROI with Google AdWords Select: http://www.ustoday.net/pz.html
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