June 2004

About Pay per Click - the lowdown on using pay per click search media

The pay per click search engines are becoming much more prominent in the world of search engine marketing. Strictly speaking, they are a form of online advertising, but can greatly complement your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts. I have put together a synopsis of how the pay per click (PPC) search engines work and who they are.

So, what is pay per click advertising?
Pay per click literally means what it says - every time anyone clicks on your link in a PPC advertising campaign, you pay. You bid on key phrases relevant to your website and the more competitive the key phrases are, the more you will have to pay per click. Prices vary depending on which PPC search engine you use to advertise on. Campaigns can be set up almost immediately, or within a few days. They complement traditional SEM methods as you can gain traffic to your website whilst you are waiting for natural search engine results to kick in, which can take several months.

Which are the best pay per click search engines to use?
Here is a run down of the 3 major PPC search engines for advertising to a UK or worldwide audience. They differ in price, cost per click, how the campaigns are set up, as well as where the pay per click links are served. The return on investment can vary enormously from one PPC campaign to another.

1. Overture
Overture is the one of the best known PPC search engines. Now owned by Yahoo!, its ads have a wide reach and are shown on some of the major search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Excite, some meta search engines such as Dogpile and MetaCrawler and ISPs such as AOL and Wanadoo. For a complete list, you can visit the Overture website.

Overture give you the option of setting up the campaign yourself (Self Service), or paying their staff to set it up for you (Fast Track). It depends on how many key phrases you have, how much time or how confident you are about setting it up as to whether or not you would pay the extra £79 for the Fast Track service.
To assist you in targeting the right key phrases, Overture has a couple of tools to help you. Firstly there is the Search Term Suggestion Tool, which gives you a rough idea as to how many searches are carried out per month for your chosen key phrases. You can also find out how much people are bidding on your key phrases when you carry out a search on Overture. On the search results page, click on 'View Advertisers' Max Bids' at the top right of the page. This can help you work out roughly how much you could spend per month along with the number of searches per month. Once your key phrase list is complete, you can then write titles and descriptions for your key phrases, insert your maximum bids then wait a few days for Overture to approve your listings.

To activate the account, you need to start with a minimum of £60 plus VAT, with a minimum monthly spend of £20. If your monthly spend is used up quickly, you need to ensure that you deposit further funds as soon as possible to keep it active.

2. Google AdWords
Google Adwords are a form of PPC advertising on Google and some of its partner websites. The best thing about Google Adwords is that the ads can be set up within a few minutes and you can edit them at any time. However, usually Google Adwords work out more expensive than Overture advertising and you really do need to keep checking that you do not run over budget, which can happen quite easily. Google Ads appear on Ask Jeeves, Kelkoo, The Times, Reuters and a variety of other websites, which are listed here.

To set up a Google Adwords campaign, you firstly need to start with an ad - you have 35 characters per line so need to be very specific about your offering. They also have a keyword suggestion tool, to help you target your key phrases for the best return. Instead of selecting a maximum bid per key phrase, you choose a daily budget amount and a maximum amount for all your key phrases. This is where it can start to get expensive, particularly if your keywords are quite competitive and you want them served every time a search is made. If you find your budget is running high, you can pause your Adwords campaign and restart them any time, for example, the next month. Google do monitor ads and will stop them if they believe they do not adhere to their guidelines.

3. Espotting
Espotting is a UK based PPC search engine, which has recently merged with American PPC search engine Findwhat, to take a bigger share of the market. It has been mostly a European network until now. Espotting's ads are shown on a network of affiliate sites as opposed to the major search engines. They state they have over 1000 affiliates which generate over 1 billion queries per month. Some of these affiliate sites include Infospace, Lycos, Netscape, UK Plus, Mamma, Lastminute.com and Moneynet.

The set up of an advertising campaign with Espotting is similar to Overture. You bid on the key phrases you want to sponsor, with a minimum bid of 10p per click.They also have a keyword generator tool which shows the number of searches per month for your key phrases. To find out how much other advertisers are bidding on your chosen search terms, just carry out a search on Espotting. Set up costs either £10 set up fee plus a minimum activation fee of £50, or £79 set up fee (plus the £50) if you want help. You need to write titles and descriptions for your keywords, and can track the activity as well as your budget similarly to Overture.

When using the PPC advertising media to complement more traditional search engine marketing, it is important you track your clicks and conversions to make sure it is worthwhile and your money is being spent in the right way. You may find that you will need to edit and tweak your campaigns by changing key phrases and descriptions quite frequently as you go along to maximise on the click through rate and conversions. After a month of so of advertising it is worthwhile going through your campaign stats and web log files to ensure it is money well spent. The return on investment varies greatly from one campaign to another and we would strongly recommend comparing cost per click and sales or leads achieved. I cannot advise you which PPC media to choose as it really depends on which one gives you the best return on your investment. My advice would be to trial a few of the options available and stick with the one that gives you the best return on your money.

For large campaigns, there is software available to help you manage your campaigns all in one place, particularly if you are running pay per click campaigns across several search media. I will be reviewing some of these in next month's Marketing Karma.