You’ve taken the time to research keywords, set up your bids, create your headlines and ads, and then you put your homepage as the url to send all of those clicks to. Oh, and by the way, you’re selling the most incredible couches ever made, they come in 2 sizes, leather or fabric and if you choose fabric, 4 different patterns, if you choose leather, 4 different colors and that you’re offering free shipping and oh yes, your homepage mentions nothing about this but it does have cool flash. Guess what? You might as well throw your money out the window since it’s being spent about that effectively by sending all of your traffic to your homepage.

I think you can see where this is going; you should use a landing page or pages to help turn those clicks to purchases. The idea is simple, if the visitor initially searched for brown leather couches and you had the top result and he clicked on it and landed on your homepage that:

• had no mention of the term brown leather couches on it
• had a cool flash presentation about what a great company you are.

What do you think the visitor is going to do? Studies show he’s probably going to hit his back button and go to the next result.
So what is the right way to address this? Send the visitor to a page that has what he’s looking for. He told you up front he’s looking for brown leather couches so put him on a page that:

• has the phrase “brown leather couches” somewhere in a prominent position on the page
• Show him pictures of your brown leather couches
• Let him know it comes in other colors and in fabric as well
• Show him a price
• Give him the opportunity to purchase it
• Let him know that free shipping is available

Now what do you think the visitor is going to do? Probably pull out his credit card and buy that great brown couch you have for sale.

Landing pages don’t need to be stand alone pages created specifically for the campaign (although you should use that approach if your current site doesn’t have pages that can support your keywords), they can be an existing page within your site but they need to properly address the needs of your ppc campaign.

Spend your money wisely and support that spend by being smart throughout the ppc process and that includes where you send your visitors.

When we began The Info Group, in the fall of 1997, search engine optimization was not a term that had been coined instead the few people involved in the field were calling it search engine ranking and pay-per-click was literally a baby as GoTo had just launched and the only buzz I recall was that no one would pay for a click they received from a search engine. So the only real game in town was search ranking and with algorithms the way they were at the time, getting top rankings was almost a cinch so why would a firm like ours push an unproven product? We didn’t but that philosophy lasted about 90 days until we tried pay-per-click ourselves and found it to be a very cost effective supplement to regular rankings. We were getting clicks from an engine that our competitors weren’t listed on (they hadn’t figured it out yet) and the cost was a nit since you could bid pennies for terms. Now the appeal wasn’t overwhelming since the listings were limited to GoTo (they hadn’t formed any partnerships with other engines) and since GoTo was not the big daddy (Yahoo was the gorilla of the day) not too many people were using the engine. Yet it provided another lead source that generated some business but more importantly it set into motion what became our core philosophy of utilizing both aspects of search marketing, paid and organic.

Let me try paint a simple picture to illustrate the point in today’s search world. Say you have a brand new site, unfortunately you are coming out of the gate at a disadvantage in organic search in both Google & Yahoo as they have aging filters in place and getting great rankings on competitive terms in the short term is next to impossible. Well, then the obvious way to boost your site to the top or front page of Google & Yahoo is to take advantage of pay-per-click. I posted on the benefits of pay-per-click earlier.

So immediately you get a presence on the top two engines, great now what? You carefully analyze your traffic and conversions and begin to identify what keywords are working for you in ppc. Often times you can find less competitive terms with very high conversion rates that with tweaking of ads and/or landing pages you can increase your conversion rate even more and suddenly you’re not so dependent on your top level keywords within ppc to generate results. Taking that analysis you also address those words on your site as these are the types of terms that will pick up in Google & Yahoo much quicker than your top level terms and once again you have a better chance at generating results. Using a simple strategy like this can make a dramatic difference in an overall campaign, not only financially from a spend point but also from a bottom line profit increasing point.

Effective use of search engine marketing is what you should be looking for not just #1 rankings.

Everywhere I turn there is a buzz in the industry about pay-per-click fraud. I’ve posted on the subject and just took part in a SEMPO webinar dealing with the subject, so let’s talk about the benefits of using pay-per-click or ppc. There are many more than I’m listing here but this list should touch on the top level reasons to use pay-per-click and why it can be a very effective means of marketing or advertising.

• Small initial investment. The search engines don’t charge a fee to place or run your ad. You only pay for the users that click thru on the ad.
• Realistic for all businesses, regardless of size. Pay-per-Click campaigns can create a level playing field for small businesses, particularly if your campaign research results in the right keywords. With the right campaign management, your ad placement might be right above or below a larger competitor or national chain. This effectively puts you in a good competitive position without having to substantially out bid the larger advertiser.
• Immediate results. The research, set up and implementation cycle of pay-per-click campaigns can take place in just a few days, as opposed to natural search engine rankings, which require weeks or months to gain desired rankings. Pay-per-click campaign results are immediate: the day your ad is placed – the clicks to your website begin!
• Real-time tracking. Metrics such as: effectiveness of keywords and phrases, per ad traffic generated, per ad conversions, and many more measurements provide campaign managers with the data to alter campaigns almost in real-time. This allows you to respond very quickly to either good or bad performing ads. And unlike a printed piece or mailer, the lag time to judging ad effectiveness is hours not days. And modifying an ad can be accomplished in minutes.
• Targeted traffic. Print and traditional media generally reach a mass audience making it difficult to target your message. Pay-per-click campaigns utilizing geo-targeting, effective keyword research and demographic site selection allows you to target your viewing audience much more precisely. Thus, pre-qualifying your customers to a far greater degree before they ever land on your website.
• Branding. Top placement on Google, Yahoo or MSN has proven to be a very effective branding method.

With these benefits in mind it’s easy to just jump in and get started and the pay-per-click publishers have made it simple to get started but the learning curve involved is not free. Take the time to learn everything you can about tracking, keyword selection, targeting, fraud and become familiar with the tools that can help you with these tasks. Your other option is to hire a professional search marketing company like us. We’ve been involved with pay-per-click since the business model was invented and that experience serves our clients well.

If the word Google does not come up in the first three sentences of any conversation I have with clients or potential clients I immediately go play the lottery because it’s a sign from the Big Kahuna that’s it’s a lucky day. Don’t get me wrong I have somewhat of an obsession with Google not only from a work standpoint but also from a personal standpoint. I love to see sites we work on ranked well in Google and I love to mess with anything new Google puts out. HOWEVER, during those conversations and at times during any optimization campaign, I must take a quick breath and remind myself and others that Google is not the be all end all in search. The fact is if you are not paying attention to what your site is doing in Yahoo, MSN and several other engines you are missing out on significant traffic. Let’s look at a case in point.

I recently optimized a site for a good friend of mine. He has a business that operates on a local level only and the only competition he has for his main keywords is Yellow Pages of which he not only advertises through but because he bought their advertising they gave him a website for free. (Note: TANSTAF - there ain’t no such thing as free) Sorry I digress. His site is brand new and as part of our agreement I’m not doing all the grunt work so the content is limited but growing and the links are few but growing and with that in mind he’s not ranking in Google yet for his main keywords, in fact he’s still fairly distant in Yahoo for his main keywords but in MSN he has achieved top rankings on numerous keywords. So should he be upset with the results so far?
Let’s see:
Before he ranked in MSN -

• Traffic was about 2 visits a day
• No emails being generated from website
• Phone calls were about 2 or 3 a week

Since he ranked on MSN -

• Traffic is about 25 visits a day
• 1 or 2 emails a week from website
• 4 or more phone calls a week

Let me clarify this is not all due to MSN as the site receives traffic from several secondary directories, local directories, etc but there is a definite connection to at least 70% of the traffic and at least 50% of the phone calls and emails. He told me the other day he had compared his business to date to last year and it was up about 80% and this is his slow season.

The point here is obvious while Google is king and probably will be for a while, concentrating all of your efforts to rank well on Google at the expense of the rest of the engines is a big mistake.

Clicklab, a Web analytics and click fraud protection service, recently released research suggesting over 50 percent of all clicks coming from pay per click advertising are fraudulent. If true this number is far more significant than many industry insiders had previously thought and up to 30% more than previously published studies have shown and certainly more than Google or Yahoo, the two major players in the ppc arena, would admit to. Although some might recall that Google did underline the problem to the Securities and Exchanges Commission as a potential risk that investors should worry about during their IPO filing.

The study also revealed there are two categories of fraud, competitive where the clicks are meant to deplete a competitors daily ad budget and affiliate fraud where the clicks are meant to increase compensations.

So how are they doing it? Usually a program is created that will go to Google or Yahoo! and click on the same sponsored link. These programs then click through to the landing page which triggers the advertising or affiliate fee, abandon the session and then repeat. The same is true of the B2B offenders but their models will identify the competitor’s ad and start the cycle.

So how can you protect yourself against this abuse? Well there is no failsafe method yet but we have used tracking tools to help identify problem accounts and several are available through third party vendors. Some examples of this service are:

• Clicklab
• Adwatcher
• WhosClickWho

Besides using a tracking system, it is essential you stay in communication with the engine on which the fraud is occurring. Despite the negative impression pay per click fraud is having, Google & Yahoo! are committed to providing their service on the up and up and from our experience they will investigate all claims of fraud, they’ve got to, this is their cash cow especially for Google.

As more and more major corporations use ppc to advertise their wares this problem would seem to have a shorter rather than longer life. Rest assured when they start recognizing the dollars they’ve lost from fraud, they certainly won’t hesitate to use their influence in the political world to put an end to click fraud.

A large part of the challenge in managing a successful pay per click campaign is generating a conversion rate on keywords that translates to a bottom line result. While most marketers feel lucky to achieve a 10% conversion rate, The Info Group considers that a standard. iTKO developers of LISA a automated testing solution for SOA, websites, applications and more, has already seen their ppc campaign achieve double digit conversion rates on their keywords.