|
In the
last issue of the "Marketing Tips" newsletter, I attempted to take
some of the mystery out of making money and generating traffic with the
pay-per-click (PPC) search engines by showing you how to calculate your
"maximum bid" – what you can afford to pay for a single visitor
to your web site to guarantee you always make a profit! (If you missed
this article, you can click
here now to read it.)
This
issue, I’d like to take this topic a step further by explaining more
in-depth how to use your "maximum bid" to funnel traffic to
your web site from the PPC search engines by…
- Bidding on inexpensive
keywords that are frequently searched by your target audience
– but virtually ignored by your competition!
- Spending less money to get
the same traffic by paying close attention to "bidding
gaps."
Lately, PPC search engines have been
gaining popularity with web site owners who are looking for paid
advertising that guarantees traffic, sales, and profits – and this
means that bids on popular and common keywords have been steadily
increasing.
However, it’s still possible to pay
literally pennies for frequently searched keywords and phrases that
your best potential customers are typing into the PPC search engines –
you just need to be educated in your approach and use the following three
simple bidding strategies.
Increase Your Traffic and Sales
With These
Three Simple Bidding Strategies:
Strategy #1 – Build a list of targeted keywords and
phrases.
When brainstorming a list of keywords and
phrases to bid on, your challenge is going to be thinking up terms that
are commonly searched by your best potential customers, but that aren't
overly expensive as a result of bidding wars between your competitors.
For example, if you sold cell phones you
might consider bidding for the key phrase "cell phones" in Overture.
However, a quick search of this phrase shows that to be ranked in the #1
spot right now, you'd need to bid $1 per visitor. On the other hand, you
would only need to bid 26 cents per visitor to be ranked #1 under the
similar phrase "cellular phone sale."
Now you could probably enlist the help of
friends and colleagues to come up with unusual variations of your common
keyword list – however, if you’re a stickler for accurate statistics like
I am, this guessing game isn’t going to satisfy you.
That’s why I recommend getting a little
help from two powerful tools that will tell you exactly which keywords
your target market is searching:
Tool #1: Wordtracker
WordTracker is basically an online
tool that collects the search results from 24 major search engines –
including Overture.com, FindWhat.com, and numerous other top PPC search
engines – and compiles them into a database that is constantly being
updated.
Simply type in your keyword and
WordTracker will return a list of related keywords and phrases. This is a
really useful feature because often produces keyword combinations that
you may not have thought of!
Plus, WordTracker will also tell
you:
- How many times a particular
keyword was searched during the past 24 hours based on their
database of well over 30 million queries,
- Exactly which
misspellings are drawing traffic (so you can bid on this traffic,
too!),
- And how
many web sites are competing under a keyword in a particular search
engine.
This is all the exact critical
information you need to make informed decisions about which keywords
are worth bidding for… and which are a waste of your money!
Tool #2: Overture’s Search
Term Suggestion Tool
The other tool worth checking out
is Overture’s free Search Term Suggestion Tool that takes the keywords
and phrases you enter and gives you a list of related keywords along with
the number of times each was searched in Overture during the past month.
It’s obviously not as comprehensive
as WordTracker, however, you could reasonably assume that popular search
terms in Overture – the giant of the PPC search engines – will be
relatively popular in the other PPC search engines as well.
Important Note:
Before moving on to the next strategy, I
can’t stress enough the importance of choosing targeted keywords – words
that aren’t just frequently searched, but that are frequently searched
by individuals who fit the profile of a buyer on your site.
If you’re bidding on keywords that don’t
really relate to your product or web site, you’ll be wasting money on
traffic that isn’t interested in what you’re offering. Your money will be
more profitably spent on targeted keywords.
Strategy #2 – Calculate your maximum bid.
In the last issue of the "Marketing
Tips" newsletter, I showed you step-by-step how to calculate the
value of a single visitor to your web site. This figure is very important
because the value of your visitors is also your maximum bid.
For example, if a single visitor to your
web site is worth 75 cents profit, then your maximum bid should never
exceed 75 cents per visitor if you want to guarantee that your
advertising always remains profitable.
Warning: Should you be
tempted to enter a bidding war for a popular keyword that exceeds your
maximum bid, stop for a moment and think about all of those dot-bombs who
threw millions and millions of dollars into unprofitable advertising,
with vague notions about turning profitable 5 years down the road. Then
give your head a shake and focus on advertising that’s really going to
make you money!
If you don’t know the value of a visitor
to your web site, click
here now to review the last
issue of the "Marketing Tips" newsletter.
Strategy
#3 – Place strategic bids for cheap but popular keywords.
Once you’ve done the preliminary footwork,
you’re ready to start combing through your list of keywords one by one,
looking for those that are frequently searched by your target market, but
that aren't highly competitive (i.e. expensive!).
A really useful tool at this stage in your
research is CompareYourClicks.com,
a free site that will take any keyword or phrase you type in and produce
a comparison chart of the top bids in 9 of the PPC search engines
including Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks, Bay9, and more.
Overture offers a similar Get
Current Bid Tool , though it obviously
doesn’t offer bidding comparisons for the other PPC search engines. (I
guess we can forgive them… it’s their competition after all.)
Simply type your keyword into either of
these tools, and you’ll be presented with a list of the top bids for that
particular search term. For example, when I typed "gift ideas"
into the Overture Bid Tool, here’s the list I was presented with:
- Lenox Has Something for
Every Collector
s0b.bluestreak.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.78)
- Give the Gift of an
Online Business!
www.cihost.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.77)
- Great Gifts at GiftWild
www.giftwild.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.76)
- T.J. Maxx - You Should
Go!
www.tjmaxx.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.73)
- Send Champagne or Wine
Anywhere in Hours
www.1-800-4champagne.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.19)
The gift industry is very competitive, so
it shouldn't be too surprising that bids for visitors are heading up
towards $2 per click. However, let me draw your attention to a couple of missed
opportunities in bidding strategies that exist here.
Opportunity #1 – Save Money
By Closing The Gaps!
First of all, remember that we're looking
at bids in Overture, the giant of the PPC search engines, where
ranking among the top three bids means that you also get exposure under
your particular keyword or phrase in Yahoo!, AOL, Lycos, AltaVista,
Netscape, Hotbot, and Cnet.
So it obviously makes sense to try and
rank among the top three listings in Overture whenever you can afford it
because you...
Dramatically
increase your exposure in multiple
search engines through this single listing.
However, do you notice a problem with #3 –
Great Gifts at GiftWild? They're bidding 3 cents more than necessary to
keep their ranking in the top three! They could easily save themselves
money by dropping their bid to $1.74!
What's more, if #4 – T.J. Maxx can't
afford to compete with the top 3 bidders, then they should drop their bid
by a whopping 53 cents to $1.20. They'd keep their #4 ranking, but avoid
wasting an unnecessary 53 cents per visitor!
When you're looking to place your bids,
watch for gaps like these and take advantage of them! Never bid more than
necessary... and monitor your bids once you've placed them to remove any
gaps like these that may appear. You'll save yourself a lot of money in
the long run – money that you can use to bid on more keywords to drive
even more traffic to your site!
Opportunity #2 – Go For The Traffic Your Competitors
Are Neglecting!
Grab the low-hanging fruit first. Why get
sucked into an expensive bidding war for one common search term when you
can bid pennies for multiple keywords and phrases to generate similar
volumes of traffic for a lot less cost!
Just to give you a simple example, I
searched the keyword "gift" in Overture's Search
Term Suggestion Tool and was provided with a list of approximately 50
related keywords that included "unique gift idea," "the
gift," and "gift for a birthday."
Then I did a traffic and bid comparison on
the keywords I randomly selected from this list using information from
both Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool and Current
Bid Tool, and here's what I discovered...
|
Keyword:
|
Traffic
|
#1
Spot
|
#2
Spot
|
#3
Spot
|
#4
Spot
|
|
gift idea
|
45,613
|
$1.78
|
$1.77
|
$1.76
|
$1.73
|
|
unique
gift idea
|
3,774
|
$0.97
|
$0.96
|
$0.69
|
$0.68
|
|
the
gift
|
3,132
|
$0.40
|
$0.37
|
$0.36
|
$0.30
|
|
gift
for a birthday
|
2,192
|
$0.06
|
$0.06
|
$0.06
|
$0.05
|
Obviously, "gift idea" is the
phrase more frequently searched – that's why it's sooooo competitive at
$1.78 per visitor for the #1 spot.
However, who says you have to bid on the
most frequently searched term when you can go after smaller traffic
streams... like the bargain find "gift for a birthday" at just
7 cents per visitor for the #1 spot! Even 41 cents per visitor for
the #1 spot for "the gift"... or 70 cents per visitor for the
#3 spot for "unique gift idea"... is a far cry from the $1.78
these sites have been battling one another to pay.
Do you think we should tell them? ;-)
|
Key Secret: Did you know that there are
over 200 PPC search engines? Sure, Overture is where you'll get
the majority of your traffic from; however, its popularity means you
pay more for each visitor you get.
With the smaller
PPC search engines like FindWhat, Kanoodle, Sprinks, Bay9, etc... you
can still place bids of 1 and 2 cents on popular keywords! Maybe
you won't get the same traffic that you will from Overture... but
you're paying pennies per visitor! So does it really matter?
Even if a keyword
in a smaller search engine only generates a handful of extra visitors
each month, it's still traffic you wouldn't have without the bid! To
get a complete list of the PPC search engines, visit PayPerClickSearchEngines.com
|
Final Thoughts:
I know paid advertising like the PPC
search engines might seem a bit risky to those of you with tight budgets.
If you’re looking for new sources of traffic for your site, though, I’d
advise you to consider the strategies that I’ve taught you in this
article (as well as those in the November
01, 2004 issue of the "Marketing Tips" newsletter) very
carefully.
The PPC search engines are one of the few
low-risk paid advertising opportunities that allow you a LOT of control
over your success. If you follow these few simple rules that I’ve laid
out for you here, keep your bids lower than your maximum bid at all
times, and choose keywords targeted to your market, it's actually quite
easy to funnel targeted traffic into your web site.
Plus, you can really give yourself an
extra edge by looking for keywords that your competitors are neglecting
and scooping up these untouched traffic streams while taking advantage of
bidding gaps that make sliding your site into a top 3 listing extremely
easy!
|