Pay Per Click Web Advertising
I wanted to touch a bit on some PPC lingo today. Everybody knows what pay per click is but not everyone knows how to make it work correctly. When you are dealing with pay per click web advertising, you have to take into account a few things. The first of them is your target market. Who are you trying to sell too? Do these people actually want what you are giving them?
When you are managing an Internet advertising campaign, you have to plan what you want before you get knee deep in bid costs. Pick the the keywords you are going to test, write your ad copy, and make sure to focus on tight knit ad-groups. Small, focused ad-groups always outperform their broader counterparts. I can think of one or two exceptions to this rule, where you would be advertising on cities, states, and counties, and you could use dynamic keyword insertion (cannot make 50,000 ad-groups in 1 campaign). But you get the idea.
The big three advertisers are of course Adwords, Yahoo, and Adcenter. However this presents an interesting scenario in light of the PPC industry. With the Yahoo/MSN deal going into effect by the year 2012, what are you going to do about your campaigns? Are you a big fan of Yahoo or Adcenter? The way I understand it, is that Adcenter will be managing the paid ads on Yahoo’s platform. So essentially we have two competing rivals instead of 3.
In my opinion, this not only makes the pay per click market more competitive, but it also streamlines the process. It is my guess that the cost per click will rise substantially on Adcenter as a result of this merger. In turn, it will also help newcomers because quite frankly, Adcenter is much easier to deal with then Yahoo’s paid advertising interface. Even if MSN only gets a tiny percentage of web traffic – I have found it to convert to leads and sales rather well – on par, if not better than Google. I didn’t see as many great results with Yahoo but this of course depends on the markets you are in.
The conversion ratio could potentially go down because of merging Adcenter into Yahoo’s search but on the flipside, it will allow users to reach a much bigger audience with less hassle. So one has to weight the negatives versus the positives. One thing that bugs me about Adcenter is the need to copy your adgroups and repost them, targeting them to a different country. They should really streamline that feature and allow you to choose the countries you want all from the same adgroup.
