pay per click

Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components combined.

Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West. It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, and reliable experts. We also see well-intended but inept operators and a growing number of scammers and business perils. There are enough moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively involved in web marketing -- even seasoned traditional marketers. From our perspective, we have two initial points of advice:

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a website can look good, contain many pages of original content, and still not be found by the search engines. Or even when it gets traffic, the same site may not be effective at converting visitors from natural or pay per click traffic to customers. Depending on the category, more than half the visitors “bounce off” the average website. This means they exited the landing page without going deeper or stayed less than a prescribed amount of time, usually 30 seconds for most web analytics programs.

Since pay per click (also known as PPC) ads on the top and side of a search engine results page appear simultaneously with natural or organic results in the center of the page, there is a lot of misunderstanding about them. The processes behind the two are very different, but both complex. The fact list below help you begin to understand PPC better:

• Focus on return on investment. Understand that fully before drilling into the details of how PPC works. ROI is the best comparison tool for all online or direct response marketing efforts.

I first got into search engine marketing and advertising as an employee for a corporate team building consulting company. There, we observed a predictable pattern on which teams were more successful in team building scenarios and back at their jobs.

Teams that take time to make a plan before taking action consistently perform better than those who do not.