ppc

In a blog in April of this year, I wrote about automated search marketing platforms and questions to ask providers. In today's post, I'm going to briefly compare/contrast two types of automated platforms: bid management platforms and what we'll call budget based platforms. We're going to stick to how they work, what they do (and don't do), and avoid using company names.

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.

As it says on the home page of our website, web marketing is a complex topic. Every day, your market gets more fractured, and there are more options to consider on what to do about it. It seems that everything to do with the Internet expands except the number of hours in your day to deal with it.

So, anything that can simplify a process without reducing its effectiveness too much should be considered, right? The questions below help you understand what kind of search engine marketing & advertising you need. For this discussion we will divide the options into two categories:

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:

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads. However, there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of. Essentially, you want to make sure your company is making the most of these tactics, but not unknowingly paying for search traffic on your company name, especially at a premium price or mixed in with new customer acquisition reports.

Internet Search Engines - Used Like Telephone White Pages

In explaining website marketing and advertising, we often refer to the search engine results page as being like a split-screen television. The natural , organic results appear in the left/center of the page, and the ad results (called “Sponsored Links” in Google AdWords) display on top center and down the right side column. While both results are triggered simultaneously by the same search, the mechanisms behind the two types of results have many differences.

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.