Home – New › Forums › Tech talk › Pay-per-click on a budget
- This topic is empty.
-
AuthorPosts
-
December 16, 2010 at 5:36 pm #971200Up::0
The title of this post could just as easily be
Why You Need Pay-Per-Click Even if You are Broke
Every person with an online business or blog who is the least concerned about traffic, SEO and relevance should have an Adwords account. No, I don’t work for Google, and I don’t think you should follow Google’s advice on how to set up your account! Keep your bids low – you will need to be on the first page of paid ads but you pay an absolute premium to be on top.
4 reasons why you should set it up:
-
Access to Google Analytics
-
Immediate traffic
-
To Inform Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
-
You can always switch it off!
Without Google Analytics (which is free) you are flying blind.
Without immediate traffic you have no way to test your site – SEO takes time.
Without market intelligence – knowing which keywords perform for your market etc – your SEO will not be focused.Better still set up an account with Adwords and another with Yahoo Search Marketing (in Australia this covers Bing as well).
(Tip: Yahoo Search Marketing/Bing will only deliver a fraction of the traffic, but it is cheaper per visitor. Only target the Premium network. make sure you switch off Content and Standard Search networks, traffic quality seems very poor on these.)
Regards
Tony
____________________
http://www.youronlinebusiness.com.auDecember 16, 2010 at 9:03 pm #1048374Up::0Only one statement out of the 4 you have posted is true.
Access to Google Analytics
Google analytics has long since been separated from adwords, so you don’t need to sign up or spend anything to use it. Also, although analytics is fairly accurate, I would suggest also signing up to qantcast or another tracking system to gain other benefits like audience measurement.
Immediate traffic
You don’t need to spend money to get immediate traffic. Yes, Google Adwords are very good tactical marketing method, but they are not the only way to get traffic when you are starting out. If you only had a budget of $100 I would say that the benefits you are going to get on Adwords would be a lot less than, say, spending a few hours writing some interesting posts, or writing in forums, or trying to make sure you are a part of professional directories.
To Inform Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Adwords has nothing to do with SEO.
You can always switch it off!
Seems like a bit of a strange reason to want to start something…. just to switch it off?
December 16, 2010 at 11:08 pm #1048375Up::0Ok – Let me explain further what I mean.
An important goal of SEO is to rank higher in organic search results, however in any new market you have to know for which keyword searches. Through keyword research for your market niche you would get an idea of the competition and number of searches for the main keywords and keyword themes, however this research is fairly approximate and needs to be tested as it applies to you.
So you create a number of groups of ads based on your keyword taxonomy and run some traffic.
The results will tell you how people are looking for your goods or services, and the value of specific keywords.
This tells you which keywords are best to optimize for.
(Contrary to what some imply you can’t optimize for everything.)
There is also a direct link between SEO and what Google will want you to pay for a specific position on the page. It is called the Quality Score. If your landing page is properly optimized for a keyword then Google will charge you less. By tuning the quality score against the most productive keywords you
are setting up is a loop where PPC informs SEO and vice versa.You are not going to get this from posting on a few forums or blogs, although you will get some traffic and backlinks which are also very important for SEO.
Also on Yahoo search marketing you may be able to get quite a lot of traffic for $100. Maybe enough to make $200 and spend $100 more! However $100 is a pretty small budget, you will probably need more than this.
It is true that you don’t need to sign up for Adwords to get Google Analytics, but analytics has more value if you can link it to directly to your campaigns. It is only then that you can assess the relative costs.
Finally about turning it off. There is a hell of a lot of logic in turning it off if its not working! What I was mainly referring to was specific campaigns, ad groups or keywords that are not giving a decent ROI, not necessarily the whole account. Although you may turn off all campaigns if you have finished testing, or the niche is not viable. You have total real-time control of your spend.
Adwords management is all about doing just this, turning off or reducing bids on unproductive stuff, increasing exposure and improving ads where there is a good ROI and also tuning the in-page SEO.
You don’t get this with say a media placement – such as a banner ad – where you pay your money up front. If it doesn’t work you’ve blown your dough. This is an example where you can’t turn it off.
( I also have a lawnmower. I am glad I can turn it off before it runs out of fuel.)
Finally, if you can create and test a good ad that converts well for you it will give you some strong clues as to headlines and copy that is likely to work on your site.
There is a very direct link between SEO and PPC, although there are certain markets where PPC is not appropriate. It is also true to say that there are real risks for uneducated PPC advertisers, particularly if they adopt all of Google’s bidding and campaign structure recommendations.
Regards
Tony
http://www.youronlinebusiness.com.auDecember 16, 2010 at 11:43 pm #1048376Up::0Tony Pfitzner, post: 59234 wrote:You don’t get this with say a media placement – such as a banner ad – where you pay your money up front. If it doesn’t work you’ve blown your dough. This is an example where you can’t turn it off.That’s not exactly true. You can do media placements with banners, measure ROI, rotate best performing banners based on CTR, or ROI, and drop your campaign if it’s not performing providing you have the necessary clauses in place to do so prior to starting a banner campaign.
Just my 2 cents.
December 16, 2010 at 11:48 pm #1048377Up::0sydneyfx, post: 59236 wrote:… providing you have the necessary clauses in place ..
The operative wordsRegards
Tony
http://www.youronlinebusiness.com.auDecember 17, 2010 at 12:57 am #1048378Up::0Tony Pfitzner, post: 59223 wrote:Without Google Analytics (which is free) you are flying blind.Also.. never under-estimate the value of Google’s Web Master Tools. It can provide an insight to keywords that you don’t track well against but may be very attractive if you do.
December 17, 2010 at 10:35 am #1048379Up::0Hi,
No question that Analytics is a very powerful and valuable tool but I’m afraid I got rather lost by your post, also.PPC generates, “Immediate traffic” – Yes, but for so many markets the cost is so high that you need deep pockets to generate much.
“SEO takes time” – perhaps a more accurate statement would be that SEO is theoretically infinite in its ability to generate more traffic and it therefore takes an infinite amount of time to reach that point.
Google claims to revisit websites every few days since it introduced its “caffeine” upgrade early this year. From the results I’ve seen, this appears to be true so I’m not convinced your statement is still current.
How much traffic you generate with PPC depends on your ad budget. I’ve recently had a brand new site in a competitive market generate a couple of thousand visitors by the end of its first month just using SEO tactics. You’d be paying around $2 per click in this market. A lot of PPC budgets would have expired long before they attracted this volume of SEO traffic.
“There is also a direct link between SEO and what Google will want you to pay for a specific position on the page. It is called the Quality Score.”
In simple terms, if you don’t SEO your website, your Adwords are more expensive. If you are recommending that people employ SEO on a site before investing in PPC campaigns, I’d agree with that.
I believe this statement needs some clarification, “(Contrary to what some imply you can’t optimize for everything.)”
I agree, but that does not mean you only target one search phrase per page. I’ve got a 5 page website that is optimised for a couple of thousand search phrases and 3-4,000 page websites where 30-40,000 search phrases per year are used to find them.
I’m in complete agreement with you about the importance of analysing results – be they PPC or SEO. Too few people do.
I recently encountered someone who was spending $2,800 per month in Adwords. For both organic referrals and Adwords campaigns, something like 70% of the SE traffic spent less than 1 minute on the site and bounce rates were way, way up.
Analysing their traffic reports it was obvious they had major conversion problems.
Attracting traffic to a website is only half the battle.
Regs,
JohnW -
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.