Nice White Paper here - Five Rules for PPC in B2B - from Velocity.
I like the idea of refocusing on what you are looking to get from pay per click, when someone actuall clicks-through, including what you focus you adverts on. After all, would someone buy from your B2B straight from a traditional print ad?
My friend has a small local business. A few years ago, we did him a website as a favour. It’s a bit dated but it gave him a presence. Obviously times have changed so please go easy on us…
Anyway, a company approached him on the phone a few months ago and he signed up for their offering and then he came to me like an excited puppy to tell me (he knows I’m a geek):
“Craig, craig, I’ve started using this company that can get me onto Google for £100 per month for up to 10 keywords. Look, if you type in “obscure term” I am there look, see, right at the top”.
I started to explain how pay-per-click works and I couldn’t understand what he had actually bought from them. But he has persevered with them.
He called this morning explaining how many visitors his website has had from the adverts, based on figures the company gave him over the phone.
The thing is, when I set up his website, I also put some stats running on it so we could see what it was doing and the numbers don’t seem to correlate. Hmmm.
Setting up pay per click campaigns takes more than £100 a month (which includes the advert spend).
For instance, I would usually spend at least four hours researching and setting up a campaign for small website, with constant monitoring for a couple of months, and that’s not including the spend. I’ve had some very good results with pay per click doing it this way.
But, it’s getting harder and I still insist it only pays for itself on business to consumer commodities, ie. e-commerce sites.
I also think there are a lot of people looking to sell pay per click on an ad-hoc basis to people like my friend, who, to be honest, doesn’t understand (a) how it works, and (b) how to maximise efficiency and reduce cost per acquisition.
I did ask one pertinent question though that really got him thinking… how many enquiries have you had?
Update…
I got an e-mail forwarded to me for the keywords that he has been selected for… All [exact] and all very specific, with, in my opinion, very little search traffic going to be generated. This keeps the advertisers costs right down, maximising his profit.
What’s more, one of them has a blatant typo!
I recently worked on a project that I am quite proud of:
A Google Adword (pay per click) campaign whereby I managed to reduce the traffic from 4137 click throughs to 831.
Oh yes, and I managed to cut the costs to create an annual saving for the client of £18,250.
All that and we managed to keep the level of enquiries on the same level.
As Nichegeek points out, sometimes the value is in the savings.
Using pay-per-click - especially Google - is becoming harder and optimisation of your adverts is central to keeping this manageable for a small business.
Costs for keywords are rising exponentially and although it is easy to blame Google, Webmasters need to be looking at themselves and what they can do. The title of this post came from an article on Search Engine Land about Adwords Quality Score, a pain in many people’s side at the moment, although I see it as a massive opportunity.
Simply, my view is this. Any company can throw money at advertising if they have spare cash (and many do). But, Google (and maybe I am being näive here) want to offer their searchers quality results, whether in their natural listings or with their advertising, so naturally they have started taking the landing page of the advert into consideration - the page people get to when they click on the advert.
Well if their paid search results simply went to the highest bidder, it’s not necessarily in the interest of the person doing the search. If that person feels they aren’t getting good results they may go somewhere else to search and Google can’t let that happen. Searchers make Google successful not necessarily the advertisers.
The best way to remedy (or try to control) your Adword costs therefore is:
Go on - take control today.
Many companies create generic adverts that drive click-throughs to the [generic] home page of their website. The problem is that because a lot of companies do this, there is more competition for the keywords you assign to your adverts and there tends to be a lack of context to some of the search terms. This has the double effect of creating higher ‘keyword’ prices for less-effective adverts.
For instance, I have researched some keywords for a company recently that sell plasma walls (or is it a video wall, projector cube… etc.). The problem is, if you do a search for ‘plasma walls’, you come up with more results for “plasma wall brackets” and will have to compete against these irrelevant results. (more…)
The Pay-per-action model from Google is now being rolled out internationally (as a Beta).
It is invitation only to companies using AdWords receiving more than 500 conversions from their cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression campaigns in the past 30 days.
Pay-per-action allows advertisers to pay for their advert only when a specific action is completed by a user on their web site. You could choose to pay when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or completes any other clearly defined action that you choose (more information on pay-per-action). (more…)
This article highlights two very different pay-per-click campaigns. One company spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, a rival chocolatier sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads (figures not quoted).
The moral of the story is that the difference was an employee who took the time to learn about how to get the best from Google Adwords, all driven from a highly restricted budget:
With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.
Pay Per Click, like any online marketing, requires a hell of a lot of optimisation but a lot of new advertisers still see it as a quick and easy way of attracting traffic - and it can. The problem is, the looser the advert, the less likely you will attract a serious buyer. No pain, no gain - a lot of time and effort is required setting up an Google Adwords Campaign:
What many new people to Adwords do, is create generic adverts with generic keywords pointing to generic pages (usually the website home page).
Unfortunately for them, a web user, when performing a search, will type in a much more specific requirement. ie. They wouldn’t be looking “web design agency” when they can type in “web design agency in Hampshire” and get a more specific result.
So, as users becomes more sophisticated, less patient, and whilst they have abundant choice, when it comes to pay-per-click, advertisers surely need to put a hell of a lot more time and effort to get their attention, and, make the whole ‘click-through’ process as logical and straightforward for the user.
Fortunately for those who do put the time and effort you can attract more relevant traffic with better adverts and lead a buyer into a page on your website that is further down the selling process, increasing your chances of a sale. The flip-side of better optimisation is actually reducing your advertising costs, not wasting time on ‘loose search phrases’.
Google has had it good for far too long - hasn’t it? Their great Adwords product has enabled thousands of companies to advertise on the web at affordable prices.
News out recently shows that both MSN (Microsoft) and Yahoo, are seriously fighting back with their own products.
It would seem from (my) opinion that both Yahoo and MSN have realised that they are being trounced in the search engine (and related products) market and are making serious inroads into taking back market share. From what we see, they are really gunning for Google.
UK businesses, however, are still so used to knowing Google as the market leader. According to recent figures: Yahoo has a 27% share of the search engine market, behind Google’s leading 42%. Microsoft’s MSN has a 13% stake, with Ask on 6%.
That said, these will be new tools, fresh for the picking and it’s the (search) results that count. The more relevant, the better.
Working with Adwords is certainly not as easy as it is made to sound. Picking the right words; paying the right price; Writing your adverts: They are all time consuming and take practice, lots of learning, and experience. Tread carefully, or seek advice.