This week, I continue to look at strategies to stretch your pay per click budget as far as possible to get the maximum impact. In Part I, I looked at the major PPC players, how they worked and who their syndication partners were. This time, we’ll go over a number of strategies that will help you fine tune your PPC campaign and zero in on the best potential customer at the lowest cost.

Picking the Right Keywords

When you’re paying for every visitor, it’s vital to make sure you’re getting the right ones. The best way to do this is to take the time to ensure you’re bidding for the right keywords. You’re trying to balance potential traffic against relevance for the term. The more relevant the term, the more likely it is that the visitor will be looking for what you have to offer. Let’s look at an example. You’re a lawyer in San Diego who specializes in family law. Here’s some terms, their potential traffic and current bid amounts in Overture:

Term	Searches	Bid Amount
Lawyer	82927	$1.89
Family Lawyer	2577	$0.53
California Lawyer	2328	$11.45
California Family Lawyer	191	$2.33
San Diego Family Lawyer	98	$0.21

While “lawyer” has great potential traffic, the relevance is minimal at best. You’re much better to find several highly relevant terms to bid on than one irrelevant term. In this case, I would definitely bid for “San Diego Family Lawyer” and would probably try “California Family Lawyer”. I wouldn’t bid for any of the more generic terms. In fact, there’s a great likelihood that Overture and Google’s editorial review team won’t even approve your bid for the more generic terms

One final word of caution about those huge traffic numbers for generic terms. When you look at how people actually search, you’ll find that these numbers can be very misleading. Often people will start searching using generic terms. When they see that the search results aren’t very relevant, they’ll launch a new search with more specific keywords. Although the initial search registered, it didn’t result in any clickthroughs. It was a “wasted” search. When you see huge search numbers for generic terms like “lawyers” in the example above, remember that many of those searches will be “wasted”.

Picking the Right Market

With pay per click, the key is to target as specifically as you can. You can target by picking the right keywords. You can also target by picking the right geographic market. When you sign up for a Google AdWords account, you can choose which countries you want your ad to appear in. If your only market is the US, that’s the only place your AdWord will appear. You can stretch your budget by concentrating your message in the markets where you have the greatest likelihood to convert visitors to your site. A web analytics program like SEP Traffic will help you in choosing these markets.

With Overture, you can choose a partner site in the UK, France, Germany or Japan. Overture has signed partnership deals with regionalized search portals in each of these markets. If the UK is a major market for you, remember that Espotting is the number one PPC engine there.

Picking the Right Time

As you start monitoring your PPC campaign, you will see that certain times of day or days of the week may result in much higher conversion rates than other time periods. As you fine tune your campaign, you can use this information to increase bids during peak conversion periods and then lay off during slack times.

Brush up your Titles and Descriptions

When you open a new ppc campaign, you’ll be asked to provide a title and description for each listing. These few words (a total of 230 characters for Overture, 95 for Google) can make or break your PPC campaign. It will be these words that will determine whether the potential customer launching the search will click on your listing or not. Also, editors at the PPC engine will carefully review your copy to make sure it’s relevant. Why do they care so much about relevancy? Simple…Money. Irrelevant listings produce few clickthroughs, take up space and don’t generate revenue for the engine.

Here’s some quick guidelines for writing this all important copy:

• Make sure the keywords you’re bidding for are included in both the title and description
• Make sure your copy is relevant to both the search term you’re bidding for and the page the user will click through to
• Avoid symbols and punctuation for effect
• Avoid Hype and Superlatives
• Ensure that anything that sets you apart from the competition is indicated in your description
• Carefully review your competition before writing

Writing effective PPC copy is a much bigger topic than I can cover here. After all, Overture’s listing guidelines alone run over 2500 words, all describing what you can and can’t do in your 40 or 50 words. For more on Overture’s and Google’s editorial guidelines, see Compare and Contrast: Ad Guidelines at Overture and Google, on Searchenginewatch.com. There’s links to both editorial guidelines at the bottom of the article.

We’re (Not) Number 1!

Ranking is not everything when it comes to PPC. Well written titles and descriptions and choosing the right keywords are much more effective strategies for driving the right traffic than making sure you’re always in the number one slot. In fact, when it comes to PPC, there are drawbacks to being the top dog.

First, of course, is that it costs more. While autobidding will usually keep the gap to 1 cent, insisting that you stay number one makes you a prime candidate for bid trapping. More about this later.

Secondly, we’ve seen the quality of the clickthroughs is generally better when you’re sitting in the number 2 or 3 spot. The reason for this has to do with the nature of the searcher. There are serial clickers and considered clickers. The serial clicker is someone who doesn’t read the search results, but automatically clicks on the number one return. The considered clicker reads through the search results and chooses the one that seems to offer the best match for what they were looking for. In this case, being Number 1 isn’t always better.

When determining your preferred ranking position, remember that you need to be in the top spots to take advantage of the syndication network offered by Google and Overture. While the number of top listings shown varies with the partner, being in the top 3 guarantees you’ll show up on the entire network.

It’s Not the Click, It’s the Conversion

Of all the tips offered in this column, this is the most important one! Clickthroughs mean nothing unless those visitors take the action you want on your site, becoming what we call a converted visitor. Yet less than 5% of all site owners track the number of conversions on their site. Monitoring your clickthroughs from a PPC engine is great, but if you want to check your bottom line and ROI, you have to monitor conversions. SEP Traffic is the ROI analysis solution we use for our clients. Having tracking in place which monitors conversions allows you to fine tune your PPC campaign to get the highest conversion rate possible.

Watch for Bid Gaps & Traps

There are two things you have to look out for when managing your bids on PPC engines: Bid Gaps and Traps

Bid Gaps occur when you’re paying more than the one cent that is required to stay ahead of the next bid. On Overture and Google, this problem has been helped by the introduction of autobidding, but it still occurs on the other PPC engines. In some cases, when these bid gaps aren’t monitored they can end up costing you several cents or even dollars more for each click you receive.

Ironically, by introducing auto-bidding to eliminate bid gaps, Overture introduced another problem, bid traps.

How Bid Trapping Works

Bid Trapping is when competitors force a bidder into paying inflated costs to stay in a desired ranking position. It occurs because Overture allows you to set a maximum bid amount. While you only have to pay 1 cent more than the next lowest bid, setting a high maximum bid forces to next higher bid to spend 1 cent more than your maximum. For example, let’s say that bidder 1 has set their maximum bid to $2.75 for the #1 position in Overture. Bidder #2 has set their maximum bid to $2.74 for the #2 spot. Bidder #3 is only paying $1.64 for the #3 spot. By setting their maximum one cent under the high bid maximum, Bidder #2 is locking Bidder #1 into paying $2.75, but is only paying $1.65 per click.

Bid Trapping only becomes a problem if you are absolutely set on maintaining a position. If you’re willing to move up and down in rankings, you can escape from a bid trap. Again, in the example above, Bidder #1 can reduce their maximum bid to $2.73, which will move them into #2 and up the ante for Bidder #2, who has now been bid trapped into paying $2.74. What usually happens then is a reverse bidding war that drops both bidders down to the level of the next lowest bidder.

Bid Management Tools, High Powered Help

As you can see from the example above, monitoring your Overture account can be a full time job. If you choose to use Overture’s auto-bidding tool, you have the added disadvantage of allowing your competitors to see your maximum bid, so they know exactly how much you’re willing to pay for a term. It’s like playing poker and letting everyone see your cards.

If Overture and other PPC placement is a major marketing strategy for you, you’ll probably want to check out some of the PPC management tools available. Our own SEP Traffic incorporates all the strategies outlined above, as well as integration with tracking and keyword analysis tools. Other bid management tools include Go Toast and BidRank.

These tools allow you to set a hidden maximum value without publishing it on Overture. They also automate much of the administration work required in managing your PPC campaigns.

The PPC Bottom Line

Pay per click engines have come on strong in the last few years, offering advertisers an excellent marketing channel to attract qualified, highly motivated prospects. For all the benefits of PPC, however, one always has to keep a sharp eye on the bottom line and make sure your per click charges never exceed your maximum cost per visitor. The strategies outlined should allow you to keep your PPC budget in check and boost your return on investment from Overture, Google and the other players.