Mild-mannered webmaster by day …
Pay-per-click advertising is a tough business these days, and it’s showing no signs of getting any easier in the near future. Bids are rising at astounding rates. When I first starting buying PPC ads a few years ago, we never paid more than $1.00 per click, and most clicks cost less than 50 cents. Now we regularly venture into the $3.00 to $4.00 range, and often the only reason we don’t pay more is that we simply can’t afford to.
Mega-corporations can afford to spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising just for the sake of branding, but small businesses have to be a lot more careful about what they spend and how they spend it. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the years that can help small businesses get the most out of PPC advertising for the least amount of money.
If you sell handcrafted wooden toys, don’t bother trying to compete over the keyword “toys”. With a term this broad, you never know what customers might be searching for, and you could end up with a lot of useless traffic. A broad term like this can also be very expensive. A quick check on Google Adwords shows me that the top three bidders can expect to pay anywhere from $9,950.00 to $17,640.00 per day on the keyword “toys”.
Instead, choose very specific terms like “handcrafted wooden toys” or “handmade wood toys”. A lot less people will see your ad, but the ones who do will be much more likely to buy. After all, you’re selling exactly what they searched for. You should mine your product catalog for more specific keywords, including product names, brand names and model numbers. These keywords might bring in just a click or two every month … but if you have 500 of them, that’s 1,000 clicks a month from highly targeted customers. And remember, they’re likely to be very cheap clicks, so the return on investment could be huge.
On Google Adwords, it’s called “broad matching” or “expanded matching”. On Yahoo! Search Marketing, it’s called “advanced matching”. Regardless of what it’s called, it all amounts to the same thing: untargeted traffic. When you use broad matching, the advertising network will show your ad for related keywords, such as synonyms and plurals. It sounds like a good idea on the surface (not to mention a lot less work for you), but this strategy can go horribly awry. Let’s say you’re bidding on the term “handmade wooden toys” and you have broad matching switched on. If a customer searches for “handmade wooden sex toys”, do you want your ad to show?
Personally, I prefer exact matching. I only want my ad to show when the exact keywords I’m bidding on are searched for. This means a lot more work for me when building my keyword lists, because I have to brainstorm every possible combination of words a customer would use to find my products. But I also spend a lot less time these days wondering where all my ad dollars went and why those thousands of clicks never turned into sales.
I intended to write only one post on this topic. A thousand words later (and still going strong), I realized I would need to break this up into multiple posts so it could be read in easily digestable chunks. Part two will be posted tomorrow.
Continue reading about PPC tips for small businesses in part two.
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