This is the second post in a series. Read the first post about how small businesses can save money on pay-per-click advertising.

Opt out of content networks

With traditional pay-per-click advertising, a customer types a word or phrase into a search engine, and your ad appears alongside the natural, unpaid search results. With content advertising, your ad can be shown on all kinds of websites, such as blogs and news sites. In my experience, click-through rates on content advertising are abysmal, and it’s not hard to figure out why. How often do you click ads while reading a blog or a news article? If I’m not shopping for something, I rarely look at ads. In fact, I have an extension installed on my browser that blocks the vast majority of ads before they ever have a chance to appear.

Another type of content advertising I would be wary of is site targeting. If you really do your homework and hand-pick which sites you want your ads on, it could work for you. But again, you have to ask yourself whether the visitors to those sites are in a shopping frame of mind. Your ad is essentially like the impulse buy rack you see when you’re waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket. Every once in a while, you might pick up a pack of lighters and a tube of Chapstick, but usually you just want to pay for your groceries and go.

Deliver what you promise

If you’re bidding on the keyword “handmade wooden toys”, make sure your ad directs customers directly to a page selling handmade wooden toys. Don’t send them to your home page and make them search for what they want. And if you only sell one or two handmade wooden toys, but the majority of your products are plastic toys or electronic toys, you might want to drop the keyword altogether.

If you don’t sell any handmade wooden toys and are bidding on the keyword in the desperate hope that customers will see all your lovely plastic toys and have a change of heart … take a deep breath, slap yourself in the face and promptly forget the whole idea. Not only are you wasting your money, chances are pretty good you’ll never make it past the ad network’s editors, anyway.

Continue reading the third post about pay-per-click tips for small businesses.

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