Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

Ron Erdos

Imagine telling your Yellow Pages account manager that you are happy to pay for your ad, but only when people ring up!

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an entirely new way of thinking about advertising. For the first time in history, you can pay for advertising only when you know people are interacting with it.

Here are some tips to help you deliver the maximum revenue from your PPC campaigns. (You will save hundreds if not thousands from these tips).

Tip #1: Don’t dump all your keywords under one ad.
In offline media, it is common practice to see one ad offering many products. Department store brochures in your mailbox are the classic example.

It is a different story altogether online. People are after cricket bats, not sporting equipment. They are searching for 42” plasma TVs, not consumer electronics. It’s important that you have ads that refer to specific products, not just ads which refer to the product category as a whole. Often these search terms will even have brand names attached (such as a search for “Brand X, Model Y plasma TV”).

If you can show people that you have exactly what they are looking for (e.g. “Brand X, Model Y Plasma TVs”), you are much more likely to get clicks on your ad. For those who were unaware, more clicks on your ad results in cheaper clicks for you. This is because ads which are clicked on often are deemed highly relevant, and therefore seen to provide a better search experience for the user. Think of it as a “discount for providing relevant ads”.

Tip #2: Don’t bid on keywords that are too generic.
Let’s say you offer management consulting services. I would recommend that you not bid on the generic term “consulting”. It will most likely be more expensive per click, and it is also not as targeted as the term “management consulting”. Generally, the cheaper terms to bid on will be multi word phrases (known as “long tail” terms), such as “management consulting Melbourne”.