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They showed spending overall on online advertising
to be up more than 60% in 2004 over 2003. Paid Search Advertising accounted for
39.5% of that figure and was itself up more than 87% over the previous year.
"We've always viewed local advertisers as fairly
conservative in that they don't have that much to spend," Borrell told Clickz
Network reporter Rob McGann. "Typically you expect them to funnel most of their
ad spend into direct mail and yellow pages, with only a small percentage for
online, but that is not the case at all this year.”
WSI Internet Consultant Ron Adelman wasn’t
surprised at all. He believes that local advertisers are behaving conservatively
when they choose to participate in paid online advertising. In fact, he says 80%
of these local business people jump at the chance to do Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
campaigns when he shows them how many people locally are searching on keywords
related to their business. He also reports that every single one of his current
clients is engaged in some level of PPC ad campaign, targeting either a local,
national, or international audience.
“Pay-Per-Click is the best way for any company
to reduce their advertising risk. Because even if your campaign isn’t that good,
you only pay when you get results – when you get someone to click through to
your site” he shares.
The other risk Adelman believes these
businesses are reducing is the overall financial risk posed by the high bid
prices many generic but popular search terms can pose. Very competitive keywords
like “mortgages” or “Web design” could easily command a bid price of $10, $15,
or even $30 per click. However, when you add a regional term such as “St. Louis”
or “London” to the keyword “mortgages” and use a tool like Overture or
Wordtracker you’ll see that the number of searches done on that phrase may be
dramatically lower – 30 - 40 searches as opposed to 4,000 to 400,000. Through
effective keyword research a business can identify more specific keywords which
cost substantially less, oftentimes just pennies a click.
One of the major benefits of running a local
PPC campaign is that it provides flexibility in reaching local customers within
a given geographic area. For example, a florist operating in Edinburgh, Scotland
can set-up their ad so that it only appears to users within the Greater
Edinburgh area.
'Few industry experts recommend that a small or
medium sized business attempt to track their own campaigns and results.'
Adelman reports his typical clients happily
spend between $300 and $1,000 USD on their clicks each month. His St. Louis,
Illinois WSI office charges a very affordable fee to set up PPC campaigns and
manage them each month on behalf of their clients. Adelman and his team provide
the expertise and careful management that each PPC campaign requires making sure
clients get the optimal return for their PPC advertising investment.
While the major search engines themselves offer
advertisers a variety of free tools to help them manage and track the results of
their PPC campaigns, few industry experts recommend that a small or medium sized
business attempt to track their own campaigns and results. They note that while
most can track which keywords convert the best, many do not look deeper into
their numbers to know whether what they are doing is at the best possible price.
Management of a PPC campaign goes beyond
setting up an account, keyword research, writing ads and setting a daily
advertising budget. It also entails measuring your results and tweaking your ads
and placements to improve on those results. Tracking which words convert the
best is only the first step across the surface data available. Which search
engines or networks return the best conversion results for each keyword, or
whether they’re doing so in your targeted cost range are just two more of the
many other variables you’ll want to keep an eye on. You’ll also need to know,
and use, your average cost-per-sales, average customer acquisition costs, and
average lifetime customer value calculation to determine the actual Return on
Investment for each phrase, ad, campaign, engine, search network, or local
search directory used.
While managing a successful ongoing PPC
campaign can be extremely tedious and time consuming, even a poorly run campaign
can begin to increase a company’s search visibility within days or hours.
“I can literally walk in to any business with a
document in my hand that shows them how many people searched for their type of
business, product or service online last month, and say the one thing that every
businessman wants to hear – I can guarantee to put them on top of all those
searches within hours of launching a brand new website. I can guarantee that
they will be found” exclaims Adelman.
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