Let’s face it, Google and Yahoo are extremely profitable due to their highly successful pay per click (PPC) options of each engine (AdWords and Overture respectively). It’s also safe to say that a great number of businesses find it profitable to advertise with PPC or this whole cycle of paid search would grind to a halt.

ROI

I personally have found that neither AdWords or Overture are interested in helping you increase your Return On Investment (ROI). After all, they earn an extremely large percentage of each dollar that you invest. They aren’t interested in you lowering your individual output per month or in bid prices going down (as a whole).

In June, 2006 (6/20/06) “laser hair removal new york” tipped the scales at $39 per click in Overture. Yahoo and the advertiser are still profitable at nearly $40 per click.

PPC Programs

PPC providers my offer for you to enroll in one of their PPC support programs – which are not widely available and often their answer is quite simply to pay them to take care of your PPC bid management. Your organization pays a monthly fee, they choose your terms and bid rates for each term.

Often a support program will guarantee a total number of clicks.

Let’s be very clear – they are guaranteeing that you will spend a certain amount with them each month! If they are guaranteeing a total number of clicks – and you are paying them for each click – then they’re writing their own paycheck regardless of your best interest.

That’s like a brick & mortar store guaranteeing that you will spend $50 each visit. Ignore what you get for the $50 – much less what you intended to purchase on your arrival.

PPC Guarantees

It is simply impossible to guarantee a number of something as fluid as the click through rate of search traffic unless you cook the books. A useful guarantee would be a guaranteed click through rate or a fraud-free guarantee.

PPC Bid Management

PPC Bid Management is a soft science but we have some very simple advice that will save you a large percentage of budget waste.

Content Matching

First of all, turn off “content matching” options unless you can verify that the traffic is turning verifiable leads. In our experience, the vast majority of traffic from content matching is either unqualified or outright fraudulent clicks.

Analysis

The Second step is to analyze your traffic through a good traffic analytics tool. We like NetTracker but there are other similar options on the market – ask your hosting provider for options.

Mark your PPC traffic with a special address (http:// yourwebpage ?source=google)

The analytics tool will catch the special code and isolate the PPC data from the rest of your traffic. From here you can run scenario reports on your PPC bids.

“How many PPC visitors filled out the contact form?”

If you can’t answer that question, you are undoubtedly wasting funds.

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing