Transcript Lecture 24x

Lecture 24
E-Marketing
Paid Search Marketing
Instructor: Hanniya Abid
Assistant Professor
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
Objectives
 After this lecture you would be able to
 Review search engine marketing techniques.
 Know the differences between paid search marketing vs
traditional marketing.
 Know how to manage Pay Per Click
A brief recap...
Remember, the main techniques are:
1. Ensure your sites are included in the indexes of the
main search.
2 Complete keyphrase analysis to identify phrases
relevant to your market.
3 Start a search engine optimization initiative. This may
involve restructuring your website.
4 Maximize quality links from and to different sites –
run a link-building campaign.
5 Review the relevance of pay per click advertising and
trusted feeds
Be sure to devote sufficient resources to deliver ROI from these.
Ensure you employ someone who is knowledgeable to optimize your
position with search engines.
Paid Search Marketing
 Paid search marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC) is
similar to conventional advertising; here a
relevant text ad with a link to a company page is
displayed when the user of a search engine types in a
specific phrase.
 A series of text ads usually labelled as ‘sponsored links ’
are displayed to the right of the natural listings .
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05we2g3Edgs
Paid Search Marketing
 Although many searchers prefer to click on the natural
listings, a sufficient number do click on the paid listings
(typically around a quarter or a third of all clicks)
 They are highly profitable for companies such as Google
and a well designed paid search campaign can drive a
significant amount of business for the search companies.
Paid Search Marketing
There are two significant differences between PPC and conventional
advertising which are its main advantages:
1. The advertiser is not paying for the ad to be displayed.
Cost is only incurred when the ad is clicked on and a
visitor is directed to the advertiser ’s website. Hence it ’s a
Cost Per Click (CPC) model!
However, there are increasingly options for paid
search marketing using other techniques, Google also
offers CPM (Site targeting) and CPA (Pay Per Action) options
on its content network where contextual ads are
displayed on third-party sites relevant to the content on
a page.
Paid Search Marketing
2. PPC advertising is highly targeted.
The relevant ad with a link to a destination web page
is only displayed when the user of a search engine types
in a specific phrase (or the ad appears on the content
network, triggered by relevant content on a publishers
page), so there is limited wastage compared to other
media.
Users responding to a particular keyphrase or reading
related content have high intent or interest and so tend
to be good quality leads.
Pay Per Click - Advantages
In addition to performance-based payment and well targeted
prospects, PPC has other advantages:
1 Good accountability.With the right tracking system, the
ROI for individual keywords can be calculated.
2 Predictable.Traffic, rankings and results are generally
stable and predictable.This contrasts with SEO.
3 Technically simpler than SEO. Position is based on a
combination of bid amount and quality score, whereas
SEO requires long-term, technically complex work on page
optimization, site restructuring and link-building.
Pay Per Click - Advantages
4. Speed. PPC listings get posted quickly, usually in a
few days (following editor review). SEO results can
take weeks or months to be achieved. Moreover, when a
website is revised for SEO, rankings will initially drop
while the site is reindexed by the search engines.
5. Branding.Tests have shown that there is a branding
effect with PPC, even if users do not click on the ad.
This can be useful for the launch of products or major
campaigns.
Pay Per Click - Disadvantages
However, these disadvantages need to be managed:
1 Competitive and expensive. Since Pay Per Click has
become popular, some companies may get involved in
bidding wars that drive bids up to an unacceptable level.
Some phrases such as ‘ life insurance ’ can exceed £10 per
click.
2 Inappropriate. For companies with a lower budget or a
narrower range of products on which to generate lifetime
value, it might not be cost-effective to compete.
Pay Per Click - Disadvantages
3. Needful of specialist knowledge. PPC requires a
knowledge of configuration, bidding options and of the
reporting facilities of different ad networks. Internal staff can
be trained, but they will need to keep up-to-date with
changes to the paid search services.
4.Time consuming.To manage a PPC account can require
daily or even hourly checks on the bidding in order to stay
competitive. This can amount to a lot of time. The tools and
best practice varies frequently, so to keep up-to-date is
difficult.
5 Irrelevant. Sponsored listings are only part of the search
engine marketing mix. Many search users do not click on
these.
Managing Pay Per Click
 Different advertisers bid on particular key words through
a web-based management interface provided by the
network to achieve the listing that they want.
 Setting up a sound account structure is important since it
determines how closely you can target your paid search
activities.
 Campaigns provide a way to manage ads for related
products.You should set a daily budget, which will often
correspond to budgets for different product groups
(categories) and geographies.
Managing Pay Per Click
 Generic search terms and brand terms often also have
their own campaigns compared to more specific product
campaigns.
 Within each campaign Ad Groups will be set up which
contain keywords that will trigger the ad to be displayed
when it is searched upon.
 Advertisers decide on the maximum Cost Per Click
(CPC) they are prepared to pay for each keyword or Ad
Group.
Adwords account structure
An Adgroup within Adwords
In this case there is a single keyword which when typed will trigger a
targeted message for which different versions can be served for testing.
Managing Pay per Click
 With PPC as for any other media, media buyers carefully
evaluate the advertising costs in relation to the initial
purchase value or lifetime value they feel they will
achieve from the average customer.
 As well as considering the Cost Per Click (CPC), you
need to think about the conversion rate when the visitor
arrives at your site. Clearly, an ad could be effective in
generating clickthroughs or traffic, but not achieve the
outcome required on the web site such as generating a
lead or online sale.
Managing Pay per Click
 This could be because there is a poor incentive, call-to-action
or the profile of the visitors is simply wrong.
 One implication of this is it will often be more cost-effective
if targeted microsites or landing pages are created specifically
for certain keyphrases to convert users to making an enquiry
or sale.
 These can be part of the site structure, so clicking on a ‘car
insurance ’ ad will take the visitor through to the car
insurance page on a site rather than a home page.
 This is not a form of advertising to use unless the
effectiveness of the web site in converting visitors to buyers
is known
Managing Pay Per Click
 Cost Per Click differs between different keywords from
generic to specific. It also shows the impact of different
conversion rates on the overall CPA.
 It can be seen that niche terms that better indicate interest in
a specific product such as ‘women ’ s car insurance ’ demand
a higher fee (this may not be true for less competitive
categories where niche terms can be cheaper).
 PPC search in competitive categories have been shown.
Advertising just on these four keywords to achieve a high
ranking would cost €33 000 in a single day! Some advertisers
target lower positions in the SERPs, since visitors are better
value and lower cost.
Managing Pay Per Click
 The cost per acquisition (CPA) can be calculated as follows:
 Cost per acquisition
(100/Conversion rate %) X Cost per click
 Given the range in costs, two types of strategy can be
pursued in PPC search engine advertising.
 If budget permits, a premium strategy can be followed to
compete with the major competitors who are bidding the
highest amounts on popular keywords. Such a strategy is based
on being able to achieve an acceptable conversion rate once the
customers are driven through to the web site.
 A lower-cost strategy involves bidding on lower cost, less
popular phrases. These will generate less traffic, so it will be
necessary to devise a lot of these phrases to match the traffic
from premium keywords.
Optimizing Pay Per Click
 Each PPC keyphrase ideally needs to be managed
individually in order to make sure that the bid (amount
per click) remains competitive in order to show up in the
top of the results. Experienced PPC marketers broaden
the range of keyphrases to include lower volume phrases.
Since each advertiser will typically manage thousands of
keywords to generate clickthroughs, manual bidding
soon becomes impractical.
Optimizing Pay Per Click
 Some search engines include their own bid management tools,
but if you or your agency is using different Pay Per Click services
such as Overture, Espotting and Google, it makes sense to use a
single tool to manage them all. It also makes comparison of
performance easier too.
 Bid management software such as Atlas One Point
(ww.atlasonepoint.com ) and BidBuddy (
www.bidbuddy.co.uk ) can be used across a range of PPC services
to manage keyphrases across multiple PPC ad networks and
optimize the costs of search engine advertising.
 The current CPC is regularly reviewed and your bid is reduced or
increased to achieve a goal of profitability or sales volume.
Optimizing Pay Per Click
 More sophisticated bid management tools such as Efficient
Frontier use historical click, cost, impression and position data to
model the whole campaign in a portfolio-style approach similar to
those used by stock market traders. For each keyword and each
position, these tools predict the required bid, the actual CPC
(cost per click), the click volume and the conversion rate.
 As more marketers have become aware of the benefits of PPC,
competition has increased and this has driven up the Cost Per
Click (CPC) and so reduced its profitability. We will soon reach
the point where those bidding at the top will be the companies
with the most efficient web sites for conversion to outcome and
the highest potential lifetime value for cross- selling.
Making your ad creative effective
 Creative ad copy is important for quality score and
minimizing costs.
 Your copywriting techniques need to work within the
many editorial guidelines.
Beware of the fake clicks
Whenever the principle of PPC marketing is described to
marketers, very soon a light bulb comes on and they ask, ‘so
we can click on competitors and bankrupt them ’.

Well actually no. The PPC ad networks detect multiple
clicks from the same computer (IP address) and say they
filter them out.
 However, there are techniques to mimic multiple clicks
from different locations such as software tools to fake clicks
and even services where you can pay a team of people across
the world to click on these links.

Beware of the fake clicks
 It is estimated that in competitive markets one in five of
the clicks may be fake. While this can be factored into the
conversion rates you will achieve, ultimately this could
destroy PPC advertising. We believe that, in the longer
term, PPC will move to something similar to an affiliate
model where marketers only pay when a sale or some
other outcome on a site occurs.
Summary
 Overview of Search Marketing
 Paid Search Search Marketing
 Advantages vs Disadvantages
 Managing PPC
One more thing for today...
 Assume you are starting a local business that will provide
photography services at events.You want to reach the
right audience.You have a website where your portfolio
is available and users can see your work. However, the
visibility of your website in search results is not good.
 What would you do?