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Pay for result.
One of the most compelling features of PPC – perhaps even more to CEOs
than to marketers! – is the notion of paying only for leads that actually come to your web site.
This is “narrowcasting” on steroids! You don’t pay to show your ad to everyone watching the
Super Bowl at 9:03 pm, or everyone who picked up the January issue of Networks Unlimited.
Instead, your ad is seen by only those with some interest in your product or service (as
evidenced by keyword match); and you pay for only the subset of those viewers who actually
clicked on your ad. What would you pay your direct-mail vendor per bingo card returned, if that was all you paid
for? Probably you would use the vehicle quite a bit more, and be a bit less fanatical about list
selection/cleansing (although odds are your vendor would be correspondingly more so!).
Most likely, the per-card rate that you wouldn’t mind paying makes today’s online per-click
rates look like the bargain they still are. Trackability ...aka, clear & objective ROI:
Because PPC is all-electronic, everything that happens is explicitly measurable. The kind of measurement that you’d love to do with your offline programs – but probably don’t because of the difficulty and the extent of “hand-waving” involved – is completely trivial with PPC, and requires no hand-waving whatsoever. A clickthrough to your landing page comes about only in response to a specific keyword/phrase and ad, and all such events are captured and available for raw inspection or summary analysis. So, assuming that you can assign a “downstream” expected value to a captured lead, then
the ROI of your PPC campaign is always definitive, and can be measured on whatever
frequency you prefer. This fact, coupled with the degree of control provided, also enables you
to run “split” experiments easily (between different ad versions, keyword phrases, etc.), and
act on the results within hours or days. No need to wait for the mail-out/read/ process/mailback
cycle to unfold, or for the January issue of Networks Unlimited to come out. It’s like the
difference life scientists get from running genetic experiments on E. Coli bacteria rather than
on large mammals: there are so many more generations per unit of time that the effect of the
agent being tested becomes apparent far sooner. Incredibly granular control/flexibility: With PPC, you can control... - your chosen keywords/phrases
- your bid price for those keywords (and consequently your spot in the rank-ordered
PPC listings) - your ad text
- the offer your ad presents to the searcher
- the contents of your landing page
Since you have all these levers, it only makes sense to vary them systematically,
experimenting until you achieve an acceptable ROI across your entire campaign ...and it may
vary from campaign to campaign. Play around with your keywords; the ones that “obviously”
should work are not always the ones that do work. Adjust your bid pricing; you might well
find that you get a higher ROI by aiming for something lower than the top spot in the raked
listings. Fiddle with your ad text; as with all advertising, nuances matter in ways that are
often difficult, if not impossible, to pre-determine. And of course, different offers are likely to
have differential attractiveness and hence conversion rates. Just remember to change only
one thing at a time (“controlled experimentation”), so that you can be certain of what caused
the observed change in outcome. With some search engines, it’s also possible to limit your ad’s exposure to selected regions of
cyberspace; you can target certain countries, specify the searcher’s natural language(s)
...even vary your investment level over time to adapt to any seasonality in your business.
Given this degree of control, the only way to lose your shirt with PPC advertising is to float an
ad at a relatively high bid price and then ignore it ...in which case you really have only
yourself to blame. (After all, inattention to metrics and fine-tuning can kill your offline
campaigns, too ...just more slowly.) But with a bit of judicious attention to the controls
provided, you should be able to make PPC pay its way for you quite nicely.
Reach: Most of the more popular search engines “syndicate” their paid-search results to
some of the less popular engines. Google, for example, syndicates its results to AOL and
Ask.com; Yahoo to AltaVista, InfoSpace, CNN. Hence, even though you may not have considered, say, Ask an engine worth any real SEM attention by your company, you will nonetheless get its loyal searchers anyway by virtue of your PPC campaign on Google. Relative ease of setup: This is a bit of a double-edged sword, since it may tend to
encourage that “set-it-&-forget-it” mentality. But the exciting fact is that you can open an
account, select and price keywords, post an ad, and literally see visitors starting to hit your
site ...all within as little as 10 minutes! << previous | next >>
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