Pay-per-click web advertising needs good keywords

Pay-per-click web advertising seems so easy.

Create a brief text ad, one of those "sponsored links" that appear on search engine page results.

Select keywords that describe your product or service, so when people searching for a widget, for example, type one of your widget keywords into the search engine box, your ad will appear on the search page result.

Tell Google, Yahoo or whichever search engine you choose how much you'll pay each time a searcher clicks on your ad, but know that the price you pay per click will determine your ad's placement on the search pages. The more you pay, the better your position.

Of the two pay-per-click components, keywords and how much you'll pay, the words are more important.

For example, Andy Hortatsos was getting a "tremendous number of clicks - but not sales" with "sunglasses," a logical enough keyword for his Shadesaver.com, a Glendale Heights company that sells sunglasses online.

"We were getting people to the site, but they weren't buying," says Hortatsos. "We were using the wrong keywords."

"Sunglasses," it turns out, was too broad a keyword. Hortatsos' solution was to outsource the PPC process, a decision that, he says, has boosted revenue 25 percent over the past year while saving Shadesaver.com $40,000 in pay-per-click fees.

Google, which dominates the search sector and, therefore, the PPC process, "makes it easy to set up an account and spend money," says Mike Tatge, managing partner of JumpFly, Inc., an Elgin company that manages pay-per-click campaigns - including Shadesaver.com's PPC efforts.

The keys, Tatge says, are to know who your customers are; understand what you're trying to achieve with your Web site, and to take the time to analyze your PPC data.

"If the system is set up properly," he says, "you can learn a lot about your business from pay-per-click."

"Pay-per-click is the best thing that ever happened to us," says Bill Burr, president of S&W Manufacturing Co., Inc., a Bensenville manufacturer of precision-machined products.

"We used to have sales reps, but we never knew when they were working." The sales reps are gone, replaced by JumpFly's managed PPC process. "Now," says Burr, "we get 90 percent of our sales from the Internet."

S&W has 500 keywords - some of which, Burr says, get only two or three hits a year. The company spends $2,000 a month on keyword listings and another $250 for JumpFly, and consistently comes up first on searches that matter to S&W.

Generally, Tatge says, you have to spend $1,000 a month or more on keywords to make a managed PPC program work. That's often finable money, however. Burr notes that S&W "used to spend $20,000-$30,000 a year putting ads in Thomas Register - but nobody wants to pick up a book today." Instead, S&W puts those one-time print ad dollars into pay-per-click.

Questions, comments to Jim Kendall, JKendall@121MarketingResources.com.

© 2008 121 Marketing Resources, Inc.