Blog, Paid Search
Time Management of Paid Search
Let’s define Paid Search as paying for traffic from search engines (and their partner sites. The secret to good paid search marketing is to avoid the bad traffic and convert the paid traffic, profitably. I’m over simplifying, but this is the goal.
In this post, let’s explore time management of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. This is also known as cost-per-click (CPC) or Paid Search. This Paid Search marketing is advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and others.
By far, PPC marketing on search engines is a bigger opportunity to reach new customers than most other online marketing methods.
Everybody knows that the king of the search engine traffic is Google. Latest figures show Google owning approximately 65-70% of all search engine traffic, while the remain search engine traffic come from Yahoo, MSN, AOL and “others”. Therefore, I like to concentrate my Paid Search efforts in the following percentages:
- Google – 85%
- MSN – 10%
- Yahoo – 5%
- Other – 1%
I’m concentrating a disproportionate amount on Google and MSN for several reasons:
- You can have the biggest impact to your bottom line by optimizing your Google Adwords campaign.
- Also from my experience, MSN has tremendous value. You can often getting great keywords at a fraction of the cost compared to Google and Yahoo. MSN offers a great opportunity to take some chances to find high traffic keywords at a great price. The knock on MSN is that they there is not much volume…and it seems the volume continues to shrink month after month.
- I don’t spend a lot of time or money on other paid search engines like Ask or other “secondary” PPC programs. In fact, I really only take a big shortcut and simply implement your best performing keywords in ”other” PPC search engine program. I would recommend taking your top 10-20 terms in terms of ROI (return-on-investment) and stopping there. Why? Frankly, it’s not worth your time because there is not enough traffic. I’d rather you spend time optimizing your Google PPC campaign or implementing a great email effort (more on that another time).
Paid search marketing is a must-have for your marketing programs. If you are ignoring paying for traffic to your site, you are missing out on qualified traffic and real return-on-investment when it is done correctly.
This is huge online marketing channel and with good reason. In most instances, it’s the number one way online stores get good traffic. It’s an easy way to reach a targeted or mass audience quickly (within minutes).
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