Paid Search Tips

Paid search inclusion is a hot topic these days, and many marketers are adding paid search as an important lead generation strategy. But making search really yield positive results can be a tricky proposition, especially if you are new to the game. There are a lot of pitfalls that can make paid search a bottomless money pit instead of an efficient lead generating machine.

Tip #1: Not all clicks are the same

Given the same search keywords, one might think that the value of a click would be relatively similar regardless of their origin. But it turns out this is not the case, for several reasons. In paid search the quality of the traffic can vary drastically because of:

• The search engine's audience profile
• The presences of "incentivized" clicks, in which people who really have no likelihood of actually making a purchase are paid to "research" products.
• Click fraud, in which fraudulent clicks are generated (by people or by automated programs) in order to artificially increase revenue for affiliate or content sites, or to inflict additional charges on competitors.

Click fraud is a huge problem, with estimates of fraudulent portion of total clicks ranging from 15% to 40%. For more information on click fraud, search below:

Tip #2: Correlate leads and purchases back to their sources

The crucial thing necessary to measure traffic quality is to be able to identify the leads and purchases from each traffic source. Once do this, you can determine valuable metrics such as:

• Cost per lead - The amount you pay for each inbound sales lead or product trial for each traffic source
• Cost per acquisition - The amount you pay for each new paying customer for each traffic source
• Return on investment - The amount of revenue you generate divided by the amount you paid for the traffic to generate that revenue

In order to generate these metrics it is necessary to be able to tag web site visitors with identifying information, and pass this information along to sales lead forms, product trial signups/requests, and purchase forms. This can be accomplished with many commercial web servers' session management features, or it can also be done manually using cookies.

Tip #3: Test and use multiple vendors, keywords, and ad copy strategies

Once you have the capability to measure traffic, it is important to continually experiment and refine your strategies. Continually test, measure, and adjust, re-directing your budget towards the channels, keywords and copy which provide the best return.

Some feel that a "contrarian" approach is the most effective for paid search, because of the fact that common keywords have a generally higher cost than more specific phrases. In addition to being less expensive, the traffic generated by more specific keywords is often better qualified. The down side of this approach is traffic volume is much lower for specific keywords, which means that it is necessary to use many more keywords to achieve the same traffic levels.


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