PPC options for small or local businesses

[Localmn]

This looks like a good place to ask this question…

From a local or small business point of view, I’m curious to know what types of PPC have worked well for you or your customers. From my experience anyway…

I’m a pretty big fan of Google’s regional Adwords. A customer of mine manages his own campaign and even used to use his ad text as a call-to-action to come to his actual location (in this case, an auto repair shop). From what he says, it worked really well. Which reminds me, I should ask him why he changed the text to something else?!

Internet Yellow Pages – haven’t had as much luck. I signed up about 4 months ago at a quarter per click. I think I’ve spent a dollar so far and received no customers. I think I’d recommend it if a customer was a local restaurant, nightclub, or maybe a company that already has a recognized name. I’m hoping that someone will someday change my mind on that.

Any thoughts?

Paul

[David Wallace]

The majority of my customers use Google AdWords and Overture Premium Listings. Can't say anything about any of the others because I and they haven't used them. I used to have one client that used the smaller PPC engines for their penny click simply to drive traffic to his site but then they raised their minimums to a nickel so he cut them out.

[divshow]

I have tried Overture and a few others. Spend a good amount of money on them and didn't receive a single customer. I'm not sure if it was done 100% correct or what, but if someone could let us know what HAS worked, I would greatly appreciate that info...

[neofelis]

Originally Posted by divshow

I have tried Overture and a few others. Spend a good amount of money on them and didn't receive a single customer. I'm not sure if it was done 100% correct or what, but if someone could let us know what HAS worked, I would greatly appreciate that info...

Hello all,

Last month I started PPC campaigns with both Google Adwords and Overture. I had a fair amount of success with both, and wanted to share my experience.

First, let me get my bias out of the way: I have a distinct preference for Google Adwords. I will be happy to go into the reasons for that if anyone is interested, but will leave it out for now.

Instead, I'd like to talk about what did work for me. Since I was a PPC newbie when I started, I felt that I needed some help from the pros to get a good return on my ads without spending a ton of money. As a small business owner, I don't have a massive marketing budget that I can blow through each month.

I began with Catherine Seda's book Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales. It is a pretty good overview of all the different forms that PPC can take (Paid Inclusion, PPC, etc.). While she only devotes one chapter to PPC, her other chapters on ROI tracking and copywriting for maximum response are well worth it.

The next stop for me on the learning curve was Andrew Goodman's excellent e-book Google AdWords: 21 Pay-Per-Click Campaign Secrets Your Competition Doesn't Know. This is a comprehensive view of how to manage a PPC campaign using Google Adwords (and since I had a Google bias proved very effective).

Those were my learning tools, now for some of my own advice. Lisa, you said that you did not get a single customer from your PPC campaings. I took a look at your site, and wanted to find out if by customer, you meant someone who purchased one of the products that you sell.

For me, the Adwords campaign was just to get people to download two free chapters of a digital camera guide that I offer. I had a very specific ad that generated about a 3% - 5% click through rate. This took the people that clicked the ad to a specific landing page devoted to introducing the two sample chapters. I was tracking my conversion rate by seeing how many people actually downloaded the two chapters. In the end, conversion rates were anywhere from 11% - 33% (depending upon the keyword).

The most important thing that I learned from all of this: expand your keyword horizons. I originally began with a keyword that I thought was highly relevant: "digital camera guide". As the weeks passed, and there was little or no conversion I began to wonder what was going on. Then I realized that people who are confused about digital camera terms are probably more likely to search for the term they don't understand than a "digital camera guide." This proved to be the way to go, since I found a lot of keywords in this area that don't cost a ton (0.5 - 0.10 per click) and get a great CTR and conversion rate.

Within a week I was sitting at the top spot for some of my keywords on Google (since people were clicking the ads a lot) and that proved to be more than I had bargained for. I was getting a lot of click through, but was also paying a lot. I have since scaled back those campaigns, but they are still effective at getting me a targeted number of clicks each day.

I hope this helps as a start. I will be happy to provide more information as I learn more about the interesting (and sometimes expensive) world of PPC.

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Chris Roberts
Triphase Media - Photography, Video and Web Development Services

[Robert]

Welcome to the forum, Chris!

Excellent post! Andrew's and Catherine's books are indeed very good recommendations.

[divshow]

Chris ~

Thank you so much for the advise. I actually hired the person who does my SEO every month to manage my PPC, but really got very little help in what to do...and with no experience myself it ended up being a waste of money.

I will definatly take a look at those books. I would love to learn about the PPC's and just do it myself.

Keywords are definatly the way to go...just figuring out which are the best ones for the price is nerve wracking for me!

Lisa, you said that you did not get a single customer from your PPC campaings. I took a look at your site, and wanted to find out if by customer, you meant someone who purchased one of the products that you sell.

I consider a customer someone who has either purchased something from my site or signed up for my monthly newsletter (because they are potential customers).

I'll have time to check into those books next week...I'll probably be asking for some help understanding everything!!!

Thanks again!

[neofelis]

Originally Posted by divshow

Keywords are definatly the way to go...just figuring out which are the best ones for the price is nerve wracking for me!

I think that a lot of people agree that selecting the right keywords is the most difficult part of any SEO or PPC campaign. People search for the most interesting things!

Happily, there is some help: it's name is WordTracker. WordTracker is an online subscription service that provides great information about what search terms people are looking for. Rather than speculate about how people will find you, you can actually see the most common terms that people search for.

The real benefit of this service is that it not only tells you how many people searched for a particular word or phrase, it also lets you in on how many other web sites are competing for that same word or phrase. It then creates a numerical score called a Keyword Eligibility Index (KEI) which should be a good indication about which words to optimize for. The higher the KEI, the better the keyword.

Just a note with regard to PPC - using a tool like WordTracker is less effective for a PPC campaign, since the KEI seems to be determined using organic results. What the KEI really tells you is what search terms to use for search engine optimization. Since PPC bypasses organic results completely, this comparison is less useful.

You may be able to use it as an indicator of which search terms are going to cost more in a PPC campaign, because if there is more organic competition for a term, then presumably there will be more PPC competition, which will drive the per-click cost up.

Glad that I was able to help - if you need more pointers, feel free to ask.

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Chris Roberts

[divshow]

Chris ~

I am very familiar with Word Tracker, but oblivious about how to read it correctly. I know that anything above KEI of 10 is good and anything above some other number (it's been awhile since I used it last that I can't remember the exact number) is a gift. How they go about arriving at that number is what just boggles my mind...there was one search term I was looking at that looked like it had a good number of searches for it in the last 24 hours, and not many competing websites, but the KEI was so low.

I did use it however to pick out the keywords that I have targeting the Search Engines and optimized my pages towards. Doesn't matter if I understood, just picked the ones that had the higher KEI.

Again, thanks for the info...keep it coming! LOL...I may have to give you a discount for all the info!

[Lynn Terry]

To answer the original question: Google Adwords is my preference. I generally promote affiliate programs via PPC, so being able to use an affiliate link (vs Overture, which requires me to create a landing page on my own site) and instant approval (vs Overture's looong editorial process) are the main perks.

There's definitely a strategy to it - one which I am constantly learning and testing. I've read GoogleCash by Chris Carpenter and The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall - among a few others. I met Perry in Chicago last month, by the way - great guy!

I second the recommendation for WordTracker, however I pay no attention to the KEI factor. Personally, I like to do my own competition analysis. And of course "competition" is not always a 'bad thing'

[divshow]

Lynn ~

Thanks for the post and the Google Cash reference. That is one I have not heard of. Yet another thing to add to my list of things I want to do!