The power of search advertising

PPC ads on search engines are likely to be much more effective than banner
ads. Why?

_ People are searching for something when they see your ad. Banner
ads are often placed onto what may be termed content sites, as opposed
to search sites. On content sites, people are looking at information,
rather than for information. In most cases, banner ads lead people away
from the task at hand; PPC ads are designed to help people with the task
at hand — looking for information.

_ Ads are delivered based on what people search for, so there’s a very
good chance that if someone clicks your ad, he or she is interested in
what you’re selling or promoting.

_ The ads are unobtrusive and not gimmicky. The major PPC systems
have guidelines to stop the use of tricks and gimmicks. Again, if someone
clicks, he or she is probably interested.

All in all, PPC ads on search sites are generally more effective than banner
ads on non-search sites, in the same way that Yellow Pages ads are often
more effective than newspaper ads. When people see your ad for, say, a shoe
store in the Yellow Pages, chances are they’re looking for a shoe store. When
they see your shoe-store ad in a newspaper, they may just be reading the news.
Having said all that, it’s important to understand that sometimes PPC ads are
not placed in search results — they are sometimes placed on content sites
(that’s a choice made by the advertiser).

(I’m going to use the term content match for
this type of ad, which is actually the term used by Yahoo! — other PPC systems
use different terms. One common term you’ll hear is contextual advertising,
though that term is a little ambiguous in some ways.)

Right now, Google
is the big player in the content-match game, but other PPC systems also do it.
Google’s big in the content-match business because, through its AdSense program,
it makes it very easy for almost any site owner to run PPC ads on his or
her Web sites.

In the past, with banner ads, you would place ads on a specific Web site or
work with an ad network to place ads on a particular type of Web site. If you
sold sports paraphernalia, for instance, you would place your ads on sportsrelated
sites.

With PPC, though, you can get much more targeted than this. Rather than
just placing an ad on a site related to sports, you can now display your ad to
someone who has clearly stated that she has some kind of interest in . . .
some keyword. When someone searches on nfl memorabilia, for instance,
your ad may appear. You get to state, in very specific terms, when your ad
appears.

More specifically, each ad you create can be combined with one or more keyword
search phrases. You might have 30 different ads with 30 different groups
of keywords. When a keyword in group one is typed into a search engine by a
searcher, the associated ad is displayed; when a keyword phrase from group
two is typed, the associated ad for that group is displayed, and so on.

Again, having said that, content-match ads are not quite as precise as regular
search-result ads. Remember, with content-match ads, nobody’s typing a
search phrase into the page; rather, the ads are simply displayed when a page
is opened in a browser. So the PPC systems try to match your chosen keywords
with the text in the Web page. Sometimes they do well; sometimes
they don’t. In general, PPC advertisers seem to agree: The PPC traffic you get
through content matches are not as good as the traffic from searches.

You bid for position
PPC ads vary greatly in price. On the major PPC systems, you’ll pay anywhere
from a minimum of 1 to 10 cents per click (Google’s and Yahoo!’s minimum
bids, respectively) to many dollars per click: $20, $50, $75, perhaps more. But
rather than negotiating with the company selling the ads, you compete with
other people who want to display ads at the same time you want to display
an ad.

Here’s an example: Imagine that you want to display an ad when someone
searches on the term mesothelioma at Yahoo! (Mesothelioma is a disease
caused by breathing in asbestos fibers.) You’re not alone. Many other people
want their ads to appear at the same time. Of course, everyone wants his or
her ad to display at the top, so how does Yahoo! determine which goes first?
By how much each advertiser bids.

This is the case in most major PPC systems these days. It wasn’t this way in
the early days, when you paid what you bid, but in order to encourage more
advertising and more bidding, the engines came up with this system in which
you place a maximum bid but pay only a penny above the guy below you.
However, some smaller PPC systems may still use the old system.
Google handles bidding a little differently. The top bidder does not necessarily
get the top spot. Rather, the bid is just one criterion, and ad position is
also dependent on how well the ad performs. Ads that get clicked often get a
“bonus” and may actually be displayed higher than ads that are being
charged more per click. (I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 9.)

You have total control
As you discover in this book, PPC systems provide a great deal of control over
how and when your ad is placed. You can control characteristics, such as these:
_ You can set the maximum you’re willing to pay for a click.
_ You can specify the maximum you’re willing to spend on your ads each
day, week, or month.
_ You decide which keyword or keywords “trigger” the ad — from a single
keyword to thousands of keywords.


You control the ad wording — you can change wording from minute to
minute if you really want to.

_ You can associate different ads with different keywords or keyword
groups.
_ You can specify exactly how keywords work — if you select shoes, will
the ad appear if someone searches on shoe? What about shoes in
denver?
_ You can specify, to some degree, where the ad appears — will the ad
appear if the person searching is in Denver? In Chicago? In California? In
Germany?

The degree of control allows you to tweak your advertising campaign. As you
see in Chapter 15, you can track the effects of your ads — not only can you
see how much each click costs and how many people click an ad, you can
even see what people do when they come to your site. You can track how
many of the people who click the ad actually buy, fill in an informationrequest
form, or take some other kind of action. Some ad texts may work
better than others.

You can experiment by combining different keyword
choices with different ads. This information allows you to optimize your
advertising by pinpointing which keyword/ad pairs get you the best results.