Web Design ~ Marketing ~ Promotion ~ Strategic Development

Pay For Clicks Advertising

By John F. Wright

Ways of marketing a web site

There are many ways to market a web site in order to generate traffic:

• Search engines

• Directories

• Links from/to other web sites

• Printed media

• Word of mouth

• TV

• Email signatures

• Usenet newsgroups

• Unsolicited emails

• Banner advertising

• Opt-in mailing lists

Of all these options, by far the best way to generate traffic is by mastering the search engines. After all, this is where over 80% of your traffic’s likely come from.

Adding your web site to the directories is also a good idea because many search engines use the directories to populate their own databases. Google’s a great example. Google uses Open Directory (DMOZ) as its source for directory results – as do many others. So, adding your site to Open Directory, in particular, is a good idea.

When it comes to search engines there are really two distinct ways to gain visibility:

1. Adding your site to the search engine databases using free or paid submission services, or;

2. Signing up for pay-for-click services.

Let’s have a quick review of submitting to search engines before we discussion pay-for-click services.

Gaining search engine visibility

Once your web site is up and running, even if you don’t do anything to promote your site, most search engines will eventually find you via their robots and spiders crawling around the World Wide Web.  However, it’s just a matter of shear luck that they stumble across your site. And there’s certainly no estimate of how long it will take them to find you. You could literally go months before your site’s ever discovered.

Rather than leaving it to chance, you’ll want to use each search engines free online submission service to submit your site for inclusion. Once submitted it typically takes anywhere from 6-8 weeks before your site is added to the search engines database. There’s no guarantee your web site will be added, though. Search engines have fairly stringent requirements of web sites. If your site doesn’t meet the requirements you won’t be added.

Some search engines such as Yahoo don’t accept free submissions. You’re charged a premium fee to submit your site. As of this writing Yahoo is $300 per submission. Paying won’t guarantee your being accepted either. It only guarantees someone will review your site within 3-10 days rather than the usual 8-10 weeks. If you’re not accepted don’t expect to get your money back. It’s a one-time shot. Next time you submit your site you’ll have to anti up $300 again.

Either free or paid submission, once accepted your site will be spidered and begin showing up in the search results in about 6-8 weeks.

Once you show up in the search results, your position within the results will depend on the popularity of your site and the relevance of the search terms used to find your site and others like it.

That’s where pay-for-clicks have a distinct advantage… as long as your bid per click is sufficiently high enough, you’ll gain instant, consistently high visibility in the search results as a sponsored link.

Pay-for-clicks – what’s it all about?

When you sign up with a pay-for-clicks service, first you develop a list of keywords and/or phrases that you think someone might type in when performing a search on the web. You’ll want to come up with specific words or phrases that will hopefully narrow down the focus to only those people who have interest in your product or service.

Because other web marketers may also be interested in the same keywords or phrases, you’ll place a bid amount on each of your keyword and/or phrase. This is how much are you willing to spend whenever someone clicks on your sponsored link. If you want your link to show ahead of another sponsors link you’ll have to bid more for that same keyword or phrase.

Once you’ve completed the outlined process and your account is activated, whenever someone types in one of your keywords or exact phrases in a search, your site will prominently shows up on the first page of the search results as a sponsored link. If you’ve worded your ad right and it catches the eye of a potential customer they will click on your sponsored link which then sends them to your web site. Because they reach your web site knowing what it is you’re selling you stand a very good chance of making a sale.

Pay-for-clicks results positioning

When someone enters a search and your site is listed based on the search criteria, your position within the listed sponsors is determined by how much you’ve paid for the keyword or phrase compared to other sponsors. In other words, if you’re paying 0.05 per click while three other sponsors are paying 0.08, 0.07 and 0.06 respectively for their clicks, you’ll show up in the fourth position relative to the other sponsors.

While some affiliate search engines list multiple sponsored links, many limit it to only the top three positions. So in the aforementioned case your site would not show up in the list of sponsor links.

In order to show in one of the top three positions you will have to increase your bid for that keyword or phrase so that your bid is higher than the sponsor in the third position. If you want to be in the second or top position you will have to increase your bid accordingly.

Why use pay-for-click services?

There are some very good reasons for using pay-for-clicks services:

1. Your web site gains immediate exposure—within minutes for Google and 3-5 work days for Overture—great if your site’s new and you want immediate traffic while you’re waiting for your search engine submissions to kick into gear;

2. You’re guaranteed a highly visible position on the first page of the search engine results whenever someone types in one of your keywords or phrases.

3. By reviewing the results of your pay-for-clicks campaign you’ll get a good feel for which search terms work and which ones don’t so you can use the ones that do work in your META data tags; and,

4. With your sponsored link predominantly displayed on the front page of the search engine results you may receive a credibility edge over other sites within the same search results.

Pay-for-click services

There are really two major players in the pay-for-clicks business:

- Overture

- Google

While Overture has more affiliates and claims to provide results to over 85% of the market, Google is undoubtedly the king of all search engines and may indeed give Overture a run for their money. As of this writing here are the affiliate partners for both Overture and Google:

Portals –

·         Altavista

·         Excite

·         Go

·         Go2Net

·         Infospace

·         iWon

·         MSN

·         Lycos

·         Yahoo!

ISP’s –

·         BellSouth

·         Juno

·         Netzero

Meta Search –

·         Dogpile

·         Metacrawler

·         Search.com

Browsers –

·         Microsoft Internet Explorer

·         Netscape

Search & Directory

·         CNET

·         Download.com

·         Hotbot

·         MySimon

·         ZDNet

Portals –

·         America Online (AOL)

·         EarthLink

·         Sympatico-Lycos

Overture and Google – similar but different

While Overture allows you to set a pay-per-click bid on every keyword or phrase, Google has you define a maximum cost-per-click for a campaign (a collection of keywords or phrases).  Overture’s approach is self-explanatory. Google’s is a little more complex so I’ll defer to Google’s own explanation:

You can simply set the same maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for all your keywords, knowing that the AdWords Discounter will charge you the lowest CPC you can be charged while still maintaining your position for each keyword. If you want to assign different CPC values to different keywords, you can simply set up separate Ad Groups with different maximum CPC amounts. You can also use our power posting feature to assign a different CPC to each of the keywords within an Ad Group.

For further clarification of Google’s pay-for-clicks program, click here. For more information about Overture’s pay-for-clicks program, click here.

A review of Google and Overture pay-for-clicks

For the past few months I have been reviewing both Google and Overture – both to increase my targeted traffic to Sell Your Web and Sceneramic Photography and to review these two services so as to pass my findings on to you.

To provide a fair comparison, I submitted an identical list of keywords and phrases to both Google and Overture. Although the method of paying for clicks is different, I tried to match Google’s maximum cost-for-clicks for all my keywords and phrases with Overture’s bid-per-clicks so as to approximate the same level of visibility for the search results of both programs.

 Versus

The following results are for a typical month (findings were consistent month to month):

• Overture – Less expensive per-click:

• Overture = $0.06 Average Cost-Per-Click

• Google = $0.26 Average Cost-Per-Click

• Overture – 27.5% more traffic than Google

• Overture – Larger network of affiliates

• Google – Quicker turnaround time between adding keywords and visibility in search results:

• Overture = 3-5 work days (I did observe turnaround in as little as 1-day)

• Google = 5-10 minutes

• Overture – Easier to manage bids by individual keyword or phrase

There are many other factors, but these were the ones I felt were important differentiators. So for my needs I found Overture to be a better choice.

Will I still use Google in the future? Certainly. From reviewing my web site logs, the traffic from Overture and Google are not generated from the same collective audience. So to not use Google would mean losing a large percentage of the targeted traffic to my sites. I will, however, revise my Google keywords and phrases to reduce my overall cost-per-click. I will also increase the use of Overture.

Bottom line?

If you’re serious about selling on the web you really must consider pay-for-clicks as a viable option of driving targeted traffic to your site. With search engine ranking algorithms changing almost daily, you can’t always be guaranteed a good, consistent position in the search results. Web marketers are getting smarter too. Vying for a good position in search results is becoming tougher all the time.

One of the few ways to maintain good, consistent visibility within search results is by using a pay-for-clicks service. Compared to other forms of advertising, pay-for-clicks is still the most cost effective method of them all.

So, if you’re thinking about pay-for-clicks go kick the tires at either Overture and/or Google.

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