Pay Per Click - How To Make It Work Series

I meet advertisers every single day that tell me they have tried pay per click advertising before and aren't interested in utilizing it in the future. The reason they give is it just didn't work for them. In almost every single case, we find that the vast majority of these folks utilized either one of the telephone companies or one of the large pay per click mega vendors and had a very bad pay per click experience. As a small firm, we often find ourselves in a position of pushing the proverbial sales wheelbarrow straight up the hill with these customers. They simply don't believe the process is cost effective or will work for them.

Here is why their first experience went badly.

1) The Phone Companies and Large Pay Per Click vendors often charge extremely hefty monthly management fees for running a search program. These fees range from 40% - 52% of the clients monthly contracted spend amount. Meaning, you contract to spend $4000 per month on a search program and they keep $1600 - $2080 of that as fee. The remainder then goes to buy you advertising. When half your ad budget goes into the pockets of your search vendor, you generally won't have enough budget left to compete effectively for the better ad positions. Many of the clients we speak with say they were told by the large pay per click firm that the best return on investment is in ad positions three, four, five and six. That my friends is simply a sales tactic to get you to accept the fact that your ads will rarely appear in the top ad positions while they are handling your program. What they don't tell you is the buyers are clicking on ads in the top ad positions and the price shoppers are clicking on ads in the lower ad positions. Hint: Bid for positions one, two or three. Our experience has taught us the rate of conversion increases and our overall cost per conversion then comes down as a result of placing our clients in these top ad positions. An effective pay per click strategy needs to be focused on conversions, not clicks.

2) Unfortunately, some advertisers, and even some misguided pay per click firms give in to the temptation of clicking on other competitors pay per click ads. Call it greed, ignorance or simply bad up bringing, no matter how you look at it, people who do this are committing a serious breach of professional and business ethics. If your search marketing vendor does not have a method for dealing with these bad guys, you will end up spending a moderate to even large portion of your daily ad budget on clicks these bad guys have generated. It doesn't take many bad clicks each day to convince the uniformed advertiser that a key word term is not converting or worse, that the pay per click program itself simply doesn't work. Hint: The solution to this problem lies in proper monitoring of your web site traffic flow by your search marketing vendor. We recommend all our clients load Google Analytics to their web sites. In addition, we deploy additional analytics on each client web site we host. These additional analytics allow us to monitor actual IP addresses that are visiting our clients web sites. We utilize IP Deny technology to block IP addresses that continually generate bad clicks for our clients. In essence, we weed out the bad guys. Doing so ensures our clients can focus their daily advertising spend on achieving top ad positions and in purchasing actual advertising. Blocking offenders also helps us to promote and protect the reputations of the various search engine firms we manage programs on. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask have all worked very hard to provide us all with an extraordinary marketing tool. It incumbent upon every search engine marketing firm who manages pay per click programs to ensure that clients feel the true and often times miraculous power of the process.

True story, one long time Flyline Search Marketing client actually paid us the ultimate compliment this past month. The client actually included an unsolicited bonus payment of several hundred dollars in their most recent montly payment to us. The note they included advised that the payment was in special recognition of our efforts on their behalf. It was a truly humbling moment. We are so very blessed to have such wonderful clients and can only give thanks to our heavenly father for them and for the many blessings he and they bring to the lives of the Flyline Search Marketing team each and every day. We are devoted to our clients and will work relentlessly to ensure they greatly benefit from the work we do on their behalf.

Hope you will give us a chance to serve your firm soon!

Mark Lein
CEO - Flyline Search Marketing

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