Introduction To Paid Search

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Paid Search which is paying the search engines for a premium placement can be quite effective in your internet marketing strategy.  The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation found that advertisers in the US and Canada spent $5.75 billion on marketing through search engines in 2005.  Paid search accounted for $4.7 Billion which is about 83%.  So a lot of money is getting spent on paid search.

How paid search works

The most common way for paying for search engine placements is either cost per click or pay per clickThis means an advertiser only pays the search engine when one of the their links is clicked.  The price per click is usually worked out through an auction process where advertiser bids for the amount they would pay for a certain placement on the search results page.  The top position usually goes to the highest bidder.

Selecting which network to go with

There are several factors you should consider when picking a paid search provider such as:

  • The Business Model – How they charge, whether it is a pay per click, pay per thousand views or a different method?
  • Money – Do you have the funds to advertise with the network?  Some networks do have minimum budgets and small budget campaigns.
  • Price – What do they charge for the keywords you are looking for?
  • Quantity of traffic – Will they give you the amount of traffic you would like for your keyword?
  • Quality of traffic – What is the conversion rate of the traffic in terms of traffic converting into leads and sales?

Most of these factors are quite important but the most important one is the quality of traffic.  So you have to test out different networks to find out which ones have the highest quality traffic.  When setting up a campaign it is very important to pick keywords which are relevant to the product or service you are promoting.  Most of the paid search engine networks have tools to help with keyword research.  It is best to find keywords that have a good balance with getting enough traffic, good conversion and a reasonable price.  Many search engine networks also have this feature called fuzzy matching which allows your ad to show up in many more combinations than you would get without this feature.  You have to be careful with a feature like this because you may get traffic from irrelevant terms.

Have realistic expectations

You are not going to get results immediately with this method.  An effective paid search campaign is one that requires constant learning and refinement and there are many variables that can be optimised.  Once you keep measuring your results and keep refining your campaigns, then you will be successful with paid search campaigns.

Click here to learn lots of other ways to get high quality leads 

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