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As anyone who uses Pay Per Click (PPC)
advertising in their marketing campaign knows, getting
your ad copy on the front page of a search results listing
is becoming more expensive by the day. It's a new
phenomenon known as 'keyword fatigue', and it's down to
the overwhelming success of programs like Google's AdWords.
As more and more advertisers realize the benefits of this
form of traffic generation, so the number of people
bidding for the same keywords increases, and the bid
prices climb accordingly. Great news if you are a
publisher taking a cut of the revenue, but not so welcome
for those doing the bidding.
So are the days of 5 cents a click now just a distant
memory? Not at all, there are hundreds of thousands if not
millions of keyword phrases out there for minimum cost,
all it takes is a little more effort to use them. To
understand how this can be done, with Google AdWords in
particular, it is first necessary to understand how ad
positions are determined.
Google's PPC program, like their core search engine,
places a great deal of emphasis on advertisement
relevance. When a web surfer types keywords into the
search box, Google wants the ad that most closely matches
that phrase to be shown nearest the top of the list - not
just the ad bidding the highest amount of money. It
multiplies bid price by keyword relevance, and that means
that by careful selection of your keywords, it is possible
to be placed above competitors and pay only 1 cent more
than they are (Google doesn't necessarily charge the
maximum amount you bid, only enough to put you ahead).
There are three simple ways you can trump your competitors
with your keyword selection:
1. Longer phrases. There are huge numbers of people
bidding on a loose term like "mortgage broker",
but fewer people bidding on a tighter phrase like
"mortgage broker in Texas". If a searcher types
"mortgage broker in Texas" into Google, and you
have that phrase in your keyword list, your ad will be
deemed more relevant than anyone just using "mortgage
broker" in their own list - which means a cheaper
click for you! Of course, there are fewer searches for
mortgage brokers specifically in Texas than for mortgage
brokers in general, so it's necessary to build a large
list of similar key phrases targeting many locations.
2. Closer matching. Just because you might type "in
car satellite radio" into Google, doesn't mean every
surfer will do the same. Somebody else searching for the
same thing may well enter "satellite radio in
car", or "radio in car satellite", and so
on. If your ad contains every variation, it may trump a
competing ad which lists only the first example. In other
words, having just the keywords in your list isn't
necessarily enough - having them in the same order a
searcher enters them will give your ad a better relevance
score.
3. The final (Google specific) method is to ensure that
you wrap every keyword or key phrase in both quotes and
brackets. Again, this means that if someone enters an
exact term you have listed, your ad will beat a competing
ad that has the same term but without the brackets or
quotes.
Clearly, building keyword lists in this way can be more
time consuming than simply selecting a few generic words
that describe your product or service, but free tools such
as those at http://www.keyword-toolkit.com
can make the process much quicker than doing it manually.
Cheap key phrases are still there for the taking, the
winners in PPC now will be those who put in the effort to
catch them.
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