f you want traffic immediately, without optimizing your pages
for the big search engines, and paying and waiting for indexing, pay-per-click
is the way to go.
How Does Pay-per-click Work?
Basically there are two principles.
-
Your position in the search engine results is
dependent upon how much you bid, the more you bid, the higher your position.
-
You pay only when someone clicks on your ad
or link.
Depending on the search term(s) you use,
pay-per-click can be affordable or extremely expensive. Prices start at 1 cent
per click, with some engines requiring a minimum bid of 5 cents. The more
popular the search term, the more it will cost to be in a top position. This shouldn't
put you off though as you can determine how much you want to spend on a daily
basis based on your deposits and bidding. If you are receiving good qualified
traffic, your ROI (Return on Investment) should be reasonably good. The key here
is to find which pay-per-click engines can deliver the traffic and what keywords
to use.
Caution should be exercised when using
pay-per-click engines. We have had experiences with some who deliver an enormous
amount of traffic in a short period of time and never getting a sale from it. It
is absolutely mandatory that you set up a tracking system to know if you are
getting good clicks. One engine we used claimed to have sent us 100's of
visitors, but not one of them showed up on our records. When we questioned them
on this, they never responded. Needless to say we dropped their service.
How to Set-up a Tracking System
There are several ways you can do this. There are
third party companies that will track your hits for you. We have never used any
of them so we can't comment on their effectiveness. It's just another bill to
pay in our minds.
An easy way to do this is just to set up a page
for each engine on your site. For instance if you wanted to use Overture, you
may want to set-up a page called yoursite.com/over.htm. When you list your site,
just point all the traffic to that page and put a counter on it. It's a bit time
consuming, but if you're into using server side includes it can be fairly straight
forward.
If you have a decent statistics program on your
website, or you have access to the server logs you can also insert some code in
the url address and track that way.
Option 1
To change a URL such as http://www.yoursite.com to a tracking URL, add
"?source=overture" to the end. The URL will look like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/?source=overture
Here's another example:
From: http://www.yoursite.com/home/index.html
To: http://www.yoursite.com/home/index.html?source=overture
If you find that a Tracking URL is not linking properly, you
might want to eliminate the forward slash after the domain.
EXAMPLE: http://www.yoursite.com/?source=overture#leo could also be written as
http://www.yoursite.com?source=overture#leo.
It is important to make sure this works in your browser.
Option 2
If the URL already has a question mark in it, you will have to add
"&source=overture" to the end.
EXAMPLE:
From: http://www.yoursite.com/search.cgi?q=feline
To: http://www.yoursite.com/search.cgi?q=feline&source=overture
If the URL has a # sign, the "?source=overture" will
need to be inserted before the # sign.
EXAMPLE:
From: http://www.yoursite.com/#leo
To: http://www.yoursite.com/?source=overture#leo
Once you've converted the URL in your listings to a tracking
URL, you should be able to look for "source=overture" in your access
logs. If your Web server behaves normally, it should appear once for every
click-through on one of your Overture search results.
Traffic Analysis
For industrial strength analysis we recommend Index Tools. One
of the most important features is the Bounce Rate stat. This lets you see how
many visitors just see one page and leave, permitting you to adjust the campaign
or improve the copy, navigation or sales path. This works great if you use a
separate entrance page for each search engine as discussed above. You can get a
free trial from them. Click here for IndexTools.com
Links to PPC Engines
We have supplied the following links to you for your convenience. We do not
endorse any of the PPC engines listed, There are others that we would not
recommend.
 7Search
- According to an independent traffic ranker,
7Search.com is the second most visited pay-per-placement search engine in the
world.
List Your Site with Overture and appear on the top of search results of leading sites like Yahoo!, Lycos and MSN
LookSmart Small Business Listings - Get Listed Now! 
Reaching 77% of internet users. Results appear on sites like MSN, about.com,
Netscape, Altavista, and CNN.com.
|
