For more information, please call us at or fill out this request form:

Pay Per Click Management

Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy

Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter

Pay-per-click (PPC) management means finding the most effective keywords through research and testing that will produce the greatest ROI for our clients and monitoring those keywords so they appear in optimal positions across the major search engines. We have found over the years that in this world of click fraud and low conversion rates that your campaign must be managed daily, weekly and monthly. Otherwise you might be wasting valuable budgeted marketing dollars.

Our Approach

We believe in a human-based approach to PPC bid management. This involves standard research of your keywords according to your industry knowledge, keyword selector tools, the competition, continuous testing, tweaking of creative ads, monitoring of results and acting upon all of the above factors with common sense bids and buys.

Research

Before initiating any PPC buy, the SalemGlobal representative interviews the client for industry knowledge obvious to the client and then continues to test keywords in Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. By understanding the industry target audience and competition, we are able to come up with an effective campaign start.

Testing and Monitoring

As written above in our approach, continuous testing is truly the key to any PPC campaign. We have found that consumer and business behavior can change as dramatically as the weather. Just when you think we have the answer to the most effective campaign ROI, the season can change, the competition might get an infusion of marketing cash or Google can decide to change the rules. There are many factors that can change during the course of a PPC campaign. Various search engines can change the rules, creative ads can lose effectiveness or keywords and search terms can merely lose popularity. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly monitor the results of your PPC campaign, all the way to the conversion.

Without testing and monitoring you could easily be throwing away your money. Scientifically speaking, we set goals and objectives for your campaign and constantly monitor results to determine whether a campaign is cost effective. If not, client and SalemGlobal representative determine together which variables will need to be tweaked in order to reach the desired goals or perhaps cancelled altogether.

 

Pricing and Bidding

While budget is certainly important and related to your campaign, it is not the only factor that determines success within the sponsored links. An effective campaign will be determined by bottom line sales of product, increased prospects or new clients. Pricing of your daily budget, monthly budget and specific keywords will determine your position within sponsored link results.

Bid Per Keyword: Some keywords are going to be more valuable than others and will eat up your budget faster. It is important to realize that your sales and prospects can come from anywhere so you should not essentially put "all of your eggs in 1 basket." This does not mean that you should not increase your per keyword price. You still have too use common sense. It is important to realize when a keyword is popular and expensive, it might not be the best keyword for you or your  company. For example, "Shoes" might be a very expensive keyword but "New York Shoes" might be less expensive and more effective.

Daily Budget: Will determine how long your ads will be visible to a specific audience on a daily basis. Important factors are when (during the day and/or week) are your prospects/ potential buyers realistically searching for your products and/or services. Google allows you to set exactly what hours in what time zone (only 1) you would like your ads to appear.

Monthly Budget: Will be determined by how much your daily budget will be. (Daily budget multiplied by days of month) On a starter campaign you can determine monthly first but it will not be as effective as setting daily budget first in the more advanced mode.

Success Examples:

We have an office cleaning company in New York City that only runs their campaign during the week as people do not search for office cleaning on the weekend. We have noticed that competition rises on Mondays and so do budgets. After Tuesday, competition dies down. Consistency is the most important lesson learned. Our client runs the same ads at the same times all week long from 9am to 5pm. Though this client is not in the number one position on Mondays, he is in the number one position the rest of the week. We have found that people call on Fridays just as much as Mondays for his industry. We have also found that adding on an additional campaign on Mondays actually makes this client last longer in the results throughout the day. So when the competition runs out of gas at around 2PM on a Monday, our client continues to receive calls and leads.

A residential treatment center for depression that we work with has clientele and potential "customers" that mostly call in the evenings and on the weekends. (Opposite strategy of the above example). Sometimes they will call during their work lunch hours. Prospects are from all over the US as opposed to the above regional New York City example. Therefore this organization needs a higher monthly budget since they are running their campaign 7 days a week. As clientele does not call in the morning, this campaign begins at 12 noon on the East Coast and runs through midnight on the West Coast.

Finally, ecommerce clients should run their campaigns 24/7 as one never knows when a sale is going to be completed. Some people like to do their shopping during work hours. Others are too busy or do not have access to the Internet at work so they do their shopping at nights or on the weekend from home.

Landing Page Management

SalemGlobal analyzes the pages where potential customers "land" after clicking on a pay-per-click listing. Are you trying to drive people to your homepage or are you selling a particular product or service? It is always more effective to land on an internal page with the most information about the service you are trying to sell. Essentially we will match the ad to the product or service being sold. By customizing these landing pages for certain keywords, cost-per-acquisition can be decreased significantly. Landing page management includes creative development and implementation.

Domain Names – (http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=8490915) SalemGlobal has found great success in using domain names that you own as landing pages. i.e. Our cleaning company above owns www.CleaningServiceNY.com. When people search for "Cleaning Services" and they see that our client owns that Keyword phrase domain name, they are drawn to it and click. A good domain name can convert many potential buyers since they believe you are the absolute resource for the industry.

Industry Rules-based Management of Peripheral Keywords

While manual keyword management is great, it is not feasible to manage all keywords this way. In order to keep the management of your campaign cost-effective, SalemGlobal implements customized rules-based management programs for peripheral keywords. These keywords are the bottom 80% that do not yield as high a conversion rate as the top keywords. Some of the rules-based management techniques we utilize include:

Max Bid Gap Jammer - Moves your max bid listing to one cent below your competitor's listing.

Don't Jam Me Rule - This rule is used to adjust the Max Price for a keyword phrase to stop a competitor from jamming your bid. Jamming a bid is when the person below you bids a penny below your bid, making sure you pay the most to stay in your position. 

First Gap - Moves your listing to the first gap. Bid gaps occur when the listing(s) just under yours has dropped out from the time you made your last bid. Let's say you've obtained a number 1 ranking with a bid of 70 cents over the competition's 69 cents. A few days later the number 2 listing drops to 30 cents. That 40 cent spread between your current bid and the new number 2 is the bid gap. Gap Bidding is making the appropriate bid adjustments to close those gaps and protect you from overpaying for your keyword bids.

Largest Gap - Moves your listing to the largest gap.

Daily Bid Adjustment - Changes the bid of your listing based on time of day.

Daily Rank Adjustment - Changes the position of your listing based on time of day.

Multiple Day Rank Adjustment - Moves your listing to 'x' position between 'y' start time and 'z' end time.

Bidding War Eliminator - Moves your listing to position 'x' when the additional cost is less than or equal to 'y' cents (eliminates competitive bid ratcheting).

Relative Listing - Moves your listing above or below a specified competitor or friendly URL.

Delayed Start - Executes updates only after 'x' start time.

Price Differential - Moves your listing only if the price differential to reach the desired position is larger than 'x' from current price.

Timed Price Differential - Moves your listing only if the price differential to reach the desired position is larger than 'x' from current price, after 'y' start time.

Last Place Bid - Moves your listing to last place. (Effective when there are few bidders and not a popular keyword)

Your Company Name - Buy your own name as a keyword buy. Some companies think this is a waste. SalemGlobal believes this secures your place in the search engines and knocks out any competition that tries to ride on your coattails.

 

SalemGlobal is able to build you the best campaign for your site and your niche. SalemGlobal will increase your sales and profits through its industry expertise in addition to giving you a great looking website that works! If you would like more information on these services contact us today. In addition see a presentation given by Raphi Salem on the Rocket Science of Search Engine Optimization, click here for the PDF file.