Having long ago paid my dues in a marketing world where we spent money – big money – based on the loudest (or highest paid) person’s opinion, I have learned to embrace any marketing tactic whose cost and contribution to sales I can measure. Pay-per-click advertising is as measurable as it comes. It is, in fact, as measurable as the closing efforts of your sales team.

2. Pay-Per-Click Is Highly Efficient

Assuming you’ve set your campaign up correctly, your pay-per-click ads on search engines appear right in front of people who are actively looking for you. At the moment they are thinking about it. When you have the very best chance of getting them to take action.

This saves you time and money for two reasons. One – you don’t have to waste effort grabbing someone’s attention away from whatever they’re doing. These people are already looking for you. You can jump right into the conversation. Two – because they’re looking for you they’re already a step or two – at least – into the buying process. You’re closer to the sale from the get go.

3. It Provides Nearly-Instant Feedback

Where other direct response marketing tactics – direct mail or print advertising – have a built-in lag factor between launch and response, reaction to pay-per-click advertising happens NOW. Depending on your market and the search volume it produces, you can know what’s working and what’s not working in a matter of hours. While others are waiting to see what works, you already know.

4. Pay-Per-Click is Cost Effective

Even with increasing online competition and the resulting increase in click costs, pay-per-click advertising can still deliver new leads and traffic to your website for a lower cost-per-conversion than any other marketing tactic I know of. That includes email marketing.

5. You Can Spend Even Less By Being Good

You’ve got to love a marketing medium that actually rewards you for being successful. Google, in particular, goes to great lengths to figure out which advertisers are getting the best response from its searchers and lets them pay a lower price for a higher ranking. Looked at from the other direction, if a PPC campaign is not performing in the eyes of Google, that advertiser will pay more than the competition for the same position on page one.

6. It’s Easy to get Better

Another benefit of the measurability of pay-per-click advertising is the ability to test pretty much everything. From keywords, to ads, to landing pages you can easily and consistently improve your results by constant testing.

7. It’s Controllable

Some marketing tactics require you to invest a lot of resources – both money and people – with no guarantees you’re going to get any leads or new business out of it. (Think trade shows). Not so with pay-per-click. The wise PPC marketer begins with a test campaign, tweaks that campaign to get the better and better results and learn while doing so; and then expands – or bails – accordingly.

Too Good to Be True?

Maybe. Pay-per-click advertising is awesome and good and delivers all of the fabulous benefits I mentioned above. But it ain’t perfect.  We’ll look at the downside in my next article.

Have you read our latest PPC report, Will Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work for Me? If not, go ahead and download your copy. It’s free.

This isn’t a slam against anyone not understanding pay-per-click advertising. If anything, I’m outing myself for being guilty of using jargon, that’s not the point of this article. The point is: A lot of people don’t know what pay-per-click advertising is. Some of them are reading this blog.

So I’m going to take the time to talk about it. Mainly so I’ll have a place to send someone the next time they ask me what paperclip advertising is. I don’t know how to make it interesting so I’ll make it short.

If you’re reading this bog, chances are good you’ve used a search engine plenty of times yourself. You type a phrase into a box, click Search, and wait a few seconds for the results page to appear.

What you may not realize is the results page shows you two different types of listings.

The listings in the center of the page are organic (also called natural and / or non-paid) listings. These are descriptions of web pages the search engine thinks are relevant to your search term, and the order of the listing is based on a complex and well-guarded algorithm known in its entirety to very few.

The listings in the right column and sometimes at the top of the search results page are actually paid listings – often called sponsored links. The advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks on the link. This is “pay-per-click advertising”.

You also see pay-per-click ads on websites and blogs – often below or above a heading that says “Ads by Google”. These can be text ads much like you see on a search engine:

Or display ads like this one:

And that is pay-per-click advertising. Thank you for sticking with me.

Oh. Pay-per-click advertising is also called PPC advertising. Don’t let it fool you.

TechTarget & Google , in a recent report on Search Behavior of IT Buyers Online During the Purchase Process , clustered keywords into four groups: brand, issue/opportunity, solution and comparison, and studied how and when these words are used.

Like many studies, most of what they found on this subject is fairly intuitive if you take the time to think about it but it’s always good to have some solid data behind the assumptions.

Why does it matter how and when the keywords are used? Because the searchers’ choice of words can tell you where they are in the buying process. When you know that, you can craft a much more compelling offer, ad and/or landing page.

The study confirmed “Issue / Opportunity” keywords are used more in the Awareness (initial) Stage of the buying process than at any other time. This group includes:

• Issue
• Resolve
• Risks
• Upgrade
• Improve
• Optimize
• Prevent
• Troubleshoot.

When you see these words in a keyword phrase you can be fairly sure the searcher is early in the buying process – having identified a pain point – and is trying to learn more about the problem or opportunity itself.

In other words, they are unlikely to be interested in a product demo right now. But they will read eBooks, newsletters, editorial articles and whitepapers on the business issue.

“Solution” keywords are more common in the Consideration Stage. This group includes words such as:

• Provider
• Service
• Vendor
• Supplier
• Tool
• Device
• Software
• Appliance
• Solution

In the Consideration Stage, buyers are more familiar with their issue and want to know more about the kinds of solutions available to address the problem or opportunity. In this phase, according to the study, they are the most responsive to wide range of content types – everything from ebooks, whitepaper, podcasts, online videos, newsletters, and virtual tradeshows.

By the time buyers reach the Decision Stage, they are looking more for specific brands and product/solution comparisons. Brand words are obvious:

• EMC
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Your name
• Your competitors’ names

Comparison words include

• Versus
• vs.
• Review
• Test
• Pros and cons
• Benchmarks
• Compare

When searchers use these words they are getting serious about making a decision. They’re more likely to be interested in your trial software, online demos and even product literature.

Now that you know this what do you do about it?

By clustering keywords in your PPC campaign into ad groups according to buying stage you can increase both your click-through rate and your conversion rate. That’s because you can make educated guesses about what will appeal to the searcher and produce more relevant offers.

Similarly you could create landing pages on your website that are optimized to show up in organic listings according to buying stage.

Search marketing is one of very few marketing tactics where you are allowed this much understanding of what’s going on in your prospects’ minds. It would be a shame to let that go to waste. Listen carefully.

I even believe a lot of that.

But there’s one place I’m positive negative is good. In fact it is critical. It’s the keywords in your pay per click advertising campaign.

“Negative” is one of the match types Google allows you to use in a keyword list. A negative keyword tells Google “do not show my ad when someone searches on this term”. (Other search engines offer the same capability they just call it something else.)

Negative keywords let you let Google expand your keyword coverage without accidentally wandering down some irrelevant rabbit hole and totally screwing up your quality score.

Now, the previous sentence might sound like babble if you don’t manage your own PPC campaign, but it should mean a lot to the person or firm who manages it for you.

Some PPC experts – including those at Clicks ‘n Conversions – now believe it’s more important to have an extensive negative keyword list than a positive one.

So, check out your campaign. Negative keywords can be found at the ad group and campaign levels. Make sure you have lots.

But should you care?

For most readers of this blog I believe the answer is no. Not yet anyway. Traffic to technology and other business-to-business sites just doesn’t warrant it. In my experience – with my own search habits and those of my friends and associates – mobile searches tend to be more local and consumer-oriented. We look for restaurants, retailers, doctors, plumbers, and even the occasional Wikipedia definition. Rarely, if ever, do we use our mobile devices to find a new piece of business software.

Just to be sure, I took a look at a bunch of analytics reports – those of our own websites as well as our clients’ – to see what percentage of visitors accessed the site over the last month using a mobile device. With one exception (and it’s a weird anomaly) less than 4% of visitors used mobile devices – and most were under 2%.

Unless you’re the guy with the 21% mobile visitor traffic, it’s just not worth worrying about.

So are your visitors using mobile devices to reach you?

It’s easy enough to find out. If you’re using Google Analytics, just follow these three steps:

1. From your analytics dashboard, click the “Visitors” link in the left-hand column.
2. Click “Mobile” in the drop-down list.
3. Click “Mobile Devices”.

Among other things, you’ll see the number of visits and the percentage of site total. Most likely you’ll find your marketing resources are better focused on something else.

If you find you have a significant amount of mobile traffic, I’d like to hear about it. Post a comment below.

Why bother with blogging? Because nearly half of all IT professionals rely on blogs as a resource when they are researching and comparing potential solutions. Okay, on with the questions.

Blogger readiness assessment question #2: Who is your target audience?
Knowing your readers is paramount because it sets the tone for your blog, determines the language you’ll use to communicate with readers, and helps you achieve secondary goals such as higher SEO rankings and more traffic.

If you want to attract technical folks, for example, feel free to use technical terms in your blog posts.

If your desire is to influence C-level executives, you’ll need to ditch the technical jargon and speak directly to their leadership and business challenges.

If your goal is to attract new clients, you will want to use more general terms when blogging so that people who don’t yet know the “industry lingo” will find you through search engines.

One thing I recommend you do before you start blogging is to create a list of target keywords and phrases to incorporate in blog posts. Over time, your repeated use of the keywords will lead to better search engine rankings, and they will help keep your blogging posts on topic.

Blogger readiness assessment question #3: What will you blog about?
Once you have a clear understanding as to why you want to blog and the audience you want to attract, it’s time to choose a subject (or theme) that interests you and your target readers.

If you pick a topic that is too broad or too narrow, you’ll either run out of ideas for new content or your posts will be all over the map. Either way, you’ll find it hard to attract a steady readership.

Likewise, avoid the urge to use your blog as an advertising platform. Remember, IT buyers visit blogs to learn — not to be sold to — so you’ll be far more successful if you use your blog to educate, discuss industry news and trends, and encourage an open exchange of ideas and opinions.

Your blog should be bigger than you or your company. Write for your readers’ benefit, not for yours.

Blogger readiness assessment question #4: How will you measure success?
The majority of corporate bloggers surveyed for Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere 2009” measure success by counting unique visitors, reader comments, incoming links, and RSS subscribers. While these statistics are valuable, I contend they will not give you the entire picture when it comes to evaluating the impact that you are making with the blog.

You’ll also want to monitor what people are saying about you outside of the blog. Incoming links provide hints, but some people will talk about you without linking back.

Encourage discussions outside the blog by giving readers sociable links they can click when they Digg something you say. Then, monitor the discussions by searching social networking sites and search engines, or use a social monitoring tool like Social Mention. It sounds time consuming, but most sites have alert capabilities to automate this work.

Some bloggers also measure success by tracking the connections they build on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If this is one of your objectives, encourage this behavior in your blog by giving readers quick connection links to these sites.

Of course, we all wish people would comment on our posts, but don’t be discouraged if week after week you see zero comments. Many readers prefer to remain anonymous. If they like what they read, they’ll send you an e-mail directly, or share it with others via the sociable links you include in your blog.

Finally, don’t expect miracles over night. Like any good PR activity, you need to remain patient, persistent, and consistent with your blogging. Give the blog at least nine months before you decide if it’s worth it to continue.

The answer is simple: IT buyers don’t hang out on Twitter, at least that’s the message from 1,685 IT professionals surveyed for TechTarget’s 2009 Media Consumption Report.

Where do they turn for information when searching for an IT solution? Blogs.

Contrary to popular belief though, “WordPress or Blogger” isn’t the only decision a new blogger needs to make. To attract the desired audience and keep the blog going long-term, you’ll need to start thinking and acting like a publisher. Here are seven critical questions to help you assess whether your company is ready for the blogosphere.

Blogger readiness assessment question #1: Why do you want to start a blog?
If you’re feeling pressured into a blog because your competitor has one, or because you want more website traffic or higher SEO rankings, you’re not ready for a blog.

Of course, all of these are fine secondary motives -– especially when you consider that the average technology blog garners 41% of its page views from search engines –- but these reasons alone will not help you when you are staring at a blank screen at 11pm, or when there is “other business” that needs your attention. When forced to prioritize, you can be sure the blog will always lose.

While an individual blogger’s motivations may vary, the one thing that all corporate bloggers agree you need to be successful is passion. This alone will keep you personally interested and excited long after the newness of the blog wears off, and it is what will attract readers to you.

If you’re running a business, you most certainly have passion already. Your goal is to articulate that passion and channel it into your blog.

I’ll continue my readiness questionnaire on March 2nd, which should give you plenty of time to mull over this first question.

In the meantime, if you haven’t taken my grammar survey yet, please take one minute now to complete it. It’s just five questions long and your answers will provide valuable insight into how writing errors influence buyer behavior.

Follow this link to start the survey:
http://bit.ly/6yXttb.

Thanks in advance for your help and opinions!

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Last month I mentioned our soon-to-be-published free report called Will PPC Work for Me? I’m happy to tell you it’s now available.

The report gives you a proven formula for deciding whether or not PPC can work for you.

Just go click here Will PPC Work for Me to access your copy.

Let me know your thoughts about it.

As I look today at what it takes to succeed in Pay-per-click advertising and compare it to requirements of the past, I have but one response – Whoa! That’s not my actual response but I never know who’s reading this.

Anyway as Bob Dylan noted many decades ago – the times they are a ‘changin.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at each of the factors that are critical for a successful PPC campaign, but let’s start with an overview in case you want to take some fast action.

Here are the biggies:

Keywords

Today it’s less important to identify all of your keywords than it is to identify the most highly relevant ones. This is especially important for new advertisers who have to prove their value (ie relevance) to Google before their ads will be shown with any regularity on the first page.

Get your most relevant, highly focused keywords right, perfect the performance of the exact match, expand to phrase and broad match and Google will find more keywords for you.

Ad Groups

Organizing keywords into tightly related ad groups is even more important today than it was last year. The words in an ad group not only must be linguistically similar; they should also represent the same buyer’s frame of mind – in other words, where the searcher is in the buying process.

Match Type

One of the most common mistakes I see in poorly optimized PPC campaigns is the improper use of match type. New advertisers in particular are prone to using only broad match – which means that Google can pretty much run your ad any time one of the words in your keyword phrase appears.

Until Google has a good enough understanding of the words you are targeting, your ad will appear in all kinds of irrelevant searches. This won’t cost you clicks but it will cost you dearly in quality score.

Also, the importance of negative keywords has exploded over the past year. This is how you tell Google what search terms are irrelevant for you. For many campaigns there are far more negative keywords than there are positive ones.

Testing & Tracking

Nothing has changed here. Constant testing of ads and landing pages is the key to a successful PPC campaign. If you can let your prospects show you what they respond to best, why would you not do this?

Google has also made it easy to track your conversions. Unless you’re into branding campaigns, clicks without conversions are just a waste of money. Keep your eye on your conversion rate and conversion costs.

Customized Landing Pages

With pay-per-click search advertising you know exactly what’s on your prospects’ minds when they click on your ad. By all means, send them to a customized landing page. But there’s been a change in the type of landing page that succeeds.

Single-purpose landing pages where visitors can either do what you want them to do or leave are  no longer a good thing. One reason is that Google doesn’t like them and will ding you on your quality score. The second reason is they effectively block out people who would have been interested in seeing other parts of your site.

Today “customized” is still good. “Stand-alone” is not.

Quality Score

For years Google has factored more than bid price into ad position, but quality score has become even more important – and click-through rate on exact match keywords plays a huge role in your quality score. This makes is very challenging for niche advertisers who want to filter clicks from broader keywords.

Search versus Content Network

Google continues to perpetuate a huge PPC management mistake by making both search and content network advertising the default in a new campaign. Marketing on search engines to people who are actively searching on a particular keyword phrase is vastly different from marketing to people who are simply reading a website or blog and not actively looking for you at the moment.

Search and content network advertising should always be separate campaigns. Be sure yours are.

Change is rapid and inevitable

As Google continues to make search more and more relevant for its users, rules changes and PPC advertisers can find themselves sinking very quickly. Pay-per-click has never been a “set and forget” tactic, but now more than ever you have to stay in motion to succeed.

Or as Dylan says, “you better start swimming”.

Happy New Year everyone!

In the 4th quarter of last year we began getting more than the usual amount of contact from companies interested in trying pay per click – whether for the first time or after a less-than-successful previous attempt. This increased interest is not terribly surprising given a number of B2B studies finding that search marketing is the biggest area for projected increase in spending in 2010.

More than a few of these potential new PPC advertisers are unsure where to start and an equally high number of current advertisers that come to us for a tune-up are in the same position – they don’t really know if PPC is a good marketing tactic for them.

I like hearing from these people because they’re smart. The potential new advertisers are smart not to jump into pay-per-click advertising just because everyone else seems to be doing it or planning to do it.

The current advertisers who want a tune up are smart because they aren’t content to let things run as they have been. They want to be sure this is the best way to spend their marketing resources.

Because we’re gotten so many of these questions lately, I thought you might be interested in hearing something about how we evaluate an advertiser’s potential. It’s something every marketer should do before starting a campaign or hiring an agency.

Three important variables

Over the years we’ve figured out there are three variables that strongly affect how successful PPC will be for you. These all seem obvious now but it took a while of puzzling over our own campaigns and those of others before we could turn it into a process.

The first of these variables is search volume.

There must be enough of your potential prospects looking for you. This isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem. The volume of searches must be high enough to provide visibility opportunities for you and your competitors. As a new advertiser – or one with a low quality score – you will fight an uphill battle just to get your ads seen.

Search volume is a no brainer for some types of advertisers – those with broader appeal; but for true niche marketers, it can be a real challenge.

The second variable is cost.

You must be able to purchase clicks at a low enough cost to be economically sound. This is relative, of course. Someone who is selling a $25,000 software product can obviously afford to pay more for clicks than someone who is selling a $50 web app. The costs of certain keywords don’t necessarily match what you’re able to pay. For some marketers it is just prohibitively high.

The third variable is the ability to convert clicks into customers – or at least sales opportunities.

It doesn’t matter how cheap clicks are if you don’t get any new business out of it. This doesn’t happen by accident. You have to convince both Google and your prospects you have something they want or need. As the market gets more competitive and other advertisers get smarter, this gets trickier and trickier to prove.

Am I trying to talk you out of pay-per-click advertising? No way. I’m just encouraging you to go into it with your eyes open, be aware that success is not a given, and be willing to tinker with you campaign constantly – or hire someone to do it for you.

If you’re willing to spend some time on it, it’s possible to predict how well your campaign will perform for you in terms of number and cost of prospects, customers or whatever you are seeking.

For anyone who is struggling to decide if pay-per-click advertising will work for them, we’re just finishing up a special report that offers nine questions to ask and answer. It will be available soon – and for free. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Meanwhile, contact me if you have any questions about this important topic.