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There's gold in them thar hills, but it takes a wily marketer to find it.
You want people to find your website, and use it to buy your products and services. Unfortunately, your traffic is coming in drops instead of waves. Pay-per-click search engines can be an effective element in a campaign to deliver qualified website traffic.
Say you're selling the latest hi-tech plasma monitors on your website. You have concluded that 1 out of a thousand visitors buys a $5,999.00 monitor, and that your margin on that sale - after all opportunity costs are accounted for - is $350.00. Well, pay-per-click can easily deliver thousands and thousands of visitors to your site, and these visitors would all be searching for plasma monitors. That's a good thing. But in the example we mentioned, pay-per-click buying only makes sense if you can get a thousand visitors for less than $350.00.
That's the simple version. Of course, the traffic you're getting now is from a variety of sources, some of which are more or less likely to deliver buyers, so your 1 per 1000 number must be taken with a grain of salt initially. One terrific aspect of pay-per-click search engines is that they allow you to easily measure which searches deliver buyers, and over time, you can customize your campaign to increase your click-to-buy rate.
For example, if you start at Overture buy buying first place "plasma screens" for $1.36 per click-through and by buying "plasma monitors" for $1.61 per click-through. After 1,000 visitors at $1.36 each, you have sold one monitor and made $350.00. Unfortunately, those visitors cost you $1,360.00, obviously too much. Perhaps the 1,000 visitors who found you by searching for "plasma monitors" resulted in 4 purchases, earning you $1,400.00. You're still not profitable, but you're getting closer. You next decide to try buying some less expensive and more specific phrases, such as "toshiba plasma screens" and "toshiba plasma monitors", each of which sell for only 5 cents per click-through. It takes you longer to get the 1,000 visitors, but your click-to-sell rate is slightly higher, because you're dealing with consumers who already know what they want. Say you sell 3 monitors to those 1,000 visitors. You've made $1,050.00 and spent $50.00.
The trick to effectively utilizing pay-per-click search engines is finding the exact keyword phrases which will deliver buyers to your front door, and avoiding silly bidding wars with the competition.
Of course, it would be better still to legitimately win on search engines for the phrases your customers use when searching for your products. To do that, you need expert search engine optimization services. Read Introduction to Search Engine Marketing to learn why, and contact SEO Logic to learn how.
