Optimizing Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Returns

The Power of Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC advertising pioneer, Goto.com, now handles over 2 billion search queries per month. Their premium listings are featured on major search engines such as America Online, Lycos, Altavista, Netscape, and Hotbot. With such a high volume of keyword bidding, there are opportunities for businesses to reduce bid costs while maintaining their ranking.

A Valuable Tip for Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Here's a valuable tip that could save you a significant amount in monthly bid fees. For instance, at the time of writing, the highest bid for the keyword "flower" on Goto.com was $1.88. The fourth bid was $1.83, while the fifth bid was only $1.21. FTD.com secured the fourth place, while FlowersAcrossAmerica.com secured the fifth bid. FTD could have reduced their bid to $1.22 and still remained in the fourth spot. This would have resulted in a per-click saving of $0.61, or $610 per thousand clicks. Given that "flower" was searched more than 370,000 times the previous month, a click-through rate of just 3.0% could have saved FTD $6771.00 on the keyword "flower" alone!

The Importance of Regularly Checking Your Bids

When was the last time you checked your bids? You could potentially reduce your bids while maintaining the same ranking, or even secure a top 3 position for just a cent more. This is all about bid optimization. It's recommended that you check your bids for "bid gap" opportunities at least once a week. Search the keywords you have bid for and check for bid gaps between you and your competitors' bids. This should take less than 30 minutes a week, but the savings could be substantial.

Efficient Solutions for Monitoring Multiple Keywords

If you have several hundred keywords in your bid list, you'll need a more efficient solution. A number of bid monitoring services have emerged across the internet. For a monthly fee based on the number of keywords monitored, these services will monitor your keywords for bid gaps daily and notify you when there are opportunities for savings. If you use more than one PPC engine, most of these services can monitor bid gaps across multiple engines. Your savings in time and money could be significant, especially if you have placed expensive bids.

Here are some online bid monitoring services available:

• ClickPatrol (Engines monitored: GoTo, Sprinks, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Kanoodle)
• Keyword Bid Optimizer (Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Epilot)
• ManageBid (Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Epilot, Kanoodle, Netflip, Bay9, SearchFeed, 7Search)
• Position Guardian (Engines monitored: Goto)

By utilizing these strategies and tools, you can ensure you're maximizing your PPC advertising returns.