We, as marketers, spend our professional lives striving to gain as much visibility for our clients and/or products as possible, so it seems silly to think that being No. 1 can actually be dangerous to the health of our businesses – but it’s true, it can be, especially when it comes to paid search engine marketing. But wait…isn’t paid search marketing the new “thing”, the holy grail of Internet Marketing? Not necessarily.

Paid search is a great tool, and when planned, executed, and analyzed properly it can lead to a very high return on your investment. Be warned, to get the most from paid search marketing you need to leave your ego at the door, and get over your I must be #1 complex.

Usability
Success begins at home, as they say. A good way to be sure paid search engine marketing pays off for you is to be sure your own site is clean and easy to navigate. You can spend millions on paid search marketing and never see even the slightest return if your site annoys users with things like flash intros or difficult navigation.

People want the Internet to be fast and easy, and when it isn’t, they get frustrated and look for alternative sites that are. If the sites ranking above you are hard to use, slow to load, or just plain unprofessional, don’t outbid them to rank higher in the search engines. Become obsessive about usability, and all of your marketing that focuses on driving users to the web site will have a greater impact.

Keyword research & follow up
I recently typed in “buy office supplies online” in Overture, only to find that the No. 3 advertiser is paying a max bid of $1.50, while the No. 4 advertiser is paying a max of .56 cents! That is potentially a dollar more per click.

Further, the No. 4 advertiser only sells ink, not pens or staplers, just ink for printers.

Taking the example above, why would I as a marketer in charge of search engine marketing for a printer ink store, pay .56 cents for users typing in “buy office supplies online?”

If someone is savvy enough to type in “buy office supplies,” they are probably savvy enough to also type in “printer ink,” if that is what they actually wanted.

People don’t type things in search engine boxes that they are not looking for!

Don’t make the mistake of realizing a good ROI in paid search marketing for the terms most applicable to your business, and then try to extrapolate that out to terms that are borderline and are not 100% applicable to your business, many marketers make that mistake, and the result is that ROI on pay per click marketing efforts takes a nosedive.

I bet the ROI on terms for printer ink was good, and this marketer may have assumed that they would see a similar result if they targeted other generic terms, this is not the case.

Humility
In search engine marketing, there’s nothing wrong with being second, fifth, or tenth in the results. Remember, the Internet is a research tool for a vast many of users, the less commoditized your product, the more likely your potential audience will dig through numerous options to research multiple companies BEFORE they make a decision.

When is the last time you were looking for a product or service on the Internet and bought it from the first site that came up in a search engine without at last checking a few other sites too? You may buy products like pens and paperclips from the first place you see, but this does not happen in service businesses, or for products with moderate to high price tags.

Check your ego at the door. Being No. 1 in the search engines does not make a product or service the best – it means that organization paid the most to be there, and many Internet users know this. (Be advised: This is not the case with Google, however, where click-through does have an affect on rank).

Don’t take being #1 in a search engine as a life or death thing! If the success of your business hinges on ranking highly in search engines, you need to re-evaluate your marketing plans. Paid search marketing should be only one piece of the pie.

Copyrighting and Testing
Here are two questions:
· When is the last time you swapped copy on a paid search ad?
· Did you track the results?

One of the great things about Internet marketing is it allows the marketer test and switch gears on a dime.

More marketers take advantage of this opportunity.

Think of at least three features of your product or service; use a different product feature once a month for three months, without changing other factors. At the end of the three-month period, take a look at the impact on conversions or other important metrics.

Which feature highlights resonated best with your audience?

Maybe as another test you can create a splash page so that when a user goes from your paid ad to your web site they get a page with a specific message, test your conversion rate with and without a splash page, maybe you could try different copy or layouts of your splash page too.

You may have to devote some months for isolated testing (not testing too many features at one time). I think we all know that paid search is here to stay, so testing for 3-6 months is worth while if what you learn about your audience affects your paid marketing approach for years to come.

Analysis
Finally, many of the pay-per-click search engines are allowing you to get conversion metrics on your keyword buys by just adding some code to your task completion page. It started with Findwhat and now the other major players have followed. This is a free service, for now, on the big pay per click engines, USE IT!

If you are not using the conversion tools from the various PPC search engines, then use your analysis tool to look for trends in user behavior that comes from PPC search engines, are they more likely to convert, or less? What about the abandon rates for those that come in through paid search listings?

Learn your audience segments, you just may find that users coming to your site via paid search have a different set of needs & expectations than users that come through print ads or e-mail.

Setting up a paid search marketing campaign is easy, making sure you are targeting the right terms, at the right costs is the difficult and time consuming part.

Paid search marketing is in a frenzied state! Marketers are paying a lot of money, and not doing the follow-through.

Next time take a look at this checklist below, if anything, it will act as a sounding board for your paid search efforts.

Paid search strategy checklist:
Do you know which specific keywords are most profitable?
Are the words you target exactly what your business offers?
Do you know which paid search engine is the most likely to convert?
Do you know the cost per click at which terms become unprofitable?
Have you tested new ad copy? If yes, have you analyzed changes on conversions and other business metrics?
Do you always pay to bump yourself up to #1 without first looking at the sites above and below you?
Copyright Will Reynolds www.willreynolds.com

Adwords offers pay-per-click PPC advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The Adwords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements rules are strict. They have to be short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines.  Here you can put in good use term niche market. You need to target the right niche market, and the right niche keywords.

If you want to know about Adwords, you need to know about ROI (return on investment), Adsense (another Google service that is directly connected with Adwords), SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (Search engine marketing), SERP (Search engine results page) and other. You have to understand that all this terms evolve around each other.

Adwords is in fact very simple. You know I like examples… You signup, create an ad campaign. Lets say you are in business of selling perfumes, and would like to start online shop with your products. You can choose words, next to which your ads will show. Then when somebody searches “Armani perfume” (which are searched lets say 10 times a day) your ad will show up 200 times a day. The good part is Google charges you only when somebody clicks on your ad.

The cost depends on your campaign budget, number of searches people make, number of words you assign your ads, and number of clicks people make on your add. And most important thing. You know Google is smart, right? Don’t click on your competition ads, don’t click on yours, and don’t write bad ads. Encourage people to click on your ads, and Google will reduce your click cost! Why? Because Google likes relevancy, that’s companies policy. I think I overdid it, I plan to have a special place on this site about Adwords.