Pay per click analysis and tracking
Paid search results have now become a majors source of revenue for all the major search engines and web portals, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Lycos.
Most internet users do not search directly from the home pages of the "pure" pay-per-click search engine sites, but rather see the results of these searches on affiliate sites, including the top search engines themselves. Thus, a search listing you see in Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista or Lycos may actually originate from a paid listing in Overture. The paid results are normally marked as "sponsored results" or may be shaded in a different color to distinguish them from non-paid search results.
The two major pay per click search result companies are Google - through its Google Adwords program - and Overture's Precision Match and Content Match. (Overture is owned by Yahoo and its ads appear on MSN and other search engines as well.) These two companies are the "behemoths" of the pay-per-click advertising industry, with the highest traffic and the most sophisticated technology. For readers wanting more info, we offer an online comparison.
There are also a few medium sized text ad deliverers, like FindWhat, Kanoodle, Enhance, LookSmart and (in Europe) Espotting, as well as a large number of small PPC SEs.
Put in simple words, PPC SEs are those search engines which give rankings to various websites based upon the amount of money the website owner is willing to pay for a particular keyword. These search listings could therefore also be called "text ads", because that is what they are.
An example will help. If you are the sales manager for a hotel reservations engine, and you have bid for the keyword "discount hotels" for US$ 0.90, while your competitor has bid for the same keyword for US$0.85, then your website will be placed higher up than your rival on that search engine.
Of course, if you bid less than your competitor, or your competitor ups his bid, your positioning will fall relative to his. So too will the number of people clicking on your pay-per-click text ads diminish. You won't be charged anything if your website link goes unclicked, but you won't gain any customers, either. Also, some search engines, such as Google, will suspend your paid listings altogether if your site does not generate a minimum amount of click throughs.
Simple enough, right? Well yes... and no. You would probably always want to be in the top position, But if you see it costs you US$ 0.90 to be in top position but only US$ 0.60 to be in position no 3, which is better? The answer to that will depend on how many more people click on the top position ad versus those clicking on subsequent ads. This varies from search engine to search engine. Also, what is your exact conversion rate on visitors from this engine? It may be that you lose money at US 0.90 no matter how many visitors it brings you, but make a small profit at US $0.60.
And did you know that a visitor costing you US $0.90 on one site can cost you only a small fraction of that on another? Take a look at the large variation in price for the search expression search engine optimization that our analysis revealed on February 6, 2004:
| Site Response | |||||||
| Epilot | $0.63 | $0.54 | $0.45 | $0.31 | $0.22 | $0.19 | |
| Brainfox | $0.09 | $0.08 | $0.08 | $0.08 | $0.08 | $0.05 | |
| Ah-ha | $0.12 | $0.11 | $0.10 | $0.09 | $0.09 | $0.07 | |
| GoClick | $0.27 | $0.26 | $0.21 | $0.20 | $0.15 | $0.14 | |
| FindWhat | $0.24 | $0.23 | $0.23 | $0.21 | $0.20 | $0.18 | |
| Espotting | $1.44 | $1.43 | $0.60 | $0.59 | $0.44 | $0.43 | |
| Bay9 | $0.12 | $0.12 | $0.12 | $0.08 | $0.07 | $0.07 | |
| PageSeeker | $0.09 | $0.09 | $0.07 | $0.07 | $0.06 | $0.05 | |
| Kanoodle | $0.13 | $0.10 | $0.07 | $0.06 | $0.05 | $0.05 |
As this table reveals a number one position listing with Epilot had been bid up to $0.63, while the same position with the less known Brainfox or Pageseeker were going for only $0.09, a 700 % difference ! This underlines the importance of determining not just which key words to pick, but also which search engines to pick for each key word. A carefully elaborated strategy can double and even triple your cost effectiveness.
Want to test your own key words? Take our Click Cost Optimizer tool out for a spin now...
Do it yourself pay per click tracking software
Managed pay per click services
Sounds good, but what about click fraud?
A very good question, worthy of its own page...