This will be the first in a series of three articles examining which online marketing initiative, organic SEO or PPC, will offer the best results for your online business requirements. (These are only two of the myriad of online marketing tools available, but they will be the focus of this series.) The likely answer to this question will be a combination of both, but this series aims to answer why and what benefits are associated with each to enable you to make an informed decision when moving forward with your overall marketing budget allocations.

You have an online business and you need to drive qualified traffic to your website in order to increase your ROI or KPI (key performance indicators), whatever forms these business indicators may take. The next step is deciding which Internet Marketing tool or combination of tools to utilize in order to achieve these specified goals. One major online marketing tool in your arsenal is PPC or pay per click advertising; this will be the focus of the article.

There are many benefits associated with using PPC advertising; the major benefits are outlined below.

Increased Traffic

Usually, the primary goal of any online marketing initiative is to increase traffic to your website. There are two main types of website traffic, targeted and untargeted. Untargeted traffic, are people who happen upon your website whilst not specifically searching for your product or service. Targeted traffic, on the other hand, are people who are specifically searching for either your business or people who are searching for the product or information that your website provides. This is the type of traffic that you want to draw to your website, as they are far more likely to convert (this can be many things, a download, a purchase, a lead – and is defined in your KPI).

A properly managed PPC campaign will provide your website with the later traffic type. Since you choose specifically which keywords to target in your campaign, you can ensure that the people who click on your ad are specifically searching for you, your product or the information that your website provides. Also, you only pay for people who actually navigate to your website, rather than pay for the number of people who view your advertisement.

Campaign Management

As with any marketing campaign, tracking of campaign ROI and other KPI is critical. PPC advertising offers quantitative measurements of these indicators that are unavailable in many other advertising mediums. In the initial setup of your PPC campaign, you can enable your campaign to measure each conversion the campaign makes, you are also able to specifically define what the conversions is, this is not limited to sales. This automatic tracking of campaign conversions, allows you to measure the exact ROI of the marketing initiative. This is simply not an option that is readily available in most marketing campaigns.

Advertising Timeline

This is can be one of the best benefits associated with PPC if it is utilized properly. Unlike SEO and most other forms of advertising both online and offline, which can take a long period of time to launch and begin to see the results, a PPC campaign can be conceived, planned, written, launched, and receiving results in less than a day. This highly compressed time frame allows companies the ability to seize opportunities that are not readily available with other marketing campaigns, due to the long planning and launch timelines. This is a particularly useful attribute with limited time sales or promotions, targeting developing events or news, major events (ie/ sporting events or elections), amongst many others.

This is also particularly beneficial to companies that not only have a sporadic need for instantaneous first page access to the SERP’s (search engine results page), but can be uniquely beneficial for companies that have seasonal or uneven demand trends within their business cycle. The ability to change your ad spend budget at will allows you to increase and decrease your advertising market penetration, with immediate results, in correspondence with the given level of demand.

Campaign Costs

The costs of running a PPC campaign can be precisely pegged at the onset of the campaign. Due to the billing format, you are able to choose exactly how much you wish to spend on ad clicks each day in a given search engine. This amount can be varied as you wish throughout the duration of the campaign, but this feature does allow you to accurately determine a budget at the inception of the campaign. The only costs that are associated with a PPC campaign are the amount you would like to spend on click traffic and, if you outsource the management of your campaign, a management fee that is determined prior to launching the campaign.

Unlike many other online pay for traffic or pay for impression advertising campaigns available, such as banner and email campaigns, there is no minimum spend required with PPC campaigns. You can pay as much or as little as you determine is optimal for your business goals.

In the short run, a PPC campaign is extremely cost efficient because there are no set up fees and you only pay for traffic as it comes in. This is particularly beneficial for companies that have a small advertising budget and need to get the maximum return on their small investment. Couple this with the fact that PPC has a lower CPA than most other marketing initiatives, makes PPC advertising an extremely option for smaller or extremely niched businesses.

Testing

Testing is perhaps the best and least utilized benefit associated with running a PPC campaign. The amount of data that you are able to collect and analyze is phenomenal. The easiest aspect to use and analyze is the ad testing functionality that is built into the search engines. You are able to use your ad variations to test which combination of headline and ad copy lead to the highest click through rates. Once you have narrowed the selection down to the best ad or two, you can continually tweak the ad copy to see which version has the best result. This data can be very useful for your on-page copy as well as your meta description tag, as this is basically the ad copy that is presented in the search engines and can greatly effect your organic listings click through rates.

You are also able to test your various landing page conversion rates by utilizing the a/b and multivariate testing functionality that is provided by the search engines. This allows you to tweak your on-page attributes to find the best combination to maximize your conversions and thus your ROI. This information is very useful for not only your PPC campaigns, but also your SEO campaigns and overall website conversion rates.

Finally, PPC campaigns give you a veritable gold mine of keyword and traffic data. This information can be leveraged in the planning stages of an SEO campaign. With this data, you are able to have an approximation of how often a term is searched, the click through rate, and most importantly, the conversion rate of a given keyword. This information can save you costly mistakes that can occur with an SEO campaign, as this information takes much longer to gather and analyze through and SEO campaign.

Branding

One of the added benefits of a PPC campaign is branding. A properly implemented PPC campaign will increase your brands visibility in the major search engines. By running PPC advertisements on keywords that relate specifically to your business, you can ensure that potential customers searching for information or products related to your field will find your company at the top of the search results.

If you are a large company, people expect to find your business in the search results. In this case, not dominating the SERP’s can tarnish your reputation in the eyes of your consumer, as not being there signals that other companies have greater relevance than yours for the given product searched, giving them the opportunity to take part of your market share. This is of increasing importance as greater percentages of people are using the internet as a primary method of sourcing product information and making product purchases. This gives other companies an opportunity to move in on your dominant market position and establish themselves as a leader in the field.

Conversely, if you are a small company, you can greatly increase your business’ exposure, and subsequently increase the value of your brand, by appearing in the results. By ensuring that your company is constantly visible, you substantially increase the chance that consumers will associate your business with the product or information they are looking for now and in the future.

There are many other benefits associated with a PPC campaign that have not been listed here, but this is a good start and should provide you with critical information when making your marketing budget allocation decisions. If you need more information regarding PPC campaigns or need a qualified company to manage your PPC campaigns for your, please contact Invoke today.

Invoke Media has extensive experience in launching Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaigns. Whether you have a large or small budget, we have a PPC campaign that will be tailored to your specific business needs.

PPC campaigns are advertising campaigns set up on a variety of search providers (usually Google and Yahoo). A prospective customer searches a keyword on the search engine and is then presented, along with their organic search results, a number of ads relating to the keyword that was entered as a search query.

Each ad displayed has targeted that keyword. We take your list of keywords and create advertisements that, when the keyword is searched, will draw a potential customer’s interest. No other advertising medium allows you to so precisely target your customer base.

We will, along with your input, create every aspect of a successful PPC campaign. Some of these steps include.

1. Keyword Research – Once we have determined the goals of your PPC campaign, we will research which keywords your customers use when they are ready to purchase your product. We will also determine the level of competition for these keywords and recommend a daily budget that will maximize your returns.

2. Ad Copy – Using your business objectives and keywords, we will create multiple ad copies with a strong call to action. These different ad copies will then be tested in the various search engines and the ad copies that lead to the best conversion levels will be used.

3. Campaign Monitoring – Throughout the life of your PPC campaign, one of our Internet Marketing Specialists will monitor the progress of your campaign. Should any adjustments need to be made at any point, they will inform you and implement changes immediately. This could include, but is not limited to, addition/deletion of keywords, re-writing of poor performing ad copy, and budget suggestions.

4. Reporting – We will monitor and track the performance of your PPC campaign and keep you informed of the progress.

If you would like to get your website instantly onto the front page of the Search Engines, contact Invoke Media today to start a PPC campaign to drive customers to your business.

Our goal is to drive targeted traffic to your website using the most cost effective methods available. The goal of your website is to increase exposure within your target market, increase branding, and ultimately to create leads or sales. A blend of internal site optimization, external linking program, and PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines will be used to increase ranking and target potential clients.

Invoke Media’s main Internet Marketing Services:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Viral Marketing
• Blogs
• Podcast
• Media Buying

If increased search engine ranking and website traffic are important to your company, contact us today.

Let me get to the point. There exists a great deal of frustration currently when it comes to trademark infringement in online searching. Let me explain: when you search up a keyword on, say, Google, you will be returned not only a page of search results, but advertisements. These advertisements are put up by advertisers who have entered that keyword — the one you searched — into their campaign. So, say, if you were to search up “ketchup”, you’d receive results and ads for all sorts of things associated with ketchup. Now, what if you were to enter “Heinz ketchup”?

That’s a trademark of a specific company, but any advertiser can, in theory, enter that keyword so that their ad is returned when you search Heinz. Acme Ketchup Co. can, if they satisfy a complicated list of requirements, have the top ad placement when you search for their competitor. The problem exists herein: is it legal for an advertiser to associate their ad with a keyword that is a registered trademark of their competition?

In some cases, such as Coke and Pepsi, companies come to agreements that allow them to use each other’s trademarks to further their own advertising campaign. It is safe to say, however, that most of the time, two competing companies will not have approached this agreement. Is it fair for Acme to gain business from Heinz searches? Should trademark law apply here, in the virtual world of the internet, where things are possible that just aren’t in real life?

France’s Tribunal de Grande Instance de Nanterre has twice ruled that no, this is not okay. In two instances they have ruled in favour of trademark owners, determining that it is illegal for search engines to permit advertisers to include trademarked keywords in their keyword lists when not associated with the company bearing that trademark. However, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled the opposite — in the case of GEICO versus Google, the court ruled that GEICO had not submitted sufficient evidence that the sale of the GEICO trademark as a keyword constituted infringement.

There does not yet exist a final rule when it comes to keyword trademark infringement. Each instance must be settled individually in or out of court in the country in which it applies. Gone are the days of the untouchable internet, during which an intelligent, tech-savvy elite could evade the law by utilising new techniques that had never before been imagined by the lawmakers and thus never outlawed.

Recently I made a posting that Diggers Dugg enough to hit front page on Digg.com (posting here). I have always been curious about the effects of hitting front page of Digg so I put together a bit of a post mortem analysis of getting Dugg to share with the curious.

The first and most obvious effect of getting Dugg is a massive hit to the server coined “the digg effect” aka “slashdot effect”. This can resemble a server attack called a denial of service attack and basically slows the server to a halt. You can see our traffic below. It DEFINITELY peaked while the article was front page, and even kept traffic at a higher level the following day.

The second interesting note is that although approximately 87% of people bounced after they read the article, many stuck around. In terms of numbers, 13% of visitors or 520 users (4000 * 13% = 520) did stick around. So what does this mean? Maybe they found something else useful or interesting on our site.

Comparison of ROI for Blogging VS Pay Per Click Advertising
From a marketing perspective I think this really shows the value of blogging and submission to sites like Digg. How would this stack up in terms of ROI if we were to compare to our Google Adwords Pay Per Click campaign? Below are some napkin sketches comparisons.

Assumptions

• Cost per Click through our bided Google Adwords campaign is $.50 so we’ll use that as a cost per user
• We want to compare apples and apples here, so let’s try to find out how many people that saw the Digg article stick around vs how many people who enter through our Adwords campaign stick around.
• This isn’t completely precise. Adword users are more targeted but on the other hand we’ll get more than 4000 users plus have many SEO friendly inbound links from the digg article, so let’s just say these factors cancel each other out.

Digg Article
4000 users with 520 non bouncing users

Google Adwords

With a 44% bounce rate on our Adwords campaign to get 520 users we would need 1181 initial users. (Our Adwords Campaign for Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Web development keywords has a bounce rate of 44%). At .50 * 1181, we’re looking at spending $590.

Conclusion
From a purely ROI perspective blogging makes sense, especially if you hit the jackpot by getting a front page Digg article. Working on getting relevant articles written and promoted to your website is great for users and search engine optimization, and this is exactly what Invoke’s team of writers helps our