The Pay Per Click Package Deal – part 1: Understand the System
It’s not immediately obvious, but there is an awful lot more to pay per click than just keyword lists and bid amounts. I’m not sure that Bill Gross new what he was starting when he helped establish GoTo.com back in the 90′s, but these days, there’s a whole lot more to the PPC process than just building an effective keyword list. In order for your pay per click campaigns to be as effective as possible, you have to be aware that they are, in fact, campaigns. Many of the campaigns I’ve been called in to work on all share a similar shortcoming, in that they have not been developed as advertising campaigns, but they’ve been tinkered with or toyed around with as a sort of hobby.
Know What You’re Getting Into
In the old days of the internet, the pay per click advertising model was little more than someone auctioning off ad space. These days it’s a little more complicated. First of all, bid pricing will not be the most important factor in the success of your campaign. Why? To begin with, in order to combat advertisers who were long in the pocket but short on ethics, the paid ad models had to come up with a way to penalize those advertisers who would simply buy up the bids on any possible keyword in order to expose their ads to the most internet eyeballs. Since they can’t police who bids on which terms, there had to be other considerations besides choice of keyword and bid price when deciding where the ads rank. Google calls this collective evaluation your “Quality Score.” Many beginners in pay per click haven’t got the experience with the system to even realize that it can be abused by people with more money. When you set up a new campaign in Google Adwords, the column for viewing your Quality Score is turned off by default, so if you don’t read the tutorials (or newsletters or blogs!) you don’t even know your campaigns are being graded on a quality scale.
Furthermore, the PPC platforms have become so good at making everything seem so simple (click, click, boom?), newcomers to paid search ads are often several thousand dollars into a poorly run campaign before they realize that they’ve been simply playing into the search engine’s hands by using default settings. Setting up a new Adwords account reminds me of the scene in Star Wars Episode IV where they finally get off the Death Star after shooting up all the pursuit and Leia says, “they let us go. It’s the only reason for the ease of our escape,” and Han looks at her like she’s nuts and says, “easy? You call that easy?” Setting up a new campaign in Adwords is not exactly easy, but they do skip you through a lot of things that you need to pay attention to, and the general instructions seem to leave out a lot of important details. If you just blow through the set up without taking the time to understand the various settings and how they will affect your account’s performance, you are helping the other side more than you are helping yourself…
Remember, pay per click is no longer a simple auction of ad space. It’s a complicated system of paid ads whose delivery is based on algorithmic quality measurements which are set up by default in the search engine’s favor, not yours. If you’re a first-timer and you’re not being guided by an experienced analyst, invest your time into learning how the system works before you start pumping money into it.
Check here for part II – The Forgotten Landing Page
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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