Search & the Buying Cycle Pay Per Click

Many people perform multiple searches prior to purchase. Typically early searches
tend to be more generic and as people get closer to determining what they want to
buy they search for brand names (or brand name + keyword) more frequently.

It may be harder to determine the ROI on the more generic terms than on well
branded terms as the branded clicks typically fall closer to the purchase date.

Editing Ads:
Yahoo! manually reviews ads before they will display. Google will display many ads
before they have had editorial approval. If you consistently break their rules they
may no longer want to do business with you, but sometimes it makes sense to see
where some of the limits are.

Knowing that Google shows some ads before they are reviewed by humans means
that Friday evening would be a good time to run aggressive ads since they might be
able to display all weekend before they are reviewed.

Once Yahoo! has accepted a keyword you can try to rewrite new ad copy that is a
bit more aggressive. If they do not accept your new ad copy your old listing with
your old ad copy should still remain.

Customer Tracking and Bid Management

How Tracking Works:
If you are paying by the click, you need to know what each of those clicks is doing.
From the second they click until they leave or purchase.  

If your server is already equipped with great tracking software it is easy to add a
tracking tag on the back of your ads. Instead of your Yahoo! listing going to
http://www.domain.com/salespage.html have it go to
http://www.domain.com/salespage.html?source=y+ad=6+keyword=fred.  

Tracking Software:
My favorite log file analyzer is ClickTracks. It displays the webpage in a viewable
browser highlighting the click ratio for each of the links. ClickTracks also allows you
to set up custom tracking tags to view traffic through different visitor paths. While
the software is expensive to some at $500, it is a steal for some larger commercial
websites.  

Some other popular conversion tracking software options are Keyword Max, Index
Tools, & WebSideStory. If you are working with an exceptionally large account you
may also want to try something like Efficient Frontier or Omniture.

ConversionRuler is inexpensive suitable software if you are primarily concerned with
tracking pay per click results. ConversionRuler starts out around $20 a month.
Yahoo! and Google also provide built in conversion tracking software which they
provide free.  

There are also free tracking services such as Extreme Tracking and SiteMeter if you
want to access referrer stats easily, but I would not recommend using them for
tracking any of your pay per click statistics.  

If you are a heavy spender on pay per click you will most likely want to use bid
management software.  

Google Analytics:
Google also created a free cross platform conversion tracking tool which comes
with their AdWords product. It works for tracking email ads, banner ads, and
various PPC search engine ads.

On top of the free built in tracking feature Google also bought out Urchin and
rebranded the tool as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free, and perhaps as
full feature as any other conversion tracking tool, but if you use it you are sending
your valuable market data back to your source of traffic. That may work against you
if they use your best converting terms and most frequent referrals to recommend
keywords to your competitors.

Bid Management Software:
There are automated software programs which will track your bids and change
them multiple times a day so that you achieve optimal efficiency with your ads.
These programs can do various things such as: list your site relative to another
website, bid gap management (list your site right where the first large bid gap is), bid
trapping (bidding 1 cent underneath your competitor) and various other functions.  

The best part of bid management software is that good bid management
software can allow you to dynamically change the bid price from price per click
to other metrics such cost per action or ROI.
If you get big into pay per click search engines and are managing multiple accounts
it is worth the money to use a bid management program to help save time and
money. Currently three market leaders in this field are    BidRank (downloadable
software), Keyword Max (hosted software application), and Atlas OnePoint (hosted
software application). Yahoo! also recently created their own bid management tool
by the name of Yahoo! Search Optimizer.

Fraud Prevention Software:
Most major pay per click search engines have fraud protection built into their
system to protect the value of click prices. You should use your server logs to
validate clicks if you are running a large campaign. Generally due to time overlaps
and differences in reporting it is considered acceptable to have an error up to 10%.
If your error is much larger than that be sure to notify the search engine.

If you have a good log file analyzer and understand how to use it then you have no
need for a fraud prevention tool, but these tools make it quick and easy to spot
potential fraud.

If you believe your competitors are clicking your ads or you are investing heavily in
a competitive market you will want to take a look at additional fraud protection.
Two of the current leaders in the PPC fraud prevention software market are
Who’sClickingWho and KeywordMax Click Auditor. They both keep track of clicks
from IP addresses over time. Even if a competitor only clicks on your ads every
few days it still adds up over time. This software allows you to accumulate the
evidence you need to reverse charges and potentially file a lawsuit, but you need to
have a large enough spend to justify it’s cost. Vericlix is a similar but free product.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords gets it’s own extremely long section because it is exceptionally more
complicated than other PPC search engines.