PPC Advice from Yahoo
Filed Under (the PPC Book) by Jeff Hudson on 17-01-2008
The YSM blog recently had published a guest post from Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.. His main points:
2: The Traffic Report Error… For paid search, in fact, having more lookers with few buyers is the worst possible situation to be in, because you pay for every searcher who clicks, but you’re getting next-to-no sales to show for your investment.
True enough I suppose, but isn’t every buyer a former ‘looker’? Knowing what stage of the buying process your searcher is in can very useful. Many ppc advertisers prefer to segment their campaigns accordingly. I don’t think I would ever completely avoid lookers.
3: The 24/7 Sales Pitch Error… it’s natural for you to emphasize information about your products, such as advanced features, special deals…. However, that information targets people who already know they need to buy something—folks who know that your product (or your competitor’s) solves their problem. What about the people who know they have a problem, but have no idea what to do about it? Do you have the kind of problem-solving content that those customers are looking for?
I like this point especially. Search marketers of all kinds tend to focus SO much of their effort on keywords. This keyword converted, this one didn’t, this one is too expensive, this one wears a green hat, etc etc. How about examining why the keywords did or didn’t convert. The reason often lies in the message you present on the site. Are you solving their problem? Are you feeling their pain? I think we can all stand a bit more work on our landing pages and user experience.
Good advice from the Yahoo blog.
Thanks for the kind words about the post, Jeff.
You’re absolutely right about the need for marketers to accept lookers because they will eventually become buyers. (I’ve written about this extensively in my books.) I was trying to point out that you have to measure how many of them actually become buyers, rather than focusing only on traffic and assuming that more traffic automatically turns into more buyers. Perhaps I might have worded it better, but that was what I was trying to say.
Thanks for the feedback so that I could clarify my point.
Thanks for clarifying Mike.
Your first 2 points get at what I see quite a bit with a lot of advertisers/clients. They are focusing on 1 or 2 things - ad rank, CTR, CPC, etc. Those metrics are almost always misleading when taken out of context.
I did enjoy the post and will look for more in the future.
[...] PPC Advice from Yahoo - I enjoyed reading Jeff’s thoughts about a recent Y!SM blog post. [...]
Thanks again, Jeff. I see companies falling into the out-of-context metrics trap constantly, too.