Sky Small Business - Money Matters Interview

 
Stephen Murphy PayPerClick interviewed by Matthew Nolan

If my small business can get listed for search engines for free why incur the cost of online advertising at all?

To keep the costs to a minimum what can you do to get the best out of paying for this online advertising?

Free does not guarantee any form of visibility. Human behaviour needs to be considered as most people don’t search beyond the first page of results with Paid search marketing you can guaranteed to be on the first page of first engines. And finally search marketing whilst new has brought in new rules. And that is that it is purely performance based. So you only pay when people perform an action. There is no waste.

Spend time setting up a campaign so it specifically targets your products and services to the intended audience.  Sydney harbour bridge climb business is only looking for people wanting to do the bridge climb and not people looking for a photograph of the Sydney Harbour bridge.

But why do the costs vary so much for individual clicks?

To explain the variance we have the clients who are paying as low as 12 cents per click up to $48 per click. The bid auction or click price is actually determined by the number of advertisers bidding against each other – and the engines just collect the cash. And the way it works is the more you bid the higher position you get and generally you get the most traffic for being in the highest positions. $48 could in fact be a very cheap when you consider what the value of a sale and the lifetime value of the customer.

What are the common mistakes when marketing through search engines?

One of the most common mistakes is people fail to create custom landing/or offer pages which are designed to get the maximum conversion rate. As mentioned before the campaigns Failing to schedule their campaigns at the most effective time of the day or day of the week- may be high searches, but low conversions. Fail to put a unique phone number on the web page so that you can track also how many phone calls the campaign generated.

How do you measure the return on this advertising spend?

This form of advertising is 100% accountable. And in that that is quite unique.  Traditionally you measure on a cost per lead, a cost per action or a cost per acquisition cost per order or customer lifetime value. You can effectively measure how much you need to spend to acquire a new client. The right measuring metric depends upon the type of profit margin and your ROI model.