03 July 2009

Can You Save Time and Money by Outsourcing Your Pay Per Click Campaign? Part 1 of 2

Search-Engine-MarketingImage by Danard Vincente via Flickr

By Christopher Ulrich

One of the largest challenges with Internet Marketing is operating a successful pay per click advertising campaign. Competition is fierce and the costs to advertise at Google are steadily climbing.

In this article we are going to review several of the factors that you should look at when deciding whether or not to outsource your pay per click campaign.

1. Search Marketing Expertise

(It should be stated that you are|Obviously you are an expert in your industry. You are growing your company based on your knowledge and skills and have achieved a certain level of success. That, however, does not make you an expert at search engine marketing. While you may know your business inside and out, the marketing strategies required to successfully promote on Google are a totally different issue.

Search Marketing/PPC advertising is a very specialized form of advertising. Strategies that worked justsix months ago are no longer effective. The search engines change as fast as the stock market and if you lack the knowledge to create a profitable pay-per-click campaign, you will overpay for clicks and amidst tremendous opportunities.

2. Keyword Selection

For years, our company has run campaigns with large amounts of keywords. All the way back in 2001, we developed campaigns with up to one million keywords. No one had heard of "long-tail keywords" and no one was developing large keyword lists. Today, the industry has changed. Many people have built tremendously extensive campaigns to the point that long-tail strategies had to change.

Due to search restrictions you can no longer bid on every keyword you can imagine. To be successful in search, you need a strategy that casts a net that is surgically targeted to specific services, products and audiences. Unless you know what to do to develop these keyword lists, you will very likely put yourself on the highest cost, high traffic, low converting keywords that are out there. To be able to research and locate the right keywords at the right cost is a critical skill in developing a successful campaign.

3. Tracking Capabilities

Prior to search, companies used newspaper, print, radio and TV ads that were hard to track. The Internet changed all that, making most actions highly accountable. To be successful today in search you have to implement a system to track all actions; otherwise, how will you know what worked? Let's say you are tracking, what will you do with that data?

4. Optimization Algorithms

Optimization systems / search optimization algorithms are the computerized systems that analyze the data you capture, evaluate the actual success on the individual keywords, and make determinations as to which keywords should be bid higher, lower or eliminated completely. This needs to be a systems driven task to analyze the number of keywords required to maximize the results of your search campaign.

In the next part, we will be examining development costs, ROI analysis,how much time it takes to be successful and the learning curve involved in operating a successful PPC program.

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