Are You Maximizing Your Pay-Per-Click Returns?

Pay-per-click (PPC) keyword advertising has become immensely popular as it enables advertisers to have better control over their budget.

Overture (previously Goto.com) now serves over 2 billion search queries monthly and their premium listings appear on major search engines such as America Online, Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista, Netscape and InfoSpace.

With the tremendous volume of keyword bidding, there exist opportunities for your business to reduce bid costs while maintaining the same ranking!

I'm about to reveal a hot PPC tip that will save you thousands of dollars in monthly bid fees. What is this secret? Read on ...

As at press time, the top bid for the keyword "flower" on Overture is $1.88. The 4th bid is $1.83 while the 5th bid cost just $1.21.

FTD.com secured the 4th place while FlowersAcrossAmerica.com secured the 5th bid. FTD could have reduced their bid to $1.22 and still remain in the 4th spot!

Their savings per-click would be $0.61. Savings per thousand clicks would have been $610. "Flower" was searched more than 370,000 times the previous month. If they had a click-through of just 3.0%, they could have saved $6771.00 on the keyword "flower" alone!

When was the last time you checked your bids? You could reduce your bids while still maintaining the same ranking or get a top 3 position for maybe just 1 cent more!

It's all about bid optimization. So how often should you monitor your bids? I recommend that you check your bids for "bid gap" opportunities at least once a week.

Search the keywords which you have bid for and check for bid gaps between you and your competitors' bids. This should take you less than 30 minutes a week but the savings will be substantial.

What if I have a few hundred keywords in my bid list?

You will need a more efficient solution. A number of bid monitoring services have sprung up across the Internet.

For a monthly fee based on number of keywords monitored, they will monitor your keywords for bid gaps daily and notify you when there are opportunities for savings.

If you use more than one PPC engine, most of these services can monitor bid gaps across multiple engines. Your savings in time and money will be significant, especially if you have placed expensive bids.

Here is a list of online bid monitoring services:

Keyword Bid Optimizer
http://www.paidsearchenginetools.com
Engines monitored: Overture, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Epilot

ManageBid
http://www.managebid.com
Engines monitored: Overture, FindWhat, Epilot, Kanoodle, Netflip,
Bay9, SearchFeed, 7Search

Position Guardian
http://www.positionguardian.com
Engines monitored: Overture

Here is a list of bid monitoring softwares:

Dynamic KeywordBid Maximizer (recommended!)
http://www.apexpacific.com/keywordbid_maximizer.html
Engines monitored: Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks, Kanoodle,
Espotting, Epilot, Bay9, 7Search

Tangare Pay Per Click Maximizer
http://www.tangare.com
Engines monitored: Overture, FindWhat, Kanoodle, Espotting

The makers of Dynamic KeywordBid Maximizer had sent me a complimentary copy of their software for review. I tested it on my own Overture PPC listings and it worked great.

Compared to online monitoring services, it is definitely cheaper as the cost outlay involves only a one-time purchase.

To read more articles about PPC advertising, go to http://www.internetmarketingfocus.com/to.cgi?l=topic-ppc

About the Author

Chee Wee is a professional Internet Marketing Consultant. Visit his website for lots of powerful online marketing tips and articles. Go to InternetMarketingFocus.com

cw@internetmarketingfocus.com
http://www.internetmarketingfocus.com