To find new customers and increase sales you need to be found quickly and easily online. The majority of people who are looking for a particular service or product will utilise a search engine such as Google or Yahoo.
There are two types of search results Search Engines provide:
- Natural (also called organic)
- Sponsored Search
Natural search is the process where search engines send a Robot (also called a spider) to your site. A Robot is simply an automated program that catalogues content on your site and decides what your site is about. The search engine then places your site in the search results where it feels you best fit in. How popular your site is also plays a major part in where in the search results your site features.
Sponsored search is the process where you bid on a particular keyword/s. If you were selling DVD’s about marketing online, you might bid on a keyword such as “Marketing DVD’s”.
You can also decide how much you want to bid on this keyword. So for the Keyword “Marketing DVD’s” you may want to bid $1.00 per click. Generally the higher the bid amount – the higher you will appear in the “sponsored” search results.
If a member of the general public types in “Marketing DVD’s” into their search engine and they then click on your ad – you will pay that search engine $1.00.
Hence you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. This means that if no one clicks on your ad – you don’t actually pay anything.
You can also set a daily limit which allows you to control your monthly budget. If you want to spend a $300 / month with Google or Yahoo for example – this would allow you to spend approximately $10 / day. Google or Yahoo then will place your ad strategically throughout the day to spend this budget.
Budgeting means that your ad may not appear 100% of the time for a particular keyword. If there are 1000 search’s per day for “Marketing DVD’s” and we are spending $10 / day - Google or Yahoo may only show your ad part of the time.
Google and Yahoo have different ways of calculating when to display your ad (if you have budgeting turned on). However both roughly calculate the ratio between impressions (how many times your ad is seen) and how many times your ads are clicked on.
For $10 per day and a bid amount of $1 per click your ratio is calculated like this:
If on average your ad is clicked on 50% of the time each time it is seen. Your ad can be shown 20 times in one day. This would generate 10 click throughs to your site (which equates to $10). This is a very simplistic explanation how this works, but the basic premise does hold.
With a sponsored search you can also track your click throughs via reporting so you can track the effectiveness for your campaigns.
Back to the marketing DVD’s example. If you get 300 click throughs – which result in 15 sales of your DVD at $50 each – you make $750.00. These sales can also be tracked automatically into Monthly reporting.
The best results are achieved through a combination of natural and paid searches. Try and get a good ranking in natural search, but if your site is not being found for some keywords – look at running a sponsored search. Also remember that with Natural search - the order sites turn up in the search results is completely governed by Google and Yahoo. A sponsored search program delivers more certain results.
The examples provided above are a guide only and like any advertising medium you should seek professional advice to make sure your campaign will return the maximum result for minimal cost.
