__________________________________________________________________________ PPC Clickthrough Auctions - Bid for Website Traffic
PPC Search Auction Sites: Where to Bid
Chart: Bidding Intensity based on CPC (Cost Per Click)
How PPC Keyword Bidding works
Caution: Watch for Flying Bids
Overture Keyword Phrases - Match Types Explained
Chart: Overture Match Type Variations
Overture Keyword Placement Tips: PPC Clickthrough Auctions - Bid for website traffic Tired of those traffic houses promising to send your site 10,000 hits for fifty bucks, where you don't get any sales or even see any real visitors? If so, then Pay Per Click bidding is the answer. If you are an experienced Webmaster, then you already know what Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is. You also know that profit on the internet is all about clickthroughs and traffic: those websites with the most visitors, win. Well, if you are new to all of this, did you know that you can actually bid on website traffic at Overture, enhance.com, Adhearus and other sites for pennies per click? It used to be when you searched for something on the internet, a search engine would return results based primarily on how useful and popular the content of the webpage was. The search company made its money when someone purchased ad space in the form of banner impressions- It worked at first, but then two factors occurred causing ad revenue to plummet. First came the burst of the dot com bubble- not good for web advertising. Second, and even more devastating, web surfers no longer seemed to be clicking on banner ads. Instead, they were tuning them out, and primarily clicking on text links embedded within the body of web pages. So, the search engines evolved and began to try out a new profit model: PPC bidding. Yup... Yahoo had gotten the auction bug. Tired of those traffic houses promising to send 10,000 hits for fifty bucks, where you don't get any sales or even see any real visitors? Pay Per Click bidding is the answer... So what exactly is PPC search term bidding? Well, all those little "Sponsored Listing" results or ad boxes you see on search engines like Google and Yahoo are examples of a person or company who has used a PPC auction... They have bid on keywords related to your clickthrough, and will pay for your visit if you click the link in the text ad. This is opposed to the old method of buying banner impressions that you might not actually click on or even notice, much less read. Such was the case with banner ads when the internet was in it's infancy- now, website ads are all about performance, and in this category PPC text ads is the king! PPC Search Auction Sites: Where to bid Overture is a top notch PPC (Pay Per Click) search engine company, which partners & tracks results with major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Info Space, Alta Vista, All The Web, etc. On a cost per click basis, it is considered highly competitive. Many other website owners, individuals, and corporations bid at Overture for popular search terms and ad placement (see CPC Chart below). But you get do what you pay for- a well placed and creative ad on Overture can deliver hundreds or thousands of highly targeted visitors and customers per month, depending on your search keywords and budget. There are many other PPC keyword bid auction sites, as seen in the chart below: Bidding Intensity based on Cost Per Click (CPC) | Very Competitive | Moderate CPC
Bidding | Less Competitive CPC Bidding | Google .05 Min CPC
Overture .10 Min CPC | Ask Jeeves
Findwhat
enhance interactive (previously Ah-ha) | Adhearus
Epilot
Kanoodle
Looksmart
Lycos
Mamma |
How PPC Keyword Bidding Works The way it works is you design a short text ad (image ads are now appearing as well) and associate certain keywords with your description. Then, if someone does a search on the web that matches a keyword term you have chosen, your ad will appear, usually with a list of similar ads. Your position on this list is determined by how much you have bid for that keyword phrase. You only pay when your ad is clicked on- you are not charged for impressions of your ad that are not clicked. If you are bidding on certain PPC terms, it is very important to be as specific as possible. In the early days of web design, people would throw in meta keywords like "sex" or "star wars" even if their page had nothing to do with these items- they were just hoping to get traffic by capitalizing on popular keyword terms. DO NOT do this when you bid in PPC search engines. If you do, you will not see your ads getting sales (converting), and you will drain your ad account quickly. The reason is simple: Since you are paying per click, usually anywhere between .01 to 10 cents minimum, you want your ad to be as targeted as possible to your target audience. For this, you will want to use quotation marks around phrases in Google, and use Standard Match Types on Overture Other PPC auction search engines have their own methods of matching keyword phrases to search queries, check with the various PPC Search Engines to get their guidelines. For more information about keyword placement, see our articles:
Match Types on Overture
Overture Keyword Placement Tips
also see our chart:
Overture Match Type Variations Hot tip: Not only can you benefit from from PPC bidding as an advertiser, you can get paid as a website publisher to sponsor the ad boxes on your site. The website Adhearus is one popular example of a search network that offers both pay per click bidding, and ad revenue boxes for publishers. Caution: Watch for Flying Bids In a crowded field for a high demand search term, you may see bids for eight, nine, ten or more dollars and up. We have seen bids as high as sixteen dollars for search terms related to financial websites. Sixteen bucks a click? What?!? Does anyone else out there remember the dot com collapse? In other words, be careful and wise with those ad budgets- leave egotistical goals about attaining top position out of your PPC bidding- your ads still have to convert to sales, and not every clickthrough is a guaranteed deal closer. Our experience is that most times, just being in the top three spots is very effective, and being in the top five is also very good. You will not notice a huge difference in clicks in the top five spots, if any, unless it is for a very popular keyword. But check at Overture and other sites, and you will notice that people pay vastly different amounts for those placements. Remember that most clickthroughs will convert to sales only a fraction of one percent of the time. And even if you are getting a high conversion rate of one percent or better (that's very high- about one out of a hundred clickthroughs), at sixteen bucks a click, that's sixteen hundred dollars spent to make a single sale! Your product would have to sell for several thousand bucks, just to make a profit. Different types of Overture Match Types searches: Let's say you are using Overture to sell your 200 pieces of Elvis Presley Rock Memorabilia. To get the most bang for your buck, and the highest link conversion (sales) possible, you will want to specify keyword phrases that are as close to an exact match as you can. For instance, with the above Elvis example, some possibilities for keyword terms might be "Elvis Presley Rhine Stone Belt" and "Elvis Presley Hawaii Concert Ticket Stub". You would not want to simply choose generic terms like "Rhine Stone" or "Ticket Stub", because your ad will be seen either by people who are searching for something that is totally unrelated to this and who won't click on your link, or worse, it will be seen by people who aren't going to buy from you and DO click on your link, only to click off of your page again in a few seconds. This costs you a dime up to whatever you bid, each time your ad is clicked! However, let's say you are using Overture, and you are not getting enough clickthroughs over a certain period of time... you may have set up your keywords to be a little too specific. In this case, you may want to use a simple and powerful tool called Match Types at Overture: Match Type Variation Chart | Standard Match | Exact
Plural
Misspelled | Elvis Album
Elvis Albums
Evlis Ablum | | Phrase Match | Used in an exact phrase | My favorite Elvis Album | | Broad Match | Words in between
Used in a different order or jumbled in sentence | Find Elvis first album
Favorite album is by Elvis |
Some people get Overture Phrase Match and Broad Match confused- Remember, Phrase Match finds the exact phrase, with no variation. Let's suppose you want to buy an auction book online. When Phrase Match is used, your keyword phrase "auction book" must be entered by the search user in that exact manner: e.g. "Where can I buy an auction book"? Remember, with Broad Match, a search can yields terms that involve your keywords used in a sentence, although perhaps slightly out of order. For example, a search for the term "auction book" might yield both the words used in a sentence like this: "Find ebay auction for rare old book"
This is is an example of Broad Match, separated by words. "Where can I find a book about running an auction"
This is is an example of Broad Match, with keywords used in a different order. Overture Keyword Placement Tips: If you are too far down the list for a high demand keyword phrase like digital camera, say in the 35th spot, it is very unlikely you will get very many clicks, if any. How to improve your rank? It's easy- just raise your bid. On sites like Overture, you can use the "Manage Products" section to see how many bids you are getting daily, and what the other bids in the top spots are. You want to try to be in the top five, and preferably the top three. First spot is obviously best, although sometimes we get great results with the third spot. Why? On Yahoo which is an Overture network partner, the top three sponsored listings on a search results page are displayed first- Since some people have trained themselves to weed these out, they skim through the list quickly to get to the unpaid results, and their eye lands on the third place ad, which is just above the regular search results. The same can be true of the sponsored ad in fourth place, which appears right below the regular search results section on Yahoo! With a site like Overture.com, you can actually figure out which spot you will end up in, just by checking your bid in relation to the other current bid amounts. Your ad placement for that keyword phrase will stay in a particular spot until you change your bid, your account runs out of money, or until someone else bids higher and changes the order. Also, Remember to check your bids occasionally- if you have bid a high amount for a search term, we recommend you log in and check daily at a minimum! We constantly see popular search terms like travel auction with a wide difference in bid amounts for first, second, and third place. If a bid has been costing you .45 cents for first place for some time, and you suddenly notice the next two bids are 11 cents for the second spot, and 10 cents for the third place, you should lower your top bid to a more reasonable amount. If you are concerned someone will edge you out for the top spot, don't lower it to 12 cents, which just beats the other two. You could instead try 15 cents for awhile, which gives you some leeway. | 
