“One of the things that I’ve found more interesting and challenging working as a Pay Per Click manager is the art of building and locating ads on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for both new clients who come to us with existing accounts and those who are creating accounts for the first time. Not only do we have to follow each search engine’s guidelines and best practices, but we also need to make sure that our clients’ targeted positioning and/or visibility on the engines promotes the advantages of doing business with our clients as opposed their competitors.
There’s a popular perception out there, especially with businesses that are not familiar with paid Internet advertising, that you should be in position 1 no matter what. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In most cases, this turns out to be a waste of money. The only time this may apply is if you are using Pay Per Click as a branding venue more than a revenue/leads generator. In this case, you should be willing to spend a significant amount of money for medium-long term results.
The ad building and bidding approach I take is different depending on which type of website I am dealing with.
It starts by determining what makes our client better than their competitors. For me, it is much easier when I’m working with an E-commerce site because we are dealing with pure numbers here. Either a client has the better price or not. Of course there are other selling points like free shipping, price match guarantee, and return policy, that should be also evaluated. This is not an easy task my friends. I have to literally look at every competitor’s ad and review the price and discount offers like “Save xx% or, “Save Up To xx”; but this is not enough. I also have to visit the competitor’s’ websites and make sure that their offers are in fact true. Since there are sometimes thousands of competitive advertisers, occasionally I’ll find that some of them promote exaggerated discounts and offers on the ads.
For Lead Generation sites it is a little more complicated. The process is basically the same but here we have to focus on factors like the services provided, location, ETA and other intangibles. I read competitors’ ads, visit their websites and make an objective evaluation of their business and compare it against our clients’.
Once I have learned about our competitors, I know which position we should target. If my client’s website is in fact the better option (for example, they have the lowest price) or among the bests, then I’ll target the higher positions (1-3), but if a client can’t compete against the top 3 or 4 competitors’ offers, then positions 4-6 are more realistic and cost-effective goals. I don’t want people clicking a client’s position 1 or 2 ads and leaving the website because they don’t have the best offer overall. That’s like throwing a client’s money into the garbage.
This brings up another point. An ad must promote a true offer, one that is accurately reflected on its landing page. For example, if an ad has copy promoting a special 50% discount offer, it must lead to a landing page that offers the majority of the products on that page at 50% off. If there is only one or two products at 50% off and the rest are only 25% off, credibility is lost and a potential customer may be gone for good.
Sometimes it can be really hard at first to convince clients that it’s not about making high bids and outbidding everyone else. Our job as PPC managers is to spend the client’s money wisely and obtain the best ROI possible.”
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