The Big Three In Pay Per Click Search Engines | Pay Per Click

By JoshPrizer
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If you are looking to get involved in pay per click advertising or expand the current reach of your existing pay per click advertising, where do you turn? Here are our recommendations on where your ad spend is best used ... and a few tips to optimize your accounts.

PPC and the Big Three

In the PPC search marketing world, the best results come from Google, Yahoo and MSN. These days, the Big Three share a lot more common ground, offering close to the same sort of PPC services -- geo targeting, setting adds to switch on and off during optimum times, splitting test the copy on your ads, optimizing quality scores, and so on. Google remains dominate in search traffic, but Yahoo and MSN are major players.

Let's Start With Google AdWords

Quality traffic is important and Google AdWords remains on top in delivering high-volume clicks that count. However, don't sleep on Google's success -- you still need to monitor your results with frequency. With enough the time, knowledge and the right tools, you can do this yourself, or you can outsource all that to a professional PPC management company.

Be aware that Google is not only becoming increasingly competitive, but its pay per click marketplace is also getting harder to ace. These days, there are more variables to consider with "Quality Scores" playing a more important role and more bids turning up "Inactive for Search." One of the keys to maintaining a healthy Google account is to make sure you put in the time to continually test and monitor your relevant keywords. You'll get penalized if you don't -- bid minimums might be increased, you may be forced to pay higher prices, or worse yet, be priced out by a Google slap. However, with a steady effort, you can turn your ad program around with fine tuning and tweaking. Done correctly and you'll be actually paying lower prices AND leaving your competitors behind in rank.

With Google as with any PPC engine, you should always track your content network advertising and your search network advertising separately. You may be losing money on bad keywords as you read this, especially if you are not making adjustments in tracking and monitoring your content network advertising.

Again, Google produces results, but you must be constantly vigilant, especially if you are an advertiser with a high-end budget. Spending more time, dedicating more staffing and hours or outsourcing your PPC campaign to a professional management company will pay off.

Yahoo Search Marketing

While Yahoo no longer dominates the pay per click arena as they once did, it's still wise to invest ad dollars with them. Yahoo Search Marketing (previously named Overture, which was previously Goto.com) made major changes last year in response to Google's moves in the PPC marketplace.

Similar to Google, Yahoo has a "Quality Index" ... and again, this is something that you have to pay attention to. Continual testing is a must. Yahoo won't hit you as often and as strongly as Google, but your campaign will suffer if you don't frequently split test to fine tune your ad quality.

Throttling up the Yahoo Quality Index usually means asking and answering the important questions: What makes you stand out from your competitors? Does your ad campaign relate to your customers? With ad copy testing you want to focus on the three C's: your Customer, your Competition, and your Company. Work it until you have an ad concept that consistently out produces the others. Then, work it some more. Use that as a control, refining and making small changes to variables to produce the best results.

AdCenter by MSN

MSN came late to the party, but they shouldn't be ignored. We have seen some superb quality traffic and they even have some unique targeting capabilities. You can create the same geo-targeting type of local PPC campaigns as the others, but you can also take it a step further and target demographics of users. For instance, if you notice you have high conversions on your site for a certain type of visitor, MSN will allow you to crank up your bids when it identifies those potential customers using their search services.

An important new feature from MSN allows you to import your Google AdWords accounts with much more ease. Note: Make sure your Google campaigns are as optimized and finely tuned as possible, or you will be making the same errors twice by importing them. And unless you have time to monitor them both daily, it might better to smooth out your problems in Google first. If you have large Ad Groups with huge lists of keywords, you need to condense those down into smaller, more manageable ones. Doing this will allow you to pinpoint the keywords with more relevant ads. And, again, keep testing and re-testing your targeted ads over and over.

The Rest of the Pack

We've seen mixed results with Ask and Looksmart. You can find some traffic that will pay off one week, then next week you are flooded with bad results and your Earnings Per Click go south for the winter ... and sometimes the other three seasons, as well. Miva can also be hit or miss. If you are doing a poor job managing your other PPC accounts, we definitely suggest you don't push your luck into any of these others. There is some good traffic there, but you have to double your efforts on tracking and keep a tight eye on results since things can turn sour fast. Avoid all the other pay per click engines.

Should you as a PPC advertiser use more than the Big Three? Well, if you are already using Google, Yahoo and MSN, you are probably more than busy. Especially if you are going about it the right way -- running split tests every day, monitoring earnings per click results down to the keyword, and continually looking for the profitable keyword real estate that your competition is on and expanding to relevant keywords. Make sure you are investing your time wisely with the Big Three before venturing elsewhere.

Taking Care of Business

Ignoring the daily management needs of your PPC accounts will most likely result in bad keywords depleting your funds. On top of that, good keywords are getting more and more expensive because your quality scores are slipping compared to your competitors. Under-performing campaigns cost advertisers a huge chunk of potential business. It's up to you to protect your investment with effective, intelligent supervision of your in-house PPC marketing or by outsourcing this essential work to a professional pay per click management company.

About the Author

Josh Prizer is a Senior Account Executive and PPC Expert for Zero Company Performance Marketing, a pay per click management company. Check out his website now to learn more info on how to improve your PPC advertising campaigns and results.

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