Paid for Listings on the Search Engines

Paid Listings are also known as Sponsored Links and these are of course much easier to achieve, but there are plenty of expensive traps for the unwary.

If you've ever advertised on Google, you know it's not a cakewalk at the beginning. You can set up an account and get visitors in as little as seven minutes… but a day or two later your bids get cancelled. Your ads are disapproved. You pay far too much for clicks. 

How do you get around these problems?

There are LOTS of things you can do, most of them quick and very simple.

Not just a handful of quick fixes but in fact dozens of easy, effective techniques that drive down the cost of your clicks and boost your Return On Investment for every advertising pound. Odds are, your competitors don't know any of these methods.

The screen capture below shows a typical results page from Google. You will have seen before that the sites featured down the right hand side of the site are called Sponsored Links.

Quite simply, you bid for these placings in an ongoing auction, but the skill lies in the use of keywords and managing the bids and the copy in the ads themselves. You pay nothing to appear in these displays, but you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. This is known as Pay Per Click (PPC). Prices start from 0.01p but climb quickly for very popular terms.

Google calls its version, Adwords. It is a sophisticated system that combines the amount you bid and the popularity of your site for any selected Keywords, to place your advert in its search results.

Overture is another of the main directories to carry PPC (Pay Per Click) and it supplies its results to a very wide range of popular engines including Yahoo and MSN. Overture's model is more transparent and you can see at a glance what you need to bid to achieve any given position.

Our specialty is a thorough knowledge of how Adwords in particular, works and how to achieve the best positions for the least amount of money. This is no idle boast. We can demonstrate cases where we have taken over existing campaigns, and managed to triple Click Through Rates, halve costs and win the best positions.

Can I do this myself?

Yes of course you can and if you want us to simply advise you along the way, we are happy to do so.

I haven't really got the time...

No problem. We can set the whole thing up for you and get it running successfully. Then if you want to take over the new campaign, that is fine.

Alternatively, we can set it all up and maintain the whole campaign for you, letting you have regular reports on how it is going.

We take the time and trouble to walk you through this vital part of your marketing plan. Give us a call and we can discuss where you are now, what you want to achieve and how we think you can best manage it.

In addition to the obvious benefits of so much targeted traffic, you also get reports which give you a wealth of information which will play an important role in the optimisation of your free listings.

We encourage you to take control of this process yourselves, but if you feel that you are too busy or not suited to this, we will happily take on the full management for you.

Click here to contact us