Web
Ads that Work - 2 Case Studies
Sites of Boston Tip of the Month
Dec
2002
We have known for
a while that banner advertising does not work very well so why are we still talking
about advertising on the Web? Because there is a new type of advertising that
many people do not even recognize as advertising. It brings qualified traffic
to websites within hours or days for pennies. As we've discussed before, this
type of advertising is called "pay-for-performance" or "pay-per-click"
(PPC) advertising.
Two of the most effective services are Overture which
provides the "sponsored listings" on Yahoo! and Google AdWords which
provides the small boxes down the right side of the Google screen.
I
have been using both services for several months and have had some interesting
results. I share two case studies here.
2 Pay-Per-Click Case Studies
I
have been using both Overture
and Google
AdWords for several months and have had some interesting results.
I will share two case studies here. I
set up both accounts in June 2002: I paid Overture a $50 set-up fee and have a
minimum charge of $20 per month. Google AdWords charged a $5 set up fee with no
monthly minimum. In
the first case study we found Overture to be most cost effective solution
to attracting qualified traffic and leads. We
ran the same three ads (using our best key phrases) in both Overture and Google.
In the first month, the Overture ads were clicked on 82 times, bringing 82 visitors
to the website. These clicks cost an average of $.10 each (based on competitive
bidding). The Google ads produced only 37 clicks at an average of $.44 per click.
In this case, Google produced less activity (37 vs. 82 clicks) at a much higher
price ($.44 per click vs. $.10 per click). Since
then, the number of clicks produced by Google has more than doubled, while the
number from Overture has remained constant. The price per click has increased
for both services. The average pay-per-click for these three ads is now $.23 for
Overture and $.46 for Google. It took 3 months to "pay back" the difference
in the set-up fees ($45) and Overture has turned out to be the most cost effective
solution to attracting qualified traffic and leads. For
the second case study we found Google AdWords Select easier to manage to budget My
client and I chose to use Overture and set up an ad for popular products they
would like to sell before the end of the year. On Saturday Sept 7, I submitted
the ad to Overture. By Tuesday Sept 10 (4 days), we had received 1035 clicks for
a total cost of $196.65 and depleted the balance in the account so the Overture
ads were removed. Because the client's budget was $20/month, I paid the extra
$176.65.
| Click-through
Rate: The number of clicks your listing received divided by the number of
times it was displayed in a browser as a result of a search | The
click-through rate was 26.6% while typical rates are between 2% and 8%.
The website traffic report showed numerous visits with unresolved domain names
and we had no purchases or inquires. I wrote to Overture customer service and
told them that I thought we had been spammed. They responded immediately and then
conducted an investigation. They reported that their "Loss Prevention Team
found that there were no invalid clicks". We
then submitted the same ad to Google and received a 2% click-through rate with
better results. We'll
never know for sure what happened and nothing similar has occurred, but we have
implemented a better visitor tracking system and I now subscribe to a 3rd party
bid management system to track bids and activity twice a day for all my clients. We
have found that Pay Per Click advertising is an effective way to bring qualified
traffic to a website, but that the costs needed to be controlled through careful
management. If
you would like to discuss using Pay Per Click to bring you leads and sales. Contact
me, Susan Hankins, at 978-266-0481 or shankins@sitesofboston.com Back
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