Let's look at the "pay per click" options for Sara's Bakery. You met Sara in the September Tip of the Month newsletter. Sara did a full key phrase analysis and decided to submit a Web listing to the Yahoo! directory using this Title: "Sara's Bakery" and this Description: "Bakery fresh apple, strawberry, and cherry pies delivered in the greater Boston area". Her marketing efforts were so successful that Sara was able to sell her company to Tom's Foods and retire to the South Pacific.

Tom is so impressed with the number of good leads and customers that the Yahoo! listing is generating, he decides to investigate the "pay per click" possibilities to increase business even more.

In Overture, Tom needs to bid on a specific placement in the search results for each key phrase. He decides to check the key phrase "peach pie" since it is a popular key phrase that is not included in the Yahoo! listing. First he searches on "peach pie" in Yahoo! and he sees these listings under "Sponsored Listings":

Fresh Baked Gourmet Peach Pies
Our gourmet peach pies make elegant gifts for holidays, ...
www.sendacake.com

Peach Pie
Award winning peach pie straight from the kitchens of Bema Pies baked fresh ...
www.e-corporategifts.com

PastryWizFood Resource Center
If sweets are your thing and you want to learn how to ...
www.pastrywiz.com

Then Tom sets up his Overture account and notices that there is a minimum spend of $20/month. He decides to give it a try. Going to "Add a listing" he uses "view max bids" to see the current bids on each listing and learn that the top 4 bidders are bidding $.05 $.05 and $.04 per click to get 1st, 2nd and 3rd place listings.

This means that the sendacake.com people are paying 5 cents every time someone clicks on their website listing. The e-corporategifts.com company is paying the same amount. Sendacake must have had a 5 cent bid in earlier than E-corporategifts. Pastrywiz.com is only paying 4 cents per click. This is an old bid. The current minimum bid is $.05 per click.

Tom decides to bid 6 cents so his listing will be the first one under "Sponsored listings". He deposits $50.00 in his Overture account. $.06 will be deducted from this account every time someone clicks on his listing and visits his Web site. Overture provides some safeguards against multiple clicks from the same computer so Tom's competition can't run up a big bill in his account. When this money is gone, his listing will be removed from Yahoo! and the other Search Engines. He decides to add money on a regular basis.

He writes his listing to prequalify visitors. Since he delivers only , he doesn't want to pay for clicks from people in Mississippi, so he submits "Peach Pie - Bakery Fresh Peach Pies delivered in Boston area".

The Overture editors will review his listing before posting it on Yahoo! and other search engines. Three days later, his listing is posted.

A week later, his Yahoo! listing (from Overture) has slipped from the #1 to the #3 position. He checks the bids and they are now $.08 $.07 and $.06 and because he had bid 6 cents, his listing is 3rd.

Tom wants to be near the top of the listings so he decides to regain the #1 position by bidding 9 cents per click. Tom is beginning to understand why Overture has numerous partners that provide pay per click bid management software.

His reports show him the number of click-throughs (how many times someone clicked on his listing to visit his website), the number of impressions (how many times his listing was viewed), and the click through rate (the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions). He can also see how much money he has spent. He would like to trace these click-thoughs to sales he made in the last week so he decides to learn more about how to use tracking URLs and his website statistics to help him measure his return on investment (ROI). These will also be discussed in upcoming issues.

After a month, Tom finds that the Overture listing has been cost effective. He is pleased with the increase in number of qualified leads he is receiving and decides to submit more listings to Overture and try Google AdWords. He realizes that he needs to monitor these listings and the results carefully to maintain their positions, determine which listings are effective, and get the best return on his investment.

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