You’ve got your wonderfully designed website up and running. It’s merchandised with all sorts of stuff that you’re sure people will want to buy. You’ve got great merchandising copy, a ton of awesome images, and your operations are all set up to handle hundreds of orders a day without a hitch.
There’s only one problem. No one is coming to your store! You’ve yet to build up a customer list so your e-mail marketing is not going to do a whole lot at this point. You’ve got your URL slapped on your business cards, billboards, direct mail pieces, etc. but still your potential customers seem to be ignoring the axiom, “if you build it, they will come!”
What’s worse is that because your site is so new, Google and the other search engines have not really found out about you. Perhaps there are not enough pages indexed on your site to give relevant returns for search terms you are looking for, or maybe you’re still in Google’s “sandbox” where they put new sites until they essentially prove (through some mystical mix of longevity, inbound links, black magic, etc.) that they are not just some spam site. For whatever super-secret reason that Google, Yahoo, or the rest have, your site is nowhere to be seen in the organic search results for the keywords you or your customers care about.
If you follow the link to Wikipedia above on the Sandbox effect, make sure you check out the talk section to understand the dispute about what may or may not be going on. Regardless of what you read there, in my view it’s pretty much accepted that you are indeed placed in some kind of purgatory when you have a new site.
What can you do? Well, if you’ve got the cash, you can resort to what’s known as paid search or search engine advertising/marketing.
Paid search is the reason that Google is worth bazillions of dollars today. What’s interesting is that Google didn’t invent the concept (The credit for that goes to one of the early DotCom’s then known as GoTo.com. GoTo.com eventually changed its name to Overture, and then was purchased by Yahoo when Yahoo discovered that it had its pants around it’s ankles and Google was stealing all its lunch money because it didn’t have either a paid search strategy or the technology to do anything about it even if they did have one. To read more check out this story in Wired. Because Google is the 800 pound Gorilla here, most of my examples will involve them and their AdWords program, but keep in mind that most search engines offer paid search of one kind or another.
The concept is fairly simple. Businesses wanting to advertise on Google bid on keywords (let’s say “motorcycle parts”), when a search engine user does a web search for those terms, in addition to the long list of “organic” search results (pages that are listed because Google has determined that they are the best result for the search term), there are also results on the page that represent the advertiser’s links. You’ll see them along the right edge in a column under the heading of Sponsored Links or for certain highly relevant ads, along the top (again with the identifier of “Sponsored Links”).
The cost to you as an advertiser as well as the placement of your ad are determined by a number of factors (as is typical of Google, not all of those factors are known or communicated to you, the advertiser). The first and most obvious is the amount of money you are willing to spend per ad. Actually you are bidding on how much you are willing to spend for each click by a search user (cost-per-click or CPC). Typically, the more you spend, the more likely your ad will appear, and if you spend enough, your ad will appear closer to the top.
One of the clever bits about Google’s AdWords shows why Google is the king of this game. Instead of just allowing ad display and placement to be driven by the keyword’s bid price, Google also keeps track of how many people actually click on your ad. Obviously Google wants to make sure that they are displaying relevant ads that will lead to a search user clicking on them so Google gets paid, and their advertising customers see people coming to their site from these ads. If Google didn’t do it this way, Viagra spammers and the like would just buy up a ton of the hottest keywords so their totally irrelevant ads would show up all over the place, driving out potentially relevant ads in the process.
Because Google has a stake in the game this way, they want your ads to be good ads that people click on. Google provides a ton of tools and guides to help you craft the most effective AdWords campaigns possible. They will guide you through choosing the best keywords as well as the best ad copy. However, even with all of Google’s guidance, it’s still important that before you dive into paid search advertising that you do some serious thinking about 1) your budget, and 2) what keywords you want to focus on.
Those two elements are very closely linked. Once you start using AdWords, if you’re not careful to set realistic daily maximums or choose targeted keywords, you will be in for a potentially VERY nasty surprise when your first AdWords payment comes out of your shop’s credit card. Make sure that you understand how to set up your campaigns to be effective but within your budget, otherwise it will seem like you’ve got a tweeked out teenager with a no limit credit card running wild through the mall!
Unless you’ve got more money in your advertising budget than you know what to do with, I’d recommend focusing on very specific keywords and phrases and avoid something like the example at the start of the column (”Motorcycle parts”). Open ended or general keywords are going to be pretty expensive, as well as show up on a lot of non-relevant searches.
Here’s another example. Let’s say all you sell are motorcycle helmets. Let’s say that you didn’t read this column or pay any attention to the guidance that Google tries to provide and bought keywords like “helmet”, “Motorcycle“, “motorcycle riding”, and so on. Essentially you think that you want to cast a really wide net and get anyone even remotely interested in motorcycling to your site with the logic being that they all need helmets. So you end up paying $5.00 per click for a term like “motorcycle“, or $8.00 per click for “helmet”. You’ll soon discover that your daily ad budget is gone in like 1 hour and you’ve got zero sales based on those clicks! Why? Because while your ad was showing up all over the place, it was showing up for things like a kid doing a book report on The Mouse And The Motorcycle
Now, if you are smart about it, you’d typically decide that with your limited ad budget you’d better focus a little more and start bidding on really tight search terms. Examples would be “discount motorcycle helmets” or “Scorpion Helmets.” There’s very little point in placing your ad in front of people that are not really interested in what your selling. Getting your ad out there “just in case” will become very expensive and typically very ineffective.
Considering the billions of dollars that Google is worth, all because of paid search, it’s no surprise there is a considerable industry involved in it. There are firms that do nothing but create and execute paid search campaigns, and software that does nothing but try to optimize your paid search campaign. This column can really do nothing more than give a brief overview. There are all kinds of other issues that could be columns unto themselves, such as click-fraud (for example, your competitor hires a team of monkeys to click all of your ads, thus depleting your ad inventory. Google is “supposed” to protect against this, but Google “click fraud” and you’ll see it’s a real issue).
Hopefully this gives you enough to get started exploring paid search as an advertising possibility. One thing I can guarantee is that once you start doing it, you’ll realize why so many people spend so much time and energy trying to get good organic results. Paid search can be really expensive! The next series of columns is going to cover getting your site on top of those organic lists so you can cut back, or even eliminate your paid search altogether.
Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online
