To Pay Per Click Or Not Pay Per Click

Sunday, June 1st, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing

Using Pay Per Click ads can be a great thing, but it can also be a dangerously expensive proposition. The key to using PPC wisely is to do the opposite of what many PPC resellers will tell you, and that is to think very NARROW in your PPC targeted keywords.

Let’s back up a bit.

When you do a search on Google, you generally get back two types of results: Organic search results and Pay-Per-Click ads. (These are two of the main components of what is called the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP). To use another “old media” analogy, if the Search Engine Results Page was a magazine, the organic results would be the articles and the Pay-Per-Clicks listings would be the advertisements. Take your lawyer hat off and imagine you owned a company that manufactured widgets. What would truly bring you more value from a marketing standpoint; an article in a magazine featuring your product in a positive light, or advertisements in that same magazine for your product. Obviously, most people would pick the articles.

It is for this reason I always advise my clients to consider building a strong website as the foundation for their online marketing plans. When you build a quality site with useful content (and follow other best practices for search engine optimization), you will almost certainly begin to show up towards the top of the Organic results. And best of all, there is no additional cost to do so.

For PPC ads, however, you literally get charged every time someone clicks on one of your ads. This can add up very quickly, and before you know it you’ve spent more than it would have cost you to build several high quality websites. And with click fraud still a huge problem (see this article), much of your money might be getting you nothing in return.

(Writing this I realize that there is so much to cover on this topic, it might warrant several articles, so I think I’ll get to my original point)

There are two times I think it is a great time to use PPC.

1) When you have a very new website that has still not cracked the Organic listings. Pick a handful of your most important (and competitive) search terms and sign up either directly with Google or one of the many PPC resellers.

2) If there are a few HIGHLY COMPETITIVE search terms where you really want to be found, but are not yet cracking the top 10-20 listings in the Organic results, purchase a PPC campaign for JUST THOSE TERMS. This will greatly reduce your cost. Then monitor how your site performs on the Organic Results so when you start showing up where you want you can cancel the PPC campaigns.

There is one more best practice I like to suggest to my clients who use PPC, and that is to make sure that their ads are using unique destination URLs.

The URL that appears on a PPC ad is called a DISPLAY URL. The actual web address that the ad points to is called a DESTINATION URL. Sometimes people use destination URLs just to direct clickers to an internal page of their site, but for our purposes we want to use them to track your traffic that is driven by PPC ads. When you purchase a PPC campaign you need to make sure that whomever sets up your account takes care of this for you, or it will be virtually impossible to track the value of your PPC campagin. If they play dumb or give you any flack, direct them to follow these steps.

1. Go to Google’s URL builder: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en
2. Enter the URL of the website.
3. Fill in the Campaign Source (such as Google, Yahoo!/Overture), Campaign Medium (such as PPC, banner ad) and the Campaign Name.
4. Click on the Generate URL button.
5. Add the URL to the Destination URL field of the ad management console.
6. Repeat this process for all online paid ads.

Note: your PPC vendor could choose to do the above steps manually instead of using this tool, but this tool is good for ensuring compatibility with analytics tools. I also recommend keeping a spreadsheet of all the URLs generated for the paid ads, so that you can see how many campaigns you have running.

For more information, read my PPC overview on my Los Angeles Lawyer Marketing website.

Note: Google changed their polices on this a few months ago. See here for details:
New Google Adsense URL Policies

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