Jane Jacobs has said:
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. . . . People [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.
Emphasis added. This applies more widely than I might have thought. Here is an example:
Two gourmet chocolate companies. Two pay-per-click ad campaigns. Two very different results.
Charles Chocolates — a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer in Emeryville — spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, Lake Champlain Chocolates — a rival chocolatier based in Vermont — sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads.
What accounts for that difference?
With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. But that doesn’t really explain the difference. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.
What Lake Champlain did have was an inquisitive employee who threw himself into learning everything about how pay per click works — mastering arcane details and strategies about keyword bidding . . . Middings was fascinated by a medium that seemed the reverse of conventional marketing. . . . Middings taught himself the tricks of the trade. He developed a list of 70,000 — seventy thousand — keywords to bid on.
Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.
Its all about the keyword tail. Long tailed keywords are the foundation of a successful pay per click campaign. Especially when you are dealing with a relatively small budget. A company like Charles Chocolates could waste their entire monthly budget on a keyword like “chocolate” in a single day on Google alone. By implementing keywords such as “buy chocolates online”, “specialty box of chocolates”, “hand made chocolate candy”, or “online specialty chocolates” and thousands of variations of these you can get the best bang for your PPC buck. This is where a small company can find great ROI for their pay per click efforts.
You have to be careful with extensive keyword lists, not to overwhelm yourself. So breaking this list down into common components and by the need for different ad copy is very important.
Another option is to locally target your campaign to the geographic areas where your customer base is located. This way you can bid more aggressively on the more competitive keywords and still limit your daily ad spend.
All of these tactics can help a smaller company succeed in the pay per click game, but if you don’t have the necessary ability to track which keywords are generating your sales then you may be “up a creek”. My advice is to get the proper tracking and be very smart about keyword building and organization.
Its all about the keyword tail. Long tailed keywords are the foundation of a successful pay per click campaign. Especially when you are dealing with a relatively small budget. A company like Charles Chocolates could waste their entire monthly budget on a keyword like “chocolate” in a single day on Google alone. By implementing keywords such as “buy chocolates online”, “specialty box of chocolates”, “hand made chocolate candy”, or “online specialty chocolates” and thousands of variations of these you can get the best bang for your PPC buck. This is where a small company can find great ROI for their pay per click efforts.
You have to be careful with extensive keyword lists, not to overwhelm yourself. So breaking this list down into common components and by the need for different ad copy is very important.
Another option is to locally target your campaign to the geographic areas where your customer base is located. This way you can bid more aggressively on the more competitive keywords and still limit your daily ad spend.
All of these tactics can help a smaller company succeed in the pay per click game, but if you don’t have the necessary ability to track which keywords are generating your sales then you may be “up a creek”. My advice is to get the proper tracking and be very smart about keyword building and organization.
For more advice check out InternetGatekeeper.com