7 Pay-Per-Click Advertising Strategies That Work

Pay-per-click advertising through GoTo.com’s keyword auction has moved well past the experimental phase. Enough businesses have run enough campaigns now that some tactics have clearly separated themselves from the rest. Here are seven worth adopting.

1. Bid on specific phrases, not single words

A single-word bid like “shoes” pulls in browsers, comparison shoppers and people who have no intention of buying anything today. A phrase like “waterproof hiking boots size 11” pulls in someone close to a purchase decision. Narrower terms cost less per click and convert at a noticeably higher rate, because the person searching has already done most of the filtering for you.

2. Treat every keyword as its own line item

Don’t average performance across a whole campaign. Track cost and conversion at the keyword level, because a handful of terms will usually carry most of the results while the rest quietly drain budget. Once you can see that breakdown, raising the bid on winners and dropping the losers becomes an easy call instead of a guess.

3. Bid just above the competition, not far above it

Overpaying for the top slot rarely earns back the extra cost in conversions. Watch where your competitors are bidding and set your own bid a cent or two above the position you need, not the top spot by default. GoTo.com shows bid amounts openly, which makes this kind of competitive tracking straightforward.

4. Write the landing page for the exact search term

If someone searches “24 inch gas range” and lands on a general appliances homepage, most of them leave. Build a page, or at minimum a clearly marked section, that matches what the ad promised. The tighter that match, the higher the conversion rate on traffic you’re already paying for.

5. Check bids weekly, not monthly

Because GoTo.com’s auction is dynamic, competitors can outbid a term overnight and knock a listing down several positions. Advertisers who check in weekly catch that early and adjust. Those who set bids once a month often discover, after the fact, that they paid for clicks in a lower position than they thought, or lost visibility on their best-performing term entirely.

6. Use syndication to extend reach without extra bidding

GoTo.com now places its paid listings on a growing list of partner sites and portals, which means a single bid can appear in more places than it did a year ago. That’s effectively free reach on top of an existing campaign, and it’s worth checking which of your keywords are picking up traffic from syndicated placements versus GoTo.com’s own site.

7. Set a hard budget cap before you start, not after

The auction model makes it easy to keep raising a bid to stay in a top position, and easy to lose track of how much that’s costing over a month. Decide the maximum you’ll spend per keyword and per day before the campaign launches, and treat that number as a real limit, not a suggestion.

Putting it together

None of these seven tactics require a large budget or a dedicated team. What they require is attention: checking the numbers regularly, being honest about what’s converting and being willing to move money away from terms that sound good but don’t perform. That discipline, more than any single tactic, is what separates the businesses getting real results from keyword bidding this year from the ones still treating it like a set-and-forget banner buy.

---

More on Paid Advertising, or see everything published in 2000.