Your corporate website is part of your company’s overall marketing activity.  Beyond the original focus on brand awareness and audience development, uses for customer service and retention most likely have taken on greater importance.  Now, the achievement of greater market share, cost reduction, revenue, and profit are major drivers of your web strategies and systems.

On the Internet, market share, cost reduction, for example lower cost per customer acquired, increased revenue, and higher profits require “visibility.”  In other words traffic.  The quality of that traffic is also important.  The more interested in what you have to offer your web visitor is, the more likely they are to “convert”, that is take the action you want whether it is to sign up, register, download, or make a purchase.

As with store traffic, one way to acquire more visitors is to advertise.  According to Jupiter Media Matrix over 55% of all Internet purchases begin with a search engine and 93% of these consumers do not look past the first two pages of their search results.  These consumers are ideal traffic for your site: they are looking for something and they are predisposed to make a purchase.  This creates an opportunity for search engine companies to make money.  They sell advertising.

Advertising on search engines is one method that can increase your site’s visibility in search engine results.  Search engines auction positions for specific keywords and keyword phrases.  A keyword or keyword phrase is what a search engine user has typed to initiate the search.  It’s what they think will help them find what they’re looking for and generates the results or listing from which they will choose what sites to visit.  That’s 55% of all Internet purchases!  To be included in those listings, you must bid for position on the keywords that you think will drive traffic to your site.

Paid placement advertising or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is available through most of the leading search engines.  You bid in an auction environment for the right to display your text ad within a specific position on the search engine results page or the pages of their partners.  You can bid for hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases.  However, you are not paying to be listed, you are paying only for the actual clicks on your ad.  PPC advertising is one of the most targeted forms of advertising.  Ads appear for Internet users who are specifically searching for something that is relevant to them and frequently have an intention to purchase.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is extremely effective and a fast way to gain visibility.  However, PPC can be very competitive and challenging to manage.  Large advertisers may have tens of thousands of individual keywords and the challenge in managing the prices and positions for such numbers makes it difficult to get the most for the advertising dollar.  Advertisers often update bids many times so a bid you placed for first position may end up only buying you forth, if that.  Likewise, companies with large advertising budgets can drive prices for keywords to well over $100 per click.  So beyond selecting and maintaining the best keywords, constant and precise monitoring and managing the PPC process is needed to realize the true potential of this targeted marketing.

For effective Internet marketing you need timely quality information, careful methodology, and the right tools.  While bidding more and increasing staff can help you keep up with changes, both increase costs without necessary producing a greater return on investment.  You need to leverage knowledge and technology that are being constantly updated and upgraded and that can lead to higher productivity within the budget you have to work with.  To learn how ClearLead can help you get the best return on your Internet marketing investment, please contact us.