January 24th, 2006

Successful search advertising not rocket science, but requires some effort

I’ve spoken to a lot of prospective clients in recent months about what they are doing, if anything, with Internet marketing.

Almost everybody seems to express an interest in email marketing, but many seem to be sour on what remains one of the hottest online tactics — search engine advertising. When I ask why, they save they’ve “tried Google” but with mediocre or bad results.

When I dig deeper, I find most still spend time and money on this tactic but implement few if any of the most basic best practices that industry insiders use. For example, few really do thorough key word research, or organize key words into relevant groups to match them to specific ad variations.

Moreover, instead of sending visitors to a special landing page, most people send them to an existing web page or, worse yet, their homepage (I should preface that by saying there are certain circumstances when that is the thing to do). A landing page looks, reads, and has a much different purpose than a public website page — it also entices visitors to take exactly the action you want them to take at a typically much higher rate.

If you have tried search engine advertising without utilizing these and other best practices, then you are potentially missing out on a very lucrative tactic. We’ve worked to improve some of our clients’ existing campaigns and these simple changes have turned unprofitable search ad campaigns into highly profitable ones.

Don’t be discouraged — read up a little on this tactic, on which much as been written. We’ll be making a free whitepaper on the search topic available in the next two weeks for a short time — if you’re interested, just email us with your name, company and address and we’ll provide you the location to download it. Also check out the great articles on it at ClickZ and MarketingSherpa.