Set Up Your Paid Search Account

Welcome to paid search with training wheels. This week you’re going to develop good habits and a firm grasp of how the pay-per-click (PPC) system works, using a smallbudget starter campaign. We can’t tell you what “small” means, but whether you choose to invest less than $100 or more than $10,000 a month, we’ll provide you with tips and pitfall-avoidance techniques that will help you spend your money wisely.

We recommend that you set up your paid search account and monitor it over the course of three months. This should give you enough time to judge cost-effectiveness, learn what you can expect to get for your money, and decide whether you have what it takes both financially and administratively to manage an ongoing paid search campaign. Even if you’re skeptical about the use of paid search in your long-term marketing plans, we still hope to nudge you into trying it for the short term:

How Do I Choose My Paid Search Budget?

This is one of the hardest-to-pin-down factors of SEO, and one that has as many variables as a high school algebra fair.We’d love to put on our little green visors and help you arrive at the perfect number, but instead we’ll have to give you some general guidelines and let you do the thinking:

Ask your boss (or whoever holds the purse strings). Whether you like it or not, somebody may already have a number that you’ll have to roll with. Let’s hope your paid search campaign pulls in enough conversions to convince them to up the budget when your trial period is over!

Look to your current cost per conversion. Perhaps you already have an idea of what a conversion costs your organization based on tracking for existing online or offline marketing programs.

The preliminary research you do this week may help you make an educated guess about how much you’d need to spend on paid search to meet or beat your current cost per conversion.

Consider your competition. You already know whether or not you’re in a highly competitive online space. This week, with the help of the paid search service of your choice, you’re going to attach some dollar figures to your top-priority keywords.Will you need to spend $0.15 or $15.00 per click to wrestle into the top three paid listing ranks for most of your keywords? The answer will inform your budget-making process.

Think about your own level of enthusiasm. Even though it’s likely that your paid search campaign will run smoothly, proper campaign management takes continued interest and effort.

Campaigns with larger budgets often have more keywords and more ads, taking more effort than smaller campaigns. If you don’t foresee yourself having the ability or time to keep up a large campaign, scale down your budget, along with your expectations for clicks and conversions.

Study Hall

Getting familiar with a new interface, not to mention specialized terminology and guidelines, is an important part of a smoothly run campaign. Today, you’ll do your homework and learn about the paid search service you want to use so that you can be a more effective advertiser in the long term.

As a paid search newbie, you may be confused by the many options that sprout up once you fire up the “start a campaign” page. For example, Google offers video ads, local ads, and even radio and newspaper ads through their AdWords service. But we advise you to stick with the basics: text ads displayed in the search engines.

You can pay by the impression, by the click, or even by the conversion. We think you should start with a pay-per-click arrangement, which is likely to be the default setting for any service you choose.

If All Else Fails, Flip a Coin

Having a hard time choosing which paid search service is right for you? As we mentioned there are bigger players and there are smaller ones in the search advertising arena.The current big guns in the U.S. market are Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) and Google AdWords, with Microsoft adCenter a strong third-place contender.We won’t tell you which of the three to choose.We can say that unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, you should stick with one of these top three services for your starter campaign.

If you are the kind of person who needs to scrutinize the techie details before making a choice, put on your eyestrain glasses and check out the user documentation provided by the paid search services themselves.Yourseoplan.com has links to these and other resources that will help you compare the services. Use these resources to learn about YSM, Microsoft adCenter, and Google AdWords, and decide which is the best match to your needs.The key elements that you’ll want to research are outlined in this section.

Spend the rest of your time today familiarizing yourself with the inner workings of your paid search service of choice. Next we’ll describe the most important elements for you to understand as you attack your PPC learning curve.

Editorial Guidelines

Any respectable paid search service has a list of rules with which your ads must comply. Things like limiting obnoxious SHOUTING CAPITALIZATION or limiting the use of certain terms. In addition to style guidelines, there is a laundry list of products and services for which advertising is not permitted. (Google has a rather long list that includes many fascinating and confounding barred topics such as “e-gold” and “hacking and cracking.” Entertaining stuff.) You should also know their editorial procedures: Do they publish your ad right away and review it later? Is there a waiting period before new ads can go online? Do they warn you before they take your advertisement offline, or do they just yank it for violating the guidelines?

Spending Requirements

This probably won’t be a major issue if you are planning to use YSM, Microsoft adCenter, or Google AdWords; all three offer very low minimum spending levels. If you are considering another service, be sure that you are willing to cover their minimum spending or activation fee requirements.

Keyword Matching Options

If you love to micromanage, this section is for you. Paid search engines offer a variety of keyword matching controls:

Broad matching Causes your ad to display if searchers combine your keywords with other terms (for example, your ad for “wedding bands” will show when the term “platinum wedding bands” is searched). This may include plural forms of the term, misspellings, and synonyms.

Exact matching Causes your ad to display for the term you are sponsoring, with no changes to word order or plurals (for example, your ad for “wedding bands” will display when someone searches for “wedding bands” or “wedding bands in New Orleans,” but not for “wedding band” or “bands for my wedding”).

Keyword exclusion Allows you to exclude searchers who use certain words from viewing your ad (for example, if you’re targeting “wedding bands,” you can exclude people searching for “wedding bands jazz”).

Ad Display Options

It’s important to understand exactly where and when your ads will be displayed. If you’re interested in a paid search service other than the Biggies, make sure they’re up front about who they partner with for ad displays. You don’t want to discover your ads unexpectedly displaying in annoying pop-up windows that may be detrimental to your branding. Many paid search services also offer these types of display controls:

Contextual vs. search engine display Contextual advertising displays your sponsored ads on a wide variety of websites, not just search engines. Your service should give you the choice of whether you want to include contextual displays. To keep things simple, we recommend turning off contextual advertising as you make your first foray into paid search.

Geotargeting Allows you to display your results to searchers in a particular location.

Dynamic keyword insertion Places the searcher’s keywords directly into your ad. You’ll learn more about this later when you write your ads.

Dayparting Allows you to specify the times of day your ads will display. A B2B consulting firm may want to display its ads only during the workweek, while the wee hours may be a better fit for sleeping pill manufacturers.