In the past, we have suggested to bid low and bid-out. This was referred to as a "linear bid", but Overture has abandoned this type of marketing and has moved to go along with what Google is doing now. The type of bid on sponsored links that Google uses is called "Quality Score Bids. There are four factors that come into play:
1: Bid: Setting up the cost that you are willing to pay per click.
2: Click Through Rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.
3: Congruence: Would be the similarity of the words or phrases that you would use in your ad.
4: Historical Performance: This is a history of how well your keywords are performing in bringing you visitors.
Here's an example of how this works:
The keyword we will use in this example isWheat Grass:
Ed bids $1.00 on the word but his click through rate is 1%
Sally bids $11.00 on the word but her click through rate is 10%
You will have a higher listing because of the click through rate on Sally's bid.
Google Ad Campaigns
There are three parts to Google Ad Words:
1: Campaign: You create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business.
2: Ad Groups: An ad group contains one or more ads which target one set of keywords or sites. You set a bid, or price, for all the keywords or sites in the ad group. This is called a cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM) bid. You may also set prices for individual keywords or sites within the ad group.
3: Keywords: The keywords you create for a given ad group are used to target your ads to potential customers.
The first thing you do is research different keywords. Login to Merchant Services (www.storesonlinepro.com) to review the tutorials on keyword research.
Next, break them up into campaigns based on the congruence (similarity) of each word to the ad words.
I would not recommend having one campaign for all of your keywords because of the lack of congruence and the fact that you will be penalized by the search engines for not having congruence. Also consider breaking your campaigns out into several groups, doing one campaign for about 1,000 words can be a daunting task!
Using Google Adwords, you should break your keywords into categories that best fit the keywords. Google will tell you how congruent the word is to that particular ad campaign, with poor, ok and great.
If it's listed as "poor", you will be penalized and your listing will come furthe rdown. You can track this behavior with the conversion code that you add to the receipt of your order form. By doing so, you can see how much you make on each click and decide from there how to setup your ad word campaigns.
Social Book Marking is how other people can see your bookmarks and can be ranked by Google as well. It will take you approximately two minutes to register on any social bookmarking site. After you have registered, continue to add bookmarks and your site will be fulfillign it's own marketing with this type of strategy. You will want to submit these bookmarks in a span of about two months, so take your time filling out the information or Google may become nervous that you are getting all of these links pointed to you in such a short amount of time.
The same is true for live directories. Make sure your site is ready before you submit to DMOZ. For more information about live directories, please login to Merchant Services at www.storesonlinepro.com. Unlike Google Adwords, live directories such as DMOZ use live people to review submissions, not an automated process.
If you are using Paid Live Directories, this strategy works well because they will actually send you an e-mail notification if there is something incorrect on your site and give you the opportunity to fix it before denying you entrance into the live directory. They will look at your site one more time free of charge, so pay close attention to any notification you may get if your site is not accepted the first time. Generally the problem is a privacy policy that is not visible on your site (that's easy to fix). For the free live directories, they won't tell you why it was rejected, so you're left guessing. Again, submit your site keywords via the paid live directories over the span of approximately two months.
See you next time!
Sean Guy
Director of Customer Service
StoresOnline, Inc.
