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The Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Solution

As of March 2000, there are estimated to be over 2 billion web pages all competing for traffic. An additional 1.5 million pages are added to this number every day. Typically, with the big eight search engines you are competing with anywhere from 50 million to 150 million other sites. In fact, on April 11^th Inktomi (which serves results for HotBot, AOL Search, MSN Search and many others) announced that their database contains more than 500 million web pages. 

This many web pages means that the average time to get indexed is steadily increasing. Many eMarketers site examples of search engines taking as long as 8 months to index a site. Although the traditional big eight search engines are important, if you use them to drive traffic to your site you need to hurry up and wait.

How do we start driving traffic today?

Traditionally, buying banner advertising on high traffic websites or even on the search engines themselves has been the answer. But as visitors become more web savvy they tend to also develop banner blindness making this form of advertising less and less effective. The latest industry figures estimate banner clickthrough rates at under ½%.

Banner advertising is also generally driven by a CPM or cost-per-1000 impressions model rather than a cost-per-click model. Cost-per-click models are much more cost effective because you only pay for the traffic you receive instead of potential traffic or something even less measurable like “branding.” Currently, Excite.com, one of the big eight search engines, charges up to $170 US for 1000 keyword targeted banner impressions. Therefore, if we assume an above industry standard clickthrough rate of ½%, the advertiser is paying $34 for each new visitor. That's a lot of money to buy a potential customer.

How can Excite charge so much?

Relevancy. The highest price for Excite banner advertising is linked to keyword searches of their database. For example, if you are Widget.com and you are advertising your widgets on Excite, every time a visitor uses “widget” as a search term your banner would appear at the top of the search results. The argument is that since they are looking for widgets anyway they are more likely to click on your banner thereby increasing the clickthrough rate. Furthermore, since the searcher is looking for widgets and they have clicked on your banner, which is advertising widgets, they are more likely to buy widgets. This is called a higher conversion rate.  However, even at the more reasonable industry standard price of $30 US you are still essentially paying $6 US for a visitor to your site that may or may not buy anything.

Well, if building traffic with search engines is too slow and banner advertising is too expensive how do we start building traffic to our website?

One of the simplest answers is pay-per-click search engine. Pay-per-click search engines, like GoTo, work like any other search engine with a few notable exceptions. 

First, “Advertisers bid in an open auction for placement in the results for search terms that are relevant to their sites. And they pay only for consumers who click on their listings” [GoTo].  The advantage of course is that the advertiser is guaranteed well-qualified traffic, pays only for the traffic they receive, and completely controls the amount they are willing to pay for a visitor to their site. 

Second, the advertiser controls their account so they can add or subtract listings, change the title of their listing or the description, and can raise and lower their bids, often immediately. This allows the advertiser to take advantage of special offers, topical events, or even just to fine tune their offerings. Account updates range from a couple of days on GoTo to instantaneous account updates on RocketLinks or FindWhat. GoTo takes a little longer because it uses human editors to ensure that the search terms being entered are relevant to the web page being linked to. This prevents advertisers from abusing the system by buying unrelated terms.

Here are a few of the pay-per-click search engines available today:

GoTo is the largest of these engines and has the potential to drive the most visitors to your site since its traffic numbers are significantly higher than its competition. However, it takes several days to get listed on GoTo and they are very strict about monitoring the relevancy of the terms be bid on. GoTo uses Inktomi’s database to supplement its paid listings.

FindWhat is a direct competitor of GoTo’s and is experiencing steady traffic. Unlike GoTo, setting up an account and bidding on search terms is immediate. You are up and running in minutes. It is difficult however to have individual listings for each keyword with this engine so it is time consuming customizing your message for each search term. It also uses Inktomi for its non-paid listings.

Kanoodle is another Inktomi based search engine with an interesting feature. If your search term is found within the first three listings Kanoodle will also rotate your banner through its results pages. The rotation works as follows:

·        Top spot gets 25% of rotation. 

·        Second spot gets 15% of rotation.

·        Third spot gets 5% of rotation.

I am not convinced that this will increase the likelihood of driving traffic to your site significantly but it certainly can’t hurt your odds.

RocketLinks unlike, the others mentioned so far, uses Google to supplement its paid listings. Its reporting is weak and its traffic isn’t great but it is easy to use and is an engine to watch.

SimpleSearch uses DirectHit as its supplemental database and only allows advertisers to buy one of the top five listings. It is a nice and clean search engine but suffers from its lack of traffic and it is somewhat slow.

OneSearch.com is a slightly different model in that on top of its paid listings it is a metasearch engine providing results from the top eight engines.

7Search uses its own spider to supplement its paid listings. It adds some interesting information to its listings such as address, who the link serves, year the link was registered, and how many other pages link to the listings site.

In conclusion, although the pay-per-click search engines do not have nearly the traffic that an AltaVista or a Lycos has, they are a quick means of promoting your site for the price you want to pay. Compound this with the ability to quickly and efficiently fine tune your listings and you have a powerful and efficient eMarketing tool.

For more information check out the following:

Paid Search Results Are Here to Stay

Pay for Placement?

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That 40.5% of searches are performed using more than one search term. Only 30.5% of searches are performed using a single term.

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eMage Site of the Month

SearchEngineWatch          

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GoTo provides an efficient means of determining the relative popularity of a search term. They actually list the traffic a term or phrase received on GoTo for the previous month. This is a great resource for creating metatags or determining which words and phrases you should be emphasizing in your site's content.

Although GoTo does not have anywhere near the traffic of any of the top eight engines there is no reason to believe that the popular terms on GoTo wouldn’t be popular on the other engines. Check out the link below to give it a try. 

GoTo Search Term Suggestion List