Is Pay per Click Placement In Your Control? Yes, If You Follow These Strategies

Do you need your pay per click ad to be the number one position? Maybe, maybe not. Pay per click placement can have a lot to do with the success of your search engine marketing. What follows are some of the best strategies for getting the maximum results for your search engine dollars.

1. Spend more on your keywords. Look, if you've got the dough and are not worried about little things like return on ad spend, you can get the number one spot for any keyword you want. Most businesses can't afford this strategy. But if you are engaged in a serious branding campaign and want your business' name at the top, bid high.

Businesses with big budgets who are obsessed with keeping their brand at the tops of their customers' minds. McDonalds. Companies with very large marketing budgets. And businesses who bid at a primarily local level.

2. Split-test lots of different ads. The higher your ad click-through rates (the percentage of people who see your ad who click it), the higher your ads will be positioned, all else being equal. In general, your position will be determined through a combination of your keyword bids, your click-through rates, and some proprietary component that could consider just about anything you can think of.

The point is obviously that you should try to have a higher click-through rate for your ads than your competitors. How do you do this? By testing lots and lots of different ads, you can find the ones that generate the most clicks. Fortunately, the search platforms make it easy to test different ads by automatically rotating the ads that are displayed.

There is a science to split-testing. Rather than always testing random ads against one another, in the long-run you can learn a lot more by testing ads that are very similar but have some slight difference, such as different headlines or different calls to action. Testing ads that are only slightly different helps you isolate those elements that determine an ad's success.

3. Allocate more of your marketing budget to paid search. If your pay per click budget is too low, then your ads will not receive maximum exposure. Now, if you're already spending as much as you can afford, I do not suggest following this strategy until you have generated enough data to tweak your account for profitability. Paid search is an iterative process. So for most businesses, the wisest course of action is to spend moderately while it figures out what it is doing, and then increase the budget once it has its pay per click accounts tweaked for maximum profitability.

If your number one goal is to brand your company, then total budget should be set high enough to keep your ads online at all times, and as near the top of the listings as possible. If, however, you actually need to show a profit, then your budget should be set to just below the point where the account is no longer profitable. This will insure that you are "buying" as many customers as possible.

4. Avoid Google. Maybe you don't want to avoid Google altogether, but don't think that you don't have alternatives. You do! You can use Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, or any of a number of second tier pay per click platforms that may have high quality traffic available for a fraction of the cost. Certainly, Google has the most traffic, and the traffic tends to be high quality. But if you're going broke trying to use Google, you owe it to yourself (and to your business) to look elsewhere.

Second tier platforms can save you a lot of money, but they can also cost you a lot of money if you don't watch things closely. So go conservatively until you figure out where you should spend your money. Here is a short list of options to consider when starting out: Enhance, SearchFeed, Marchex, Turn, and Miva.

Follow the above strategies and you should be able to position your ads where you want them. To learn more about managing your pay per click account like a professional, check out Scientific Search Engine Marketing: Strategies for Maximizing Your Pay per Click Return on Investment, currently for sale on Amazon.com, written by Nashville search engine marketing firm Work Media, LLC.