system can take them all into consideration influences such as PR, sales promotion or short term change in business objectives, means that sometimes we need to apply a non logical optimisation to paid search.
NJ: Do you think that this information overload is why people are turn- ing to paid search? RW: There is this thing at the moment where everybody thinks they should be running paid search activity but are not always doing so for the right reasons. You need to be very clear on what are you actually trying to achieve, what are your goals – whether it’s a cost per acquisition, whether it’s a return on an ad spend. What are you trying to do?
It’s also important to understand how much you can afford to pay to acquire business though search. If you can afford to pay twelve pounds cost per acquisition but you are trying to get it a bit cheaper at say eleven pounds then that could make a big difference to your bid price. A few pence more on your bid price because you can afford to pay for it, moves you into maybe the top three positions.
Get into the top three positions and all of a sudden, you’re going onto Google’s search content network and you’re not just on Google itself so that can open a whole new volume for you. So some of the things you need to think about carefully.
NJ: So what would you suggest as the best way to advertise? RW: Paid search isn’t always necessarily the cheapest or most cost effective way to reach your audience or to make the sale. It’s worth taking the time to sort the different channels and to lay out a performance hierarchy; it really just sets out what the different conversion levels are, what kind of click-through rates to expect, what type of return we would then expect to see from each channel and it puts it all onto a single sheet. What we can then start to do is say paid search is effective up to maybe 30-40p cost per click and after that, we’re better taking that money and
HIT ME! HOW TO GET YOUR BUSINESS TO PUNCH ITS WEIGHT 0NLINE 15
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