Clicks and Conversions: Top Tips on Search Engine Advertising

Online advertising is taking a growing share of the global advertising industry, and it's hard to ignore when planning a marketing campaign. For instance, in 2009 it was reported that advertising spending on the internet had overtaken TV expenditure in the UK for the first time.

For many companies the first port of call, when considering internet marketing, will be search engine advertising. However, this can seem daunting and complicated at first sight, so here is a little background and a few top tips.

The main types of search engine advertising are as follows:

"Pay per click": the customer placing the advert arranges with the search engine that when a key word or phrase matching your product is used, then your promotional link should appear in the search results page. The ranking of the link in depends on a "bidding" system: the higher your company's bid for a given keyword the higher the link will appear in the ranking. Payment to the search engine takes place when your link is clicked, and the size of each "payment per click" is linked to the size of your bid for the word.

"Contextual advertising": this involves arranging for ads to be placed on certain pages which contain a keyword or phrase matching your product.

"Conversions" are the sales attributable to the clicks on your ad.

When planning your campaign, consider allocating a share of your budget to a few smaller search engines as well as the titans such as Google. One reason for this is that, with a smaller search engine, the market for your all-important keywords will be less crowded, so keywords will be considerably cheaper than with the larger search engines.

As your product should be more visible more often, and will make a bigger impact, your return on investment (ROI) could potentially be higher than with a larger search engine.

Also the figures for market share of search engines, when viewed simply as percentages can conceal a potentially lucrative audience. There were some 13.1 billion searches in the USA in 2009. The smaller search engines had around a 1% share. Yet, that 1% is the equivalent to some 131 million searches; there are quite a few customers behind 131 million searches.

Finally, bear in mind that a niche search engine might be more appropriate to your services or product range.