How Can Small Business Compete in a Highly Competitive Paid Search (PPC) Market?

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You've apparently left 9 cents of client's $600 ad spend untouched. :)

What you're doing is leaving the big money terms to the folks with deep pockets who don't bother with the long tail stuff, and getting your clients better converting , better targetted traffic, more of it, and at a cheaper price. IMO it's how the small guy has to compete in competitive industries. Way to go - nice to see someone publicly taking the time to mine down that deeply for someone with smaller budgets. Money well spent on their part I expect. And doubling the CTR, well, that's just going to do wonders for their campaign as well as kill off any competitors.

Thankfully, the big players don't normally mine down this far, leaving plenty of opportunity for everyone else.

The only other thing I've noticed in similiar situations is that some folks use the big money terms for 'branding' and don't really care about click costs specifically or even conversions. They just want their name there. I prefer to focus on results instead, and smaller clients tend not to care, but it's sometimes why there are high bids on competitive terms.

There is indeed a powerful new way for the small business to compete in the online marketing world. I am talking about the only visual marketing search engine---http://clikitysplit.com.

ClikitySplit is the small businesses' dream come true. All relevant search results are displayed simultaneously on an area map. As a result, the small business has an equal chance of standing out as the big, deep-pocketed chains. As a result, for the first time in internet history, the playing field is indeed level.

Unlike the PPC business models, ClikitySplit empowers the small business with visual marketing tools, providing the means for him to market visually, limited only by his imagination and creativity.

And the small business owner can build ClikitySplit's patent-pending dynamic billboards in 15 minutes and change them in real time in seconds. All at a very affordable price.

So, yes, the small business owner's white knight just arrived!

It is always smart to test the max bid amount by dropping that amount you are willing to pay just to see where you fall. In this case, not very far at all considering the overall cost benefits. Also, in my experience, I find many ads pull better CRT's and lower costs by being right under position three and just above the last ad on the page.

Test. Test. Test.

You hit on exactly what everyone should be doing with their campaigns if they have any interest in increasing performance rather than just spending money.

I'm willing to bet if you run that one key phrase assuming most of your money through some keyword tools, you'll find similar phrases that won't be as expensive, and will give you even more clicks for the same amount of money.

Also, if the term has multiple words in the phrase, don't forget to bid on other word orders. For example, if your site is selling a "red dress", you should also bid on the term "dress red" in a phrase and exact match. This is very beneficial if any portion of your targeted audience speaks English as a second language, since most romance languages (including Spanish), say the adjective AFTER the subject instead of before.

I'll be having this and similar topics on my new blog starting after the holidays at http://www.SERPzone.com.

What about conversions? Visits could be anything :-)

>> What about conversions? Visits could be anything.

In the case of this client, they are primarily interested in increasing their visitor count as they sell advertising based on that. They are not necessarily selling a product so it is more difficult to define a conversion.

I'm slightly concerned that you're lauding the 'long-tail' keyword approach whilst only having 60 keywords. In every campaign I have ever run we measure keywords in hundreds or thousandd not tens. Perhaps a bit more keyword research may be of more use.

Also, its a 'click through rate' not 'ratio'

What about all those companies that don't have even a $600.00 a month budget? This is a very large group. How would you suggest we help this group? I would suggest a well developed site that is optimized, and updated daily!

Interesting article David, this is exactly what we have done for a client recently and our results were just as astounding as yours. I would recommend to anyone running an Adwords campaign to look at their max CPC and look to tweak this. The savings are incredible for very little difference in placement. Furthermore, Google have given you a helping hand with their 'Quality scoring' context menu which gives you the quality score on keywords. A keyword with a high quality score could keep its placing even by reducing the max CPC considerably.

David:

This definitely works. Good article exposing this.

My industry, Real Estate in the Atlanta Metro, is unbelievably competitive on the net. The good part is the web traffic available is also unbelievably high.

However, the big traffic terms like "Atlanta Real Estate" and similar are big bucks per click.

So, I decided to forget those terms and instead focus on hundreds of more targeted terms with less traffic.

I designed 50 individual neighborhood "portal" pages on my site and set up 50 matching Adword campaigns. Each lands on it's respective page. Each Google ad is specific to each neighborhood.

So, by the time someone has searched, seen the ad and landed on the portal page, they are pretty "qualified" at least as far as being interested in that particular neighborhood.

I'm doing excellent numbers at about .25-.50 cents per click through. My CTR is near 2% and my conversion rate (defined as obtaining a registered lead) is all over the map, literally from 0% to 25% on any given day.

But regardless, the divide and conquer using keywords under the radar is an excellent suggestion and it works.

Rob M

You major mistake was intially bidding $10/click. Especially when your client is focused on visitors and not conversions.

Setting up a campaign with a goal of attracting max visitors with 60 keywords, a $25/budget and $10 bids is just horrible PPC management.