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Diversify Your Campaign and Explore New Search TerritoryPosted by Joe on September 14, 2007 in PPC Management Tips |
Giving your AdWords or Yahoo account a jolt is a good start to revitalizing your PPC campaign, but that doesn’t have to be your only strategy. I know it’s difficult to get out from under the shadow of AdWords but there are other search engines that can generate supplemental traffic and conversions. Diversifying your PPC ad distribution can have very beneficial effects on your overall search marketing campaign.
Let’s face it: AdWords is always going to be the main driver of your PPC campaign, with Yahoo following a close or distant second. MSN Adcenter will usually be awarded the bronze medal. But where do you go from here? Most second tier or alternative search engines that you can expand into will drive a low amount of traffic, a fraction of the big 3, but there is room to grow into an Ask.com, or a Business.com, or 7Search, or LookSmart, or Miva campaign.
One of the main reasons to diversify your search marketing efforts is so that you’re not so dependent on AdWords or Yahoo. Your main traffic source can take a nose dive for a variety of reasons: an update in the quality score; new competition in your niche space; a campaign restructure that isn’t performing well; quality sites dropping out of, or poor quality sites entering into, the content network. If you have additional campaigns set up in a handful of alternative search engines you can mitigate any performance irregularities that may happen in AdWords, Yahoo or MSN.
Another reason to branch out and explore new search marketing territory is that each search engine has a different audience. Not everyone uses Google or Yahoo for their searching needs and you need to get your company in front of that additional audience. There are dozens of search engines that cater to small, niche audiences; you just need to do some research to discover which ones may work well for you.
As I stated before, this is a supplement method for your search marketing campaign. Most of the search engines I’ve mentioned will generate a fraction of the traffic you’ll see from AdWords. But if you open 2-5 additional campaigns within these alternative search engines their accumulative effect could be just the boost you’re looking for!
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September 14th, 2007 at 6:31 am
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September 14th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Joe, I have mixed feeling on this. On one hand I want people to go beyond the big 3 for traffic because I run a vertical ad network. On the other hand, it can be very dangerous to advertise on some of the 2nd tier networks. Some you mentioned have serious problems with click fraud that tends to vary over time — your campaign is doing great for 2 months then in the toilet.
We always tell clients it’s about return on effort. If you have the bandwidth to closely monitor the 2nd tier engines, great, but otherwise spend more effort on keywords lower down the list on G/Y/M.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Jon:
You are correct. I agree that focusing on GAW or YSM should be your first priority. The idea is to explore new territory with your PPC campaign once you’re ready to take that plunge. But I also agree that you have to monitor the campaign closely. This post was written from experience. I do have clients that are running successful campaigns within these alternative search engines, albeit they are low traffic. Thanks!
October 12th, 2007 at 6:07 am
[...] Recently, I wrote about diversifying your search marketing campaign and exploring new territory. Initiating search marketing campaigns in a handful of alternative search engines can be beneficial for numerous reasons (see list of said reasons in previous post!). However, in order for this strategy to benefit your overall campaign, you need to get these alternative search engines to perform well. This is a challenge I’ve recently encountered with AdBrite and I thought I’d get your feedback. [...]