Advertising
Options Available To You, The Website Owner For Promoting Your Business
Website
promotions is a highly competitive field, and you need to remember that
unlike offline advertising through magazines, newspapers, etc, where your
advertisement will only be visible for the duration of the paid for listing,
with your online placement, your site will remain at the forefront on
a constant basis, no matter who, where or when someone is looking for your
business, you are there. We also invite you to evaluate how much you
pay for your offline advertising, and how long it lasts before you have to
pay again for the exposure. Here
are the current pricing structures on the major search engines for sites to
list, taken straight off of their pages:
Compare
Our Services Pay a one time fee, one time all manual submission to
search engines, other industry specific websites, specific meta tags created
for your site according to what people are actually searching for regarding
your type of business and the optimization of your website to ensure the
search engine spiders, directories and human edited sites list your site
correctly and find the right information they are looking for. You
never pay again as long as your site is up and running and do not change our
metas we design for you, or the page layout without contacting us to take a
look at it to make sure it is properly optimized and never use an automatic
submission software program. That is it, your site will remain
basically in the same first page ranks year after year after year.
Another benefit of this, you will not be on a rotation with others, you will
show up for EVERY targeted query that we targeted for you, every time, every
search engine at no additional and repetitive costs.
Services
we do NOT take part in:
PPC
or Pay Per Click This can turn into a very expensive way to
attract customers and you will be paying for it every month,
continually. When someone outbids you on the ppc, your site will show
up less and less in the rotation, and you will have to increase your bid to
keep up with them. Also you need to ask yourself when was the last
time you actually clicked on a sponsored listing? Then the next
question is, did you purchase from them? How many of the sponsored
listings did you look at before you purchased? What you are actually
doing, is paying a potential customer or anyone really, to walk into your
door, they can turn around and walk back out just as quickly, but you still
paid for it.
PPI
or Pay Per Impression This is a program in which you pay every time
your website loads up on a page, or in many cases, a pop up ad is
used. You don't even have a say in whether or not they chose to even
visit your site. Every time they hit refresh, you are charged. I
had one customer who went through $3,000.00 in 24 hours on Excite. And
the pop ups, people hate them, they download software to stop them, so why
would you pay to be part of that program?
Banner
Ads One thought, when was the last time you clicked on a banner
ad?
Email
Marketing Via Opt In or Direct: Another thought, spam
folders catch these or individuals delete them without even opening
them. Do you open these emails yourself?
Major
Search Engines Ad Programs Offered, we submit to them without your
being charged with first page results:
MSN
Advertising uses featured listings of their own program and Overture
listings for the rest of the sponsored advertiser listings
"MSN also offers
keyword-targeting search results in the "Featured Sites" section
of the search results page. These are link placements that are limited to
three paid clients per keyword and are available to advertisers with a
minimum annual spend of $75,000. Please visit the MSN
Advertising section for more information." http://advertising.msn.com/msnsites/SubmitSite.asp
Yahoo
Advertising: Uses its own services and Inktomi for sponsored listings
What
is your
advertising budget?
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To qualify for Yahoo!
Express you must meet and accept all of the conditions below. Please note:
Once you have suggested your site, either by category or by direct
submission, it is still subject to review by the Yahoo! Directory team to
determine if it meets our criteria for inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory.
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I have read and
agree to be bound by the Yahoo! Express Terms of Service.
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I have verified that
my site does not already appear in the Yahoo! Directory and I understand
that this is not the place to request a change for an existing site.
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My site supports
multiple browsers and capabilities. (For example, java only sites will
not be listed).
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My site is in the
English language, or has an English-language version available.
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I understand that
there is no guarantee my site will be added to Yahoo!
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I understand that
Yahoo! reserves the right to edit and place my site as appropriate.
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I understand that if
my site is added, it will be treated as any other site in Yahoo! and
will receive no special consideration.
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I understand that if
my site is added, every year thereafter my credit card will be charged
the recurring annual fee.
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My site must be up
and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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No parts of my site
are under construction. All links on the site work.
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DESCRIPTION OF YAHOO!
EXPRESS SERVICE
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2.1 Yahoo! Express is a
fee-based service that allows you to pay for expedited consideration of your
web site for possible inclusion in Yahoo!'s directory of web sites
(the "Directory"). Inclusion in the Directory is not guaranteed.
Subject to the terms below, and in Yahoo!'s sole discretion, if your web
site is accepted for inclusion in the Directory through Yahoo! Express on or
after December 28, 2001, then your web site's continued inclusion in the
Directory will be subject to an additional review each year and to the
applicable, then current NON-REFUNDABLE recurring annual fee
("Recurring Annual Fee"). You may choose to submit your site for
consideration through Yahoo!'s free "Suggest a Site [link]"
service. Note: due to the number of free suggestions received, Yahoo! cannot
guarantee a response within a particular time period. By submitting through
Yahoo! Express, Yahoo!'s directory team will review your site for compliance
with minimum site criteria (see section 3.0 below) and respond to your
request for inclusion in the Directory on an expedited basis. In
consideration of your payment and participation in Yahoo! Express in
accordance with this Agreement, Yahoo! agrees that its directory team will
review you site for possible inclusion in the Directory, and respond
to you within seven (7) business days from the date that you submit your
site for consideration (excluding holiday periods observed by Yahoo! and any
delays due to problems processing your request). Response times are measured
on Yahoo!'s mail servers.
2.2 In order for Yahoo! to
consider your site for inclusion in the Directory, you must submit a valid
credit card number as part of the registration form. You agree that your
credit card will be charged the then current, applicable NON-REFUNDABLE
fee for expedited review and response. If your site is included, you agree
that each year, your site will be subject to an additional review for
minimum site criteria and your credit card will be charged the then-current
Annual Fee. Yahoo! reserves the right to remove your site from the Directory
for any reason, in our sole discretion, including but not limited to failure
to meet the minimum criteria in section 3.0 below.
2.3 If your site offers services
on a subscription basis, you must provide Yahoo! a trial password or
subscription ID as part of the registration form. The password/subscription
ID will be used by Yahoo! solely as part of its evaluation of whether your
site meets and maintains the minimum site criteria explained below
2.4
The current fee for Yahoo! Express for initial consideration in the
Directory is a NON-REFUNDABLE fee of US $299.00 applicable for each
web site submitted that does not include adult content and/or services. If
you are submitting a site offering adult content and/or services, the
applicable fee for initial consideration in the Directory is a
NON-REFUNDABLE FEE of US $600.00. All adult sites must be submitted to
the most appropriate category under Business and Economy/Shopping and
Services/Sex. You acknowledge that the payment of this fee is for
consideration of your site AND DOES NOT IN ANY WAY GUARANTEE THAT YOUR
SITE WILL BE INCLUDED IN THE DIRECTORY. Your payment only guarantees
that Yahoo! will consider and respond to your request within seven business
days, by either accepting or not accepting your site. You expressly agree to
pay to Yahoo! such fee whether or not your site is accepted or denied
inclusion in the Directory. If your web site is accepted for inclusion
in the commercial Directory as part of Yahoo! Express on or after December
28, 2001, then your web site's continued inclusion in the Directory will be
subject to an additional annual review for compliance with the minimum site
criteria and you agree that your credit card will be charged the
then-current Recurring Annual Fee. Subject to Section 1.3 above, the current
Recurring Annual Fee is US $299 for web sites which do not offer adult
content and/or services and is US $600 for web sites which do offer adult
content and/or services. If Yahoo! is unable to successfully charge your
card or if the charge is refused, your site will be removed. IT IS THE
APPLICANT'S RESPONSBILITY TO KEEP CREDIT CARD INFORMATION CURRENT.
2.5
NOTHING IN THIS AGREEMENT OBLIGATES YAHOO! TO LIST, LINK TO, ACCEPT OR
OTHERWISE HOST YOUR SITE ANYWHERE ON YAHOO! OR IN THE DIRECTORY. IN
ADDITION, IF YOUR SITE IS ACCEPTED, NOTHING IN THIS AGREEMENT OBLIGATES
YAHOO! TO PLACE YOUR SITE WITHIN A SPECIFIC CATEGORY OR SUBCATEGORY OF THE
DIRECTORY, OR TO PROVIDE ANY COMMENTS OR ANNOTATIONS WITH THE LISTING OF
YOUR SITE.
Overture is a pay per
click based on different categories, $50 to review the site and then a PPC
(pay per click)
Google
Pricing and Billing
Keeping your advertising expenses at a
minimum and managing your payments isn't always easy, but Google AdWords
is dedicated to helping you stay in control with:
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Only a US$5 activation fee
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No minimum spending or time commitment
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Daily budget and maximum
cost-per-click (CPC) that you set (5 cents USD to US$50), so you'll
never spend more than you want
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Targeted advertising to reduce
unwanted clicks
Full service for large
advertisers
If you are an advertiser or agency looking
to spend $10,000 per month or more on Google AdWords, you may qualify for
full service.
Google Rules taken from here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or
PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as
WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
Excerpt From WebPro News
Newsletter, 3/10/04, and shows the reality of paid listings vs.
free
| Which
results do you click on more when searching Google, Ad or
Non-Ad? |
| Ads |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| Non-Ad results |
|
43% |
[ 20 ] |
| Most Relevant |
|
36% |
[ 17 ] |
| Ads only if I can't find what I
want in the Non-Ad results |
|
19% |
[ 9 ] |
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| Total
of 46 people took this survey |
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Here are certain quotes off of this
link regarding the PPC listings. http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=15231
"I've
read many times that about 5% of SE visitors actually click on
PPC ads. In all my years I can think of two companies whose
PPC I've clicked on and actually purchased from. One actually
ended up paying at least 5 times for my one $447 purchase.
Incidentally, their price was $150 off the regular price. I
wonder how much they actually made on my purchase after 5
clicks"
"100 SE visitors perform a
search and only 5 click through a PPC ad and only 2% convert,
how many visitors does it take to convert a sale? The cost of
the PPC ad is, for a simple number, $1.00. What is the cost
for the successful sale? Now, the markup on the item is $50,
what is the end result? It would take 50 visitors to
generate 1 sale and the cost of the successful sale would be
$50. The net result would be $0. To make the advertising
worthwhile visitors would need to purchase more than one item
to generate a positive income flow. This doesn't always happen
and can't be a factor that can be counted on"
"I never click on the paid
listings in Google. I'm not interested in who paid to be
there. I click on the result that appears to be most relevant
to what I was looking for"
"I *almost* never click. I
consider the poor person on the other end, paying $1-4 (gawk!)
for my click. If I think I'm going to maybe buy, I might
click, but most of the time if I think I'm just looking I
stick with the free clicks. Poor blighters..."
"I seldom click on the ads, preferring
to use the listing, and to be honest I don't know of
any regular Google users that pay much attention to the little
green boxes to the right hand side of the listings. If the
AdWords results appeared at the top of the "regular"
listing I may be more inclined to use the link. I couldn't
care less whether or not it is a "sponsored listing"
or a "paid advertorial" or whatever, so long as it
answers my question"
"It is
important to realize that although "Adwords" tend to
produce a very small average of search click through when
compared to result listings - if you could compared sales
conversions you would likely see adwords produce far more
"immediate sales" than result listings"
"I have not been in the
habit of clicking on those side ads before and I am not any
closer now to using them more than before. (which was nil)
Unless.... to get a little "payback" for the
"misleading" I am tempted to keep on clicking
until they can't afford to mislead us anymore. : ) Talk
about wasting everyone's time. But hey... it's their
"dime". To sum it up, I will stay with my search
results on the main part of the page. Seems a better bet to
me to find what I am looking for. Why try fixing something
that's not broken (yet)? "
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Just
as an example in the office supply industry, this
is the cost of $5.50 that they suggest a site pays to obtain
the highest exposure taken directly
off of the Google site adword program.
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With sites that are
already paying for advertisements in sponsored listings on the search
engines, here is a good example to refer them to, a
client paid us to do a submission, and they are still paying for sponsored
listings through Overture. Go to MSN
and type in racing scales, one of the "sponsored" listings in
Intercomp Racing, then look at the web pages which are just under the
sponsored listings, and there they are again.
The sponsored listings
can be rather expensive overall. For instance, recently one client
came to me and it was a nanny service in New York. Google ad words
wanted $2600 per month from her to target the New York Nanny market and come
up in a rotation for when someone put chosen keywords into the search
query. Another site in Florida was a mortgage company with a couple of
locations, Google wanted $100,000 up front from them. Some overture
listings pay anywhere from $.05 -$50 per click. That is based on how
popular a search term is. Every time someone types in a certain group of
chosen words and they are clicked on, they have to pay that fee. For
instance: In Google, every time mortgage loans is typed in, a site
called www.loansearch comes up and every time someone clicks on that link
they would probably be charged about $25 or more per click because this term
was searched 55757 times in December alone. Considering that they are
clicked on 1/3 of the time, that would come to 18585 times or $464,625.00
per month they had to pay! Not necessarily did everyone that went to
their site choose to do business with them either! If you change that
query to mortgage loan, by eliminating the s on the the end, the sponsored
listings are now, www.lowrateadvisors and www.lendingtree which means they
are probably paying less since it is shared by 2 listings. If you go to
Alltheweb.com or msn you will find different sponsored listings
because their sponsored listings come from Overture
Excerpts From A
SearchDay Newsletter 3/11/04
Outsourcing Search
Engine Marketing
By Jennifer
Laycock
"Search engine
marketing is crucial for the success of online businesses -- but should you
take on search marketing in-house, or outsource this challenging task to a
contractor or agency?
A panel of experts at
the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago addressed these
issues to help business owners make better decisions about their future
search engine marketing campaigns.
"In case anyone
hasn't noticed, search engine marketing has exploded over the last few
years," said Nate Elliot, online marketing and media analyst for
Jupiter Research. Elliot also pointed out that as recently as 1997, search
engine marketing was only a $50,000 industry - this in contrast to the $1.6
billion (or roughly 28 percent of all online ad spending) spent on search
advertising in 2003.
Because of this growth,
management of search engine marketing campaigns is becoming more complex. As
businesses face greater competition online, advertise across a wider range
of search engines, and purchase more keyword phrases, it has become
increasingly difficult for companies to handle campaigns internally. In
fact, a recent study by Jupiter Research showed that half of all large
marketers and over 30 percent of small marketers had trouble managing their
own search engine marketing campaigns.
Search engine marketers
are also moving beyond simple click-thru tracking and focusing on detailed
conversion data and ROI. Many large marketers (68 percent) are now tracking
the number of sales produced by an SEM campaign, while 53 percent track the
number of leads. Additionally, 32 percent of large marketers are tracking
the number of registrations from a campaign and 29 percent track associated
brand lift.
The combination of
expanding campaigns and the desire to carefully track campaign details is
causing many companies to look to third-party firms to manage their search
engine marketing. Jupiter Research reports that 48 percent of large
marketers are currently outsourcing their SEM programs. Their studies also
show that 80 percent of companies that outsourced are satisfied with the
performance of their campaign (compared to just 58 percent for those that
handle SEM in-house)."
"Companies looking
to outsource their search engine marketing campaigns also need to understand
that SEM is not cheap. Prices range from $75 to more than $200 per hour
while full site optimization can start at $5,000 for a small site. Larger
companies seeking to outsource full scale search engine marketing campaigns
for e-commerce sites can expect to pay anywhere from $20,000 on up to more
than $100,000 per year."
