Are You Maximizing Your Pay-Per-Click Returns?
By Chee Wee


Pay-per-click keyword advertising has become immensely popular as it enables advertisers to have better control over their budget.

Pioneer Goto.com now serves over 2 billion search queries monthly and their premium listings appear on major search engines such as America Online, Lycos, Altavista, Netscape and Hotbot.

With the tremendous volume of keyword bidding, there exists opportunities for your business to reduce bid costs while maintaining the same ranking!

I'm about to reveal a hot pay-per-click tip that will save you thousands of dollars in monthly bid fees. What is this secret? Read carefully ...

As at press time, the top bid for the keyword "flower" on Goto.com was $1.88. The 4th bid was $1.83, while the 5th bid was just $1.21.

FTD.com secured the 4th place while FlowersAcrossAmerica.com secured the 5th bid. FTD could have reduced their bid to $1.22 and still remained in the 4th spot!

Their savings per-click would have been $0.61. Savings per thousand clicks would have been $610. "Flower" was searched more than 370,000 times the previous month. If they had a click-through of just 3.0%, they could have saved $6771.00 on the keyword "flower" alone!

When was the last time you checked your bids? You could reduce your bids while still maintaining the same ranking or get a top 3 position for maybe just 1 cent more!

It's all about bid optimization. So how often should you monitor your bids? I recommend that you check your bids for "bid gap" opportunities at least once a week.

Search the keywords which you have bid for and check for bid gaps between you and your competitors' bids. This should take you less than 30 minutes a week but the savings will be substantial.

What if you have a few hundred keywords in your bid list?

You will need a more efficient solution. A number of bid monitoring services have sprung up across the Internet. For a monthly fee based on number of keywords monitored, they will monitor your keywords for bid gaps daily and notify you when there are opportunities for savings.

If you use more than one pay-per-click engine, most of these services can monitor bid gaps across multiple engines. Your savings in time and money will be significant, especially if you have placed expensive bids.

Here is a list of online bid monitoring services available:

ClickPatrol
Engines monitored: GoTo, Sprinks, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Kanoodle

Keyword Bid Optimizer
Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Epilot

ManageBid
Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Epilot, Kanoodle, Netflip, Bay9, SearchFeed, 7Search

Position Guardian
Engines monitored: Goto

About The Author
Chee Wee is a professional Internet Marketing Consultant. Visit his website & discover the secrets to exploding your online sales and traffic! Subscribe to his FREE weekly newsletter & get HOT marketing tips delivered to your mailbox. Go to InternetMarketingFocus.com today!