The History of PPC, Part III: The First PPC Search Engine

In my next entry on the history of PPC, I want to explore the advent of the modern day par per click industry, and the first appearance of a pay per click search engine. PPC advertising grew in conjunction with the growth of technology and because of the need for a more cost effective alternative to banners or classified ads. The nature of the environment in the early 1990s is explained on the SEO site BlueSapphireCreations.com. ”The basic tenets of PPC advertising made it a hit among the advertisers, because it gave them some control over which people saw their adverts and how they created them in the first place. This made many other forms of online advertising pale in comparison, such as banners and classified ads.”

Banner ads do get your message out there, but it may not be reaching your target audience. Pay per click gave your advertising accountability. “While with the regular forms of online advertising like the banners and classified ads it was possible to spend money on these types of advert and not see a single response in exchange, Cost per click advertising was different. Your ad could be seen thousands of times by plenty of different people, but unless someone actually clicked on your advert you wouldn’t pay a cent for the privilege.”

It is widely accepted by several experts that PPC started with the advent of the search engines in the early 1990s. As the amount of websites grew, it became necessary to categorize these sites so they could be located more easily. One of those first entities was  “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” which later became Yahoo! (This was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierachical Officious Oracle,” according to PPCBlog.com. ). Others included LookSmart, InkTomi, and GoTo.

GoTo, created by Bill Gross, is given the credit for creating the first PPC model. On his profile on TED.com, Bill “helped create GoTo.com, the first sponsored search company. He also created the Snap! search engine, which allows users to preview hyperlinks.” His GoTo CEO, Jeff Brewer, first introduced the PPC model at a TED conference in California in 1998. In an article from June 1999 by Larry Dignan, on C-Net.com, Brewer comments on the introduction of his business to the market. “Our model is catching on with small- and medium-sized businesses that can't afford to pay expensive CPMs," said Brewer. "We see ourselves as a direct marketing vehicle, not a destination." The article goes on to explain how GoTo is such an innovation. “Goto.com…operates like a typical search engine, but advertisers with the highest bid get the top results. For example, a search on "investing" brings back SS Investor as the top result. That advertiser pays Goto.com 50 cents for a click. The cost to the advertiser is clearly marked.”

The company changed its name to Overture in 2001. According to Wikipedia, in the same year, Yahoo began syndicating Overture’s advertisers. In 2003, Overture acquired AltaVista and AllTheWeb, competitor websites, in order to compete with Google. In July of that year, Yahoo acquired Overture for $1.63 billion.

This first appearance of the model on the market helped spark the creation of today’s version of Google AdWords and AdSense, as well as Microsoft’s AdCenter, and Yahoo’s Bing. According to PPCblog.com, this has become a $20 billion industry. This was built in less than 20 years.

In my next entry, I’ll be exploring the large search engines, and their origins, as well as how they have changed the landscape of PPC.

The History of PPC, Part II

Do you remember how I said (in my last post) that it is important to go back to the beginning in order to learn about something? Well, in order to learn about the history of pay per click advertising, I had to go back several decades, to some of the earliest forms of advertising, to understand our modern day tactics.

On Gooruze.com, a site “powered by online marketers,” for marketing news and industry insight, that was founded in 2007. Malcolm Auld, in his article “The 60 Year History of PPC Advertising,” attributes the creation of our current PPC advertising delivery system to the direct mailing tactics, and newspaper ads of the early to mid- 20^th century. “The first PPC advertising was done about 60 years ago by direct marketers in the print media - newspapers and magazines,” Auld writes. “Direct marketers (usually those spending theirs not their shareholder’s money) negotiated deals with publishers whereby the publisher earned a commission on every coupon the marketer received from an advertisement in the publisher’s newspaper or magazine. The advertisements were direct response advertisements and the media buying process was known as Pay Per Coupon (PPC) or Pay Per Inquiry. The benefit to the marketer was that they didn’t pay for media if it didn’t generate any responses – they only paid for those people who responded to their ad (just like those who click-through a link today).”

This is pay per click without an internet. Advertisers were placing their ads and coupons where their audience would be: in the home, in the store, and in the streets. The costs were kept low by charging for ads that reached their intended target. Businesses that needed to create businesses partnered with media outlets with a far reaching delivery system to get out their message.  

With the expansion of technology, came the ability to deliver your message in a variety of ways. “Then there was a big technology leap, driven by emerging technology that grew the PPC market. This time it was the use of the first generation of online media – that amazing technology that utilized voice data over a landline, commonly known as the telephone,” Auld writes. “Marketers ran advertisements in the press and on broadcast media, mostly television, inviting people to reply by telephone if they didn’t want to respond by mail. The remuneration for this format was similar to the Pay Per Coupon model, but this time it was Pay Per Call.” As your audience changes and becomes more sophisticated, your delivery has to change with them. Often as a marketer, you have to take advantage of the moment in order to capture your audience’s imagination.

As much as things change, they stay the same. Your message must be delivered, it must be seen, and it must provoke some kind of action. The way your message is delivered has changed, but the basic principles have hardly changed at all. Pay per click is just another way to sell your wares. My next entry will explore PPC through the last 20 years.

The Bounce Rate Blues

Anyone can take the time to create an advertisement that will get people’s attention long enough to entice them to click on it. What happens after the ad is clicked is what usually determines whether or not those marketing efforts will pay off. At this point visitors will decide within seconds if they will find what they are looking for on this site or if they would rather continue their search elsewhere. If the visitor exits the site, this creates what’s referred to as a bounce rate. Just for the record, it is important to know that every website will experience some degree of site abandonment simply because every visit won’t result in a lead or a sale. As you might expect it’s best to try keeping this figure to a minimum.

The first order of business is to implement a way to actually determine what the bounce rate is for your site. This can be done by using any analytics program which has the ability to track this statistic. Once this tracking feature is in place, you will then be able to determine how much time each of your visitors are spending on your site as well as what pages they are viewing and at what point they are exiting your site. Armed with this information you can now go about the business of determining why your high bounce rate is high and what steps are necessary to address the problem.

So what causes a site to experience a high bounce rate? As we go over a few of the leading causes for this problem please keep in mind that this list could not possibly cover every reason for this occurrence as each advertising methods and marketing strategies vary and would each require their own individual investigation. This is merely a starting point of reference. With that being said, the first potential cause of website abandonment is often poor keyword targeting. Many pay-per-click advertisers will often utilize keywords that are very broad or general for the purpose of driving a larger amount of traffic to their site in hopes of obtaining conversions. The problem with this is that broad or general keywords will usually result in exactly that type of traffic… broad & general with no specific goal or target. Visitors that stumble upon a website after searching such keywords are either not in search or anything in particular or seeking something that has nothing to do with the site they land on, hence they abandon it. The simple solution here is using highly targeted keywords which will bring traffic best suited for the content on the website. Next, we have the curse of the misleading ad copy. If there is one thing a web surfer despises its reading an ad title and description then deciding to visit the site based on that information only to find that this site doesn’t offer what was promised. Even if a site does in fact have the product or service as mentioned in the ad if it’s too hard to find then the site is sure to encounter bounce rate issues. In short, if you don’t have it then don’t mention it and if you do have it, make it super easy for your visitors to find it. Of course we can’t neglect to mention the actual look of the site. You may view your precious website through rose-colored glasses while the outside world finds it to be a complete turn-off. Websites containing very little content, an excessive amount of links, broken links, various font sizes and offensive background colors are all but guaranteed to suffer site abandonment. Web surfers want to feel like the site will be around for awhile and a professional appearance helps them feel more secure in that aspect.

While a high bounce rate can put a website out of business fairly quickly it can also be remedied just as fast. A little extra time invested in the areas the have the most impact can not only prevent an online business from going belly up but it can also have an extremely positive effect on the bottom line.

The History of PPC: Part I

I have learned that if you really want to learn about something, you have to start at the beginning. How did this get started? How has it changed? Where did it come from? I am posing these questions to pay per click advertising. In the first part of a series, I am going to explore where PPC came from.

The roots of PPC can be directly connected to the invention of the search engine. According to SearchEngineHistory.com, the first incarnation of the search engine was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Meant to act as an archive for computer files, it was nicknamed “Archie.” Born in 1964, and a native of Barbados, Emtage was an honors computer science major who later earned a Master’s in Computer Science in 1987. While working as a systems administrator for the School of Computer Science, Emtage conceived and created Archie as a tool for indexing FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, which allows a user to transfer files between 2 computers. Archie became the father of search engines Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Google, all of which were innovators in paid search.

This invention came before the creation of the World Wide Web, where data was more than binary code and pure data. Individual websites did not yet exist. The next step in evolution, websites to share information with users, came from Tim Burners-Lee in 1990. Since the only way for FTP servers could communicate with other FTPs, a limited number of users could access information.

According to his site (the first website ever created!), Mr. Lee “wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information (HTTP).” A physicist for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Berners-Lee created this in order to “help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links.” This went live in May, 1990. He also created the first web browser and web server. The site had an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how to set up a browser.

This created a firestorm of activity, as the amount of servers for the distribution of data went from 26 in 1992, to over 200 in 1993. ”In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes,” according to Berners-Lee. This brought the internet into people’s homes. As of November 2011, there are 525 million sites in the world.

The need for organization soon became clear. With the explosion of sites, the need to index sites in order for a user to more easily locate their needs grew along with it. From Wikipedia:  “Search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders.”

Now, we use search engines for our pay per click needs, as well as for the more organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. In the second part of my series, I’ll be talking about the birth of PPC, and how it has changed over time.

What Are The Critics Saying?

I examined my posts lately, and realized that the majority of them have been about improvement of the 7Search experience. I thought, “Well, what about users or fans who are satisfied with their investment?” I decided to do some research to find out what kind of good publicity we have out there. I found some interesting material.

The first positive report comes from IMreportcard.com, a website with a mission to “catalog, review and discuss every single popular Internet marketing related product, service, person or "guru", and biz-opp.” This site works a lot like Yelp.com, but in regards to marketing. Users chime in on their experiences, and build up points toward their membership. Added on 2/11/2010, 7Search was given a cumulative grade of A-. The page devoted to 7Search gives a description of our service, and how we operate.

Their overall assessment is as follows:” Feedback on the 7Search search engine and affiliate advertising network seems to be mostly positive. Reports from advertisers who have used the service are that their ads are getting seen by a large, targeted audience, and returns on investments are usually impressive. Participating website publishers report decent earnings, and reliable payouts. Overall consensus is that this service may be worth trying out.” That’s great!

Another good review comes from PayPerClickUniverse.com. This site is free to use and brings “unbiased” information to business owners interested in pay per click. “Our aim is to show you how best to invest in this rapidly growing, extremely effective, yet highly competitive market easily and with a very low initial investment,” according to the site.

The 7Search page here gives a brief explanation of our service, and then goes a step further. It explains how to go about creating an account, and the steps to making a live campaign. “7Search has made it easy for anyone to manage a 7Search PPC account successfully,” according to the site. “Besides ever ready customer support, there are various tools provided that will assist one in managing his or her account. 7Search has also provided tutorial videos on its YouTube channel.”

The article explains the use of some of our features. Tools like our bidding notification tool, our keyword generator, and our daily spending caps are covered. They reiterate the importance of optimizing your campaign through the use of all of our tools. ” A 7Search pay per click advertising campaign will enable one to get maximum ROI. Setting up an account on this site allows one to create targeted advertisements at minimal cost,” according to the piece. “Learning to manage the account is not difficult, the tools mentioned above are simple to manage and in fact do the hard work for the advertiser.” I thought this was really helpful, because it lays out the benefits of our service, and some of our best practices. I also agree with the assessment that our platform is easy to use. This was built specifically for novice users, so it’s nice to be reaffirmed in this way.

Now, I do want a balanced conversation. I found an entry from Read2Learn, a blog “aimed to those who want to achieve internet success. We discuss and share current proven tips about internet marketing, search engine optimization, and other small business success systems that anyone can easily follow.” Run by Kent Maursemo and Anastasiya Petrova, they conducted a test campaign on 7Search. According to them, there are many positive aspects to 7Search. “The customer service is amazing! There is always someone there to help you and answer your questions…. The platform is very easy to use… You do not have to wait for your ad to get approved; it’s approved automatically.”

Kent, however, was not pleased with our level of traffic. ” The first thing I noticed about 7Search is that the traffic is slow. I thought this was because I wasn’t ranked #1 with 7Search for certain keywords. I decided to outbid my competition on every major keyword as an experiment. I increased my bids from $0.05 to as much as $2.00 per click! The traffic still did not increase that much because there were obviously other advertisers ranked higher than me.” That is a correct assessment. If the top bid is $0.05, raising your bid to $2 will not raise your level of traffic. If you are interested in that, you might consider going back to our keyword suggestion tool.

“If you don’t mind slow traffic, then 7Search is perfect,” Kent concludes. I would say that this is because we cover the 20% of the market that the larger search engines do not, so we may not have those same traffic levels. What we can offer is a simple to use platform and affordable rates. Notice how Kent felt he had to raise the bid to $2? Well, you will rarely see a keyword that asks you to bid at least that amount, which means a higher ROI for you.

We have some fans! It’s great to hear that there are users who are happy with our service. It’s also good to gain other perspectives in order to learn and get better. I’m also interested in what you have to say1 Hit me up on Twitter (@JohnnyMoPPC) or on Facebook to express your opinions!

A New Year Means Improvement on My Part, Too.

So this week, I was updating my New Advertiser Training accounts, which are advertisers that I contact to offer assistance through the first two weeks of their campaigns. After that period, I hand these off to members of our staff so our advertisers can continue to check with us with their needs, or refer to us for information. I went through my list, and came across advertisers that I had sent suggestions to.  I went into their campaigns to see if they had added any of my suggestions. Some had, and some had not.

I found this interesting and frustrating. Did I write this in a way that was too confusing? Did I not provide enough instruction or details about our tools? Or were these not the suggestions these advertisers were looking for?

My goal is to be as helpful as I can in order to get you closer to profitability. This free campaign assistance service is one of the ways I try to do that. As I thought more on the subject, I considered how I construct my campaign assistance. I have a section for notes on the choices they have made in their campaigns and how to improve upon them. I have a section to place alternative keywords. I even have a section for negative keywords to help streamline the keywords already in their campaign. I believe in providing more information instead of less, but in retrospect, it may not be the amount of information, but the way it is phrased.

My use of language may be too technical, and confusing to our users. A lot of our advertisers are not familiar with our platform. They may not be aware of how to access or use the different features in our system. I may provide suggestions to use features like keyword match, campaign scheduling or our reporting features, and they may not know what these are, or where they are located. They may not know what their significance is, or how it can help their campaigns. Using these tools can be the difference between losing and gaining money, so I should phrase this material in a way that is applicable as quickly as possible.

I will be adding a section to my assistance template that will be for specific instructions. I have created templates that show the step by step process of using several of our tools. You can then reference this as you are making changes. There will also be a section with links to my other blog posts that can be most helpful for your specific problems. You can then open a new tab in your browser and follow along as you make changes.

I also considered that I can follow up with the advertiser to determine if the assistance was helpful. I will email this assistance out to the advertiser, and then after a week or so, I could call them directly to check in on their progress. I could then also resolve any issues they may be having. Over the phone, I can direct them through their account to the places where they can locate our tools. I can also gauge what their experience is like thus far, so I can improve the experience of others in the future.

As an advertiser, please consider at least implementing the suggestions provided. These are tips that have come from working with hundreds of different advertisers and their unique problems. If you simply disregard these ideas, you may continue to have difficulty. You could create an entirely different campaign as a test, using the suggestions provided, and then using a small part of your budget to determine if there are any significant improvements. It doesn’t hurt to try.

Overall, I want to be as helpful as I can. My job is to help you to grow, as 7Search grows. I can help us grow if I am not communicating well, so I resolve to improve my feedback this year. Feel free to share your thoughts on this below, as well.

Continuing Education: New Sites For PPC Insight

The new year is upon us, and it is a great time to start new positive habits. I have a goal to learn more about this industry and the other search engines on the market. I think I can help you out more effectively if I am better educated on the different options and tactics being used. One of the ways I’m going to do that is by reading industry news through some quality blogs I have found. For our advertisers, I would encourage you to do the same. Here are some nice resources that can help you.

http://www.semgeek.com

Cool site that encompasses PPC with industry news and current events, tying together concepts to help you gain a unique perspective on the strength of marketing. Run by Greg Meyers, a search marketing expert working in the industry since 1998, the site offers insight on PPC, as well as reviews of the latest tools on Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, and other marketing tools. Articles regarding Google’s Call Metrics, a call forwarding tool that combines your Google ad with a toll free number to your business, how to leverage Facebook ads for your Google display campaign, and others.

I thoroughly enjoyed Greg’s blog,”Is PPC Becoming the Cheap Beer of the Internet Marketing Industry?” Greg challenges the advertiser to get to work, and not rest on their laurels. “When an advertiser starts spending money in Google, there must be a plan of action, other than just clicks. Their also must be a specific audience and message already in place. The “Use PPC for Clicks” era has ended a long time ago, and as advertisers start seeing their Ad budgets go through the roof, they’re gonna need more guidance and results. If they don’t, they will STOP and say GOOGLE sucks and is broken. A good PPC Marketer will never have that scenario happen to them, unless they have a strategy, well-defined goals and web analytics to back them up.”

Overall, this site is geared toward a more experienced advertiser, but this kind of insight is going to help anyone in the long run. I appreciated Greg’s effort to incorporate real world issues into his content, because political and social events affect marketing. It isn’t often addressed on these sites, but is a factor an advertiser should not ignore.

http://blog.ppcproz.com/

Site loaded with material to help any PPC advertiser. Broken down into sub categories, this supplies you with tutorials on creating campaign goals, choosing landing pages, setting up conversion tracking, and more. The site does a great job of breaking down how to use tools to help develop your traffic, track your efforts, and use the data to continue to build.

The PPC section of this site starts out with a good explanation of PPC. Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. This helps an advertiser because it reiterates the basics of how to effectively use PPC. “You get to target the exact location of the audience you are interested in at any time you want them to find you. The key to good marketing is reaching the audience that is interested in a product or service exactly when they're thinking about it. There is no better way to do this than through PPC Marketing - where you reach people searching for what you have to offer, exactly when they're searching for it. With PPC marketing, you're only showing ads to those who self-selected themselves as being interested in you by searching the keywords you chose. Meaning you're not wasting time and money appealing to lots of people, where only a few are really interested in what you have to offer.”

From writing ads for A/B testing, to using Google Analytics in order to track reporting, this site has a little bit of everything.

http://ppcwithoutpity.com

This blog, run by Shawn Livengood, does a good job of reviewing different tools on the market, so you can more easily decide if they can help you in your campaigns.

“Billions of dollars have been wasted on print, TV, and radio ads over the last century. The difference was, you could never track accurate results on that kind of advertising. In PPC, every penny is held accountable, so you can see exactly how much you are wasting. This sucks in the short term, but having that data to look back on will allow you to filter out that kind of traffic going forward.”

Shawn does a great job of being honest regarding the challenges of a PPC campaign. For example, in his entry on new campaigns, “Seeing Results from New PPC Campaigns,” he breaks down a common choice that new advertisers make in their campaigns. “Many advertisers freak out and start pausing their accounts at random times during the day or week to prevent wasting too much money. I understand the reasoning, but not many new advertisers understand how they are thwarting their account. There are a lot of complex calculations that Google does behind the scenes for positioning your ads and determining your impression share. Constantly pausing and unpausing your account messes with these algorithms, and may greatly affect how your ads are served.”

His blog has categories for several tools. Subjects include analytics, text ads, keyword bids, and other useful features. Written in an easily understandable manner, Shawn explains the benefits and detriments of the tools and tactics in PPC. A new advertiser can learn a lot from this blog.

Take some time in the next year to learn more from resources like these. You can grow your repertoire and grow your business. Knowledge goes a long way. I’m challenging myself. Will you?

2011- Paid Search Year in Review, The Good, The Bad and Everything in Between

Before the famous Mr. Clark starts the new years countdown and we all stand around with our eyes to the sky waiting for the sparkling ball to drop we thought this would be a great time to recap a few of the most memorable events that occurred in the search industry over the last year. As with everything, the Search Marketing industry saw its share of good and bad but overall I think we still came out on top. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at which events left us better and which left us bitter. Please note: the following events are in no particular order.

Google Panda Update

Of course I felt it best to start with the event that temporarily turned the search engine world upside down. I am referring to none other than the Google Panda Update. Google released a major algorithm update intended to improve the quality of their search results which also sent many high ranking websites plummeting in traffic volume and in rank. The fall out from this update continues to have a negative impact on many site owners today.

Microsoft Teams up with Yahoo

Two of the leading search engines decided to join forces in 2011. In an effort to deliver faster, more accurate search results, this was also their attempt at creating a much stronger alliance in hopes of giving Google a better run for its money as it relates to market share.

Hello Siri

Why put in all that manual work by typing in your searches when you can have Siri do It for you. Technology giant, Apple, introduced the world to a very insightful software application which has the ability to listen, understand and respond to voice command in an extremely human-like manner. Siri gives it’s users an easy-to-use method of searching the web, finding and getting things done completely hands-free and on-the-go. The only thing this service seems to be missing is a pulse.

Google+

Since they seem to have their hands in almost every other money-making arena including the cell phone market, I guess it only makes since that Google would try their hand at creating a social networking platform. Upon their release of Google+, Google saw a staggering number of users, celebrities included, signing up for the new online meeting place only to also see an equally rapid decline in sign-ups as well. Google+ continues to push the service along in hopes of possibly outshining Facebook one day.

Branding is Everything

Paid search advertisers scored a huge victory in 2011. The California Federal Appeals court ruled that advertisers are now allowed to bid on trademarked brand names as a part of their PPC marketing strategy. If you have ever done PPC marketing then you already know how much of a positive effect this could potentially have on ones ad campaign. In a time where products and services are only considered as good as the brand names they carry, this has certainly given search engine marketers a major boost towards increasing their advertising success.

7Search thanks each and every one of its members for being a part of our family during the eventful year of 2011. We continue to look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with each of its members in the years to come. Let the countdown begin in 5, 4, 3, 2,,,,, we will see you next year!