February 2006

When pay-per-click search engines (such as Overture, ah-ha.com, and FindWhat.com) were relatively new, I went to work for one of them. I had just come off working for eBay, and working for another "dot com" in a relatively new industry intrigued me.

I had an advantage over others vying for the job, as I was a home business owner and actually used the services of the company I was applying to work at.

But I also had another agenda. As a home business owner, I desired to learn more about the PPC market, and when I got the job I learned more than I realized there was to learn!

For those of you unfamiliar with pay-per-click search engines, here is a basic run down of how they work: Advertisers bid on keywords in an auction-style format. The highest bidders get their listings placed in the most optimal positions in the search engine results. Advertisers pay the amount of their bid everytime their ad is clicked on by a searcher.

The theory is that advertisers will only pay for the most highly qualified traffic: searchers that are looking specifically for what the advertiser is selling. But as you may have already figured out, there is a lot of potential for fraud.

Alot of the ads you pay for show up on third-party sites, where the owners of those sites get paid when their visitors click on the ads. Fraud occurs when site owners click on the ads with no intention of making a purchase, or convince others to click those ads when they normally wouldn't. These types of visits to your site are referred to as fraudulent clicks.

It's impossible to stop all fraudulent clicks, but there are ways to significantly reduce them. Reducing fraudulent clicks is the responsibility of the PPC provider. But it has been revealed that some PPC providers ignore the problem, citing that they would lose business if they were to reduce fraudulent clicks.

This is backwards thinking obviously. Companies that spend millions of dollars (literally) each year on PPC marketing don't spend a single penny with companies with an excess of fraudulent clicks. Loss of the big spenders has put some PPC providers out of business.

But how can you know if the clicks you're getting are fraudulent or not? There's no way to tell for sure; however, performance comparisons between PPC providers are a good indicator (ie: if one keyword with one provider is garnering you a high conversion rate, whereas the same keyword with another provider has a nearly 0% conversion, it's a pretty good clue that the latter is sending you a lot of fraudulent clicks).

But receiving legitimate clicks is no guarantee of conversions. This is why it's important to track the visitors you receive to find out what your conversion level is. Keep in mind that a conversion is a visitor to your site that takes a desired action. For online retailers, that action is most often a purchase.

It may sound like you need a lot of expensive software to track this type of information for you. But the truth is, most PPC providers offer conversion tracking as a free service!

The concept is very simple. Your PPC provider provides you with a snippet of code that you place on a page on your website. The page you place this code on should be a page that a visitor to your site is sent to after taking the desired action (ie: if the desired action is a purchase, then place the code on the purchase-confirmation page).

When a surfer clicks on your ad, the PPC provider places a cookie on the surfer's machine. The snippet of code is designed to read this cookie where it finds out which ad was clicked on and which keyword the visitor searched for to produce your ad. It then reports back to your PPC provider this information, where you can easily view it.

Viewing this information will tell you which keywords are performing the best, and which keywords aren't performing at all. Use this information to maximize your marketing dollars by moving more money into advertising the ads and keywords that provide you with the highest conversion rates, and stop spending money on ads and keywords that aren't providing you with any return on your investment.

To check out the top three PPC providers in business today, check out the marketing section of the member's Resource Center on the Wholesale Marketer website. Not a member? Start your free trial today!

On January 18 the President of eBay International, Bill Cobb, made a couple of significant announcements. First was a change to eBay's fee structure. The other was regarding a new service called eBay Express.

The changes to eBay's fees structure are relatively minor and affect mostly those selling high-dollar items. Some of the fees for listing upgrades changed as well. Some of the listing upgrades are now free, others are lowered, and they will start packaging some listing upgrades with significant discounts included as part of the package.

The new fees structure will be implemented on February 22, and will be reflected on the eBay fees page at that time.

The other major announcement is the creation of the new service, eBay Express. This could be viewed as a direct shot at longtime dot-com rival, Amazon.com.

eBay Express essentially allows buyers to easily browse and purchase items from multiple buyers at the same time. Buyers can add and remove items from a shopping cart just like a regular retail site, paying via PayPal when they're ready to checkout. PayPal would then distribute the funds to the appropriate sellers.

You can read Bill Cobb's official message on the eBay site.

If you ever have any comments or suggestions for future issues of Marketer Monthly, let yourself be heard! Simply reply to this email to send us a message.

Please note: We cannot respond to support requests sent to this address. If you have any questions or comments unrelated to the newsletter, please contact the Wholesale Marketer support team via our website.