I’ve been helping a client manage their PPC spend recently by training one of their team members. I don’t normally do this; it was just a favour to one of our best clients which happens to be a local company.
It took me back; I remembered the very early days when you’d pay 0.05$ per keyword word and could expect to be in the top 5 results. For most industries, those days are long gone.
When managed appropriately, PPC certainly delivers value. It’s well known that visitors are more likely to buy when visiting through an advert than from a natural search result. With a clear cost per conversion it’s easy to justify RoI, making the management of campaigns a scientific process. Yet I still see common mistakes being made, often with costly consequences.
I’ll leave the best practice advice to one of our many partners, who would be more than happy to help:
Or if you plan to do it internally, see econsultancy.com
Ultimately pay per click is paying for a visitor, so when compared to other forms of internet marketing the pay per click concept serves as a good benchmark. Think about it, if you know the cost of an email campaign and have the statistics of derived traffic you can calculate a cost per click. The same is true on other forms of Internet advertising.
When it comes to translation, we help businesses optimise around their translated keyword. It’s often the case that business is less competitive in international markets compared to domestic markets, so getting a high ranking for a keyword, and consequently a greater volume of traffic is more likely. Sometimes the visitor will have English as a second language and so traffic will ‘spill’ over onto the English website.
For example a recently launched site received 2899 visitors in its first 20 days, which over the course of 18 months is 79,360 visitors. That’s 0.0284 pence per visitor, less than 3.5 cents, but of course multilingual pages can be kept indefinitely. The longer they are kept online the less the average cost.
Although my client only has 3 static gateway pages translated, 22.4% of the traffic is spilling over to the English website. With 18 conversions so far the average cost per order is £4.01 (estimated over the same 18 month time frame).
With more translated content my client’s conversions would be considerably higher, but it makes the point that for many, translation and optimisation of a few multilingual pages is less expensive than PPC.
The site also gets a good mix of traffic to the different languages on offer: German (16.2%), Danish (15.6%), English (15.1%), Finnish (13.9%), Italian (10.4%), Danish (7.5%), Spanish (7.4%), Dutch (4%).
While the conversion may be lower than PPC advertising, we’re proud to help clients pay less than £0.03 for international visitors. When compared to the £0.60 keywords I was configuring earlier this week, it just drives it home that if you’re not looking to international markets, you’re not profiting as you should be.
29 September 2009 15:15