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Keyword Marketing

Search Engine Marketing
If you have never heard of Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click before, make sure you read this article because today you will learn the best ways to generate commission in this space.

If you are already familiar with PPC we have included some good tips on maximising the potential of your campaigns whilst reducing your costs.

Pay-Per-Click [PPC] advertising on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN provide an instant source of high quality traffic to your sites, or, directly to an advertiser via your TradeDoubler tracking. I am sure you have seen the "sponsored adverts" on Google, and depending on the type of search you made, find your cursor drawn to clicking through. Sometimes the adverts are a god send, they reflect exactly what you were looking for, entice you in with a strong call-to-action and delivers you straight to the product/page and the experience is concluded with a swift transaction.

There are no other costs, you pay purely for performance - if your advert does not get any clicks then you do not pay any costs.

As an example an affiliates advert costs the owner £0.10 for each click on his advert, but one click subsequently led to a £300.00 sale - even at 5% commission the affiliate just makes £15.00 for a £0.10 click - securing £14.90 profit.

I would never suggest that EVERY click you send on a PPC basis will generate commission, but if you do your research on an advertiser:

  • Do they offer competitive prices?
  • Is the site easy to use?
  • How easy is it to buy?
  • Is it a strong brand?
  • Do they offer free delivery?

Are all items you should look at closely before selecting an advertiser to create a PPC campaign around. Naturally looking at the performance of your existing advertisers will also give strong indication of how they will perform for you.

How Does SEM Work?
The biggest UK focused PPC networks are listed below. Essentially you create an account with one of the providers and then follow the simple instructions on creating your "advertising campaign" including the advertising copy, the search keywords you want to target that will trigger the display of your advert and of course the Cost Per Click you wish to pay for the keywords within that campaign.

  • Google AdWords
  • Overture
  • Espotting
  • Mirago

I strongly recommend that you start with Google AdWords because you can send traffic straight to the advertiser site via TradeDoubler tracking so you don't need a professional web site or optimised landing page to "pre-sell" the user. If you have a high quality website then Overture should be considered also.

TradeDoubler have a dedicated "keyword report" so you can track the effectiveness of each keyword phrase you are bidding on. For example, if you sent 200 clicks at £0.50 a click on the phrase "cheap red widgets" to an advertiser in your TradeDoubler keyword report you will clearly see those 200 clicks generated 15 sales netting you £200 in commission. These clicks on average have earned you £1.00 per click (£200 divided by 200), but each click only incurred a cost to you of £0.50, so, you have a 100% return on this campaign!

Your keyword report should be used to identify high performing phrases as well as low performing phrases. If you were to optimise further for "cheap red widgets" you could start including keywords such as "big red widgets", "small red widgets", "red widgets online" and generate more relevant traffic, which should increase your earnings.

There are plenty of tools that you can look at to help you find keywords related to your campaign. Google have the "keyword sandbox", but you need to be registered to use this. Overture have an excellent tool called the Search Term Suggestion Tool. You can use this tool to find the most popular keywords and combinations that relate to your target phrase.

This search for laptops yielded the following results at Overtures Search Term Suggest Tool:

Improve performance of your AdWords

Some of you may know that the higher the Click Through Rate your advert receives through Google AdWords the cheaper your Cost Per Click is. If you are bidding £0.50 a click for a certain phrase and are getting a 10% Click Through Rate and your competitor is bidding £1.00 a click but only getting a 4% Click Through Rate your advert would be placed higher.

Despite your lower bid, Google generates more revenue from your advert because it is clicked on more often for that particular search. After 1000 impressions, your advert has received 100 clicks at £0.50 a click which generates £50.00 revenue for Google, whereas your competitor has only generated 40 clicks at £1.00 a click generating only £40.00 for Google.

A high Click Through Rate is essential for lowering your costs.

The following example will demonstrate an effective technique for automating the process of increasing your Click Through Rate.

Many of the searches you see in Google have poorly targeted adverts, and ad copy to match. However, this is not a tutorial on writing effective ad copy, but more on how to maximise relevant ad click throughs and reducing your spend.

Choosing the keywords

In this example we will target an advert based on a specific product. For the purpose of this example I have created an imaginary mobile phone manufactured by Sony, the Sony XP5-4000. So first of all we need to select the keywords to be used in the campaign.

Initially we have chosen to select these keywords:

  • Sony XP5-4000
  • Sony XP54000
  • Buy Sony XP5-4000
  • Sony XP5-4000 Online
  • Sony XP54000 Price
  • Sony XP5-4000

And exclude these keywords:

  • review
  • reviews
  • repair
  • repairs


From this campaign.

Create Your Google Campaign
I am sure the majority of you know how to create a campaign, so I will skip this part. However, one minor difference is the insertion of {Keyword:} in the Ad Title.

I will explain the implication of this in the next section, but for now, enter the Ad Title as follows:

{keyword:Sony XP5-4000}

Choosing your Keywords

From the list of our initial keywords above, we insert these keywords into the text box for this campaign. If you want to take advantage of Google's different keyword matching options this is the time to do it. Show Me.

Set your Maximum Cost Per Click and Save the campaign.

What does {Keyword:} do?

1. When a user does a search that involves any of the keywords and phrases (depending on your matching options) that we selected above for this campaign, the keywords will automatically be dynamically inserted into the title.

2. When a user searches on keywords that match yours, and, the search string is too long for insertion into the AdWords title, the default title is displayed. In this instance {keyword:Sony XP5-4000} Will be displayed.

Other options are:

  • {KeyWord:} which capitalises the first character of each keyword.
  • {keyword:} which transforms all characters to lower case.
  • {KEYWORD:} which capitalises all characters, although under Google AdWords T's and C's this is not permitted so I am not sure why this functionality is included.

What is the significance of this?
When the users search term appears in the title of the Advert it will appear bold. This will make your advert stick out compared to your competitors. To demonstrate the effectiveness, I have added some screen shots of the Adverts in action!:

  • Sony XP5-4000

  • Sony XP5-4000 Online

  • Buy Sony XP5-4000

  • Default Ad Title

  • An example of Advert titles not bolded


I think you will all agree that the advert titles in bold look much more attractive, and relevant, to the user.

With a well written advert that appears relevant to the users search, they are in turn much more likely to click through on your advert. Coming back to the main point of this article:

Having a higher click through rate will reduce your cost per click, and, you will be able to secure higher positions on the sponsored listings at a significantly reduced cost.

I strongly urge you to invest a few hours and £20-£30 on a few Pay Per Click campaigns, just remember to research thoroughly, bid sensibly in a market that has historically performed well for you.

Read Related Articles:
- Keyword Report
- Deep Linking