The Clean and Green Club

Among the many sweeping changes the Internet has brought in the last decade is a powerful reinvention of the centuries-old marketing form of classified ads. Popularized by Google and its amazing ability to match the content of a page with (mostly) appropriate ads, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) has completely changed the advertising world. And somehow, I haven’t talked about PPC before in my newsletter. For the next four months, we’ll fix that.

In the old days, classifieds were much-loved by direct marketers because they were trackable. You could easily use a department number or other device to find out how many people responded to the ad. If you were lucky, you might have been able to negotiate payment based on the number of inquiries or orders. Otherwise, you had to pay based on circulation.

But…back then, there was a long learning curve. In some cases, you had to place your insertion order months in advance, and results would trickle in for weeks after publication. If you committed to three months in a row, you wouldn’t know if you were wasting your money or making a fortune–and you also would either have to recommit to the ad before the results were in, or wait another several months to reinsert on the basis of meaningful data. And even if you were doing an “A/B split”–testing different versions in different parts of the print run, it was a long time before you really had the data.

The first attempts to bring the classified model to the Web were horrible: pages and pages of un-classified (or very loosely organized, at best) ads thrown up on a web page with no other content; the only people who saw them were other entrepreneurs placing their own ads. Yuck!

Pay-per-click on the Web changed all that. It combined the strengths of the print model–careful classification by subject, targeting to specific audiences–with the strengths of the Web: searchability, quick response. And it added something from the model of print display ads: the classifieds were right up next to relevant editorial content. Even better, most websites using classifieds quickly went to PPC, so that marketers only paid for results.

Google is not the only player (there are hundreds, including Yahoo and MSN)–but Google did a few things that were very, very smart:

• Created algorithms to automatically analyze a page’s content and retrieve very appropriate, relevant ads that people would actually click on; though sometimes you can search for a term and get ads that are waaay off base, overall, its accuracy is astonishing.
• Made partners of hundreds of thousands of websites that could monetize their own content by letting Google automatically display ads–thus providing far more “eyeballs” for the ads!
• And of course, thoroughly integrated PPC results into its own search results pages, as did the other PPC engines.
• Fine-tuned the process so that the most popular ads get displayed more frequently, even if they aren’t the highest bidder
• Allowed advertisers to participate at a very low entry cost, test extensively, and refine their ad strategies on the fly.

So now, a marketer can roll out a new website, start PPC campaigns for carefully targeted keywords, and if the budget is high enough and the search terms popular enough, measure the results within hours, change some elements, and test again.

Recommended book to supplement this article: Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, which has nine full chapters on Internet/online marketing, with lots of cost-effective strategies you may not have come across elsewhere.

Coming in parts 2, 3 & 4:
August: Keyword Analysis

September: PPC Copywriting

October: Fast And Effective PPC Testing Strategies