One of the most effective ways to attract internet visitors to a website or landing page is search engine advertising, but internet forums and review sites are full of stories of people who have accumulated thousands of dollars in costs. advertising without income or sales. to justify that expense. When it comes to running a successful and profitable search engine ad campaign, it is important to monitor the numbers carefully to keep costs low and profit margins as high as possible.

What numbers should you monitor?

When you decide to launch a pay-per-click search engine campaign, one of the most important numbers to monitor is called the click-through rate, or CTR, which means the percentage of people who actually clicked on your specific ad relative to how many times they was displayed on the page. This is an important statistic to know because most of today’s major online search engines are very concerned with user experience, so they will be biased to show popular ads instead of unpopular ones. You can think of CTR as a rough measure of the popularity of a given ad.

Traditional search engine advertising

The traditional model that would be used by search engines when it comes to the paid search model is called “pay per location” which means the advertiser who is willing to pay more per individual click gets the best location for the chosen keyword . This is the bidding model that most people are familiar with and have some experience with modern search advertising. While this model does a good job of maximizing revenue for search engine companies, it does not contribute to a good user experience.

With pay-per-location advertising, someone might be willing to pay $ 1.50 per click, which might be the highest bid (giving them the best placement), but the ad or landing page may be of such low quality that they make be a bad user experience. This is where performance-based search engine algorithms come in, because they will determine how high or low a specific ad should be placed considering the click-through rate and not just the cost of the highest zoekmachine adverteren. .

Why is performance-based advertising important?

If you’re looking to drive internet traffic using search advertising, it’s important to understand how performance-based algorithms work for two reasons: First, you can’t guarantee a good position for your ad by simply throwing a lot money, because it is the quality of the copy of your ad and not the cost of the offer that will determine the rank. Second, when you finally find a good ad that offers a high click-through rate, many of these performance-based search engines will allow you to lower the cost per click, which means you can maintain a higher rank and follow spending less than its competitors.