What Overture Doesn't Want You To Know

Saving money on pay per click search engines: What Goto (Overture) doesn't want you to know.

I would be willing to bet that the majority of you have at one time or another have used Goto.com to generate traffic to your site.

They are by far the most popular pay per click search engine.

A substantial number of clients my Search Engine Optimization business gets are disgruntled Goto.com customers.

And it's not difficult to see why.

In many cases the bids at Goto.com are bordering on the insane. But the price of the bids themselves are just a small part of the problem and not the focus of this article.

The main problem is very few people have any idea what words or bids are actually turning into sales.

The statistics Goto provides are pretty useless when it comes to knowing which words are performing for you.

Let's look at this example to explain what I am referring to.

Let's say you sell an affiliate program of some type that earns you $50 profit on each sale.

Let's say you have bid on 3 keywords at Goto. I know most of you probably bid on more than 3 words, but using 3 words makes it a lot easier to make the point.

Let's assume...

Word 1 costs you $0.20 per click
Word 2 costs you $0.53 per click
Word 3 costs you $0.09 per click

Now let's look at some hypothetical traffic numbers for these words.

Word 1 results in 487 clicks in one month (cost: $097.40)
Word 2 results in 297 clicks in one month (cost: $157.41)
Word 3 results in 058 clicks in one month (cost: $005.22)

Total monthly cost: $260.03

Let's say you converted a basic average of 1% of your visitors into sales. Rounding off to whole numbers let's say you made 7 sales in that month.

OK, so far so good right? You made $350 on an investment of $260.03, a profit of $89.97.

Not great but better than a lot of folks do and you did make money.

But here's the question that very few people can answer. Which words actually resulted in the sales?

If you don't know the answer to that question I can assure you, you are throwing money away.

It is essential that you be able to track your words and know which clicks from which words turn into sales.

The question is how, but it's really a lot easier than you think. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this would be to use a system like Roibot.

You can assign each of your keywords a unique Roibot tracking URL, (yes, Goto allows you to do this) which will not only keep a more accurate count of your actual traffic from Goto, you can incorporate a Roibot order form into your web site that will tell you exactly which clicks, and therefore which keywords resulted in sales.

Let's look at some more hypothetical numbers from the above example assuming you were using Roibot or a similar system to track your clicks and sales.

Let's say word 1 resulted in 5 of your sales. Word 2 resulted in 1 sale and word 3 also resulted in 1 sale.

By having this information available to you, you would know that on word 1 you earned $250 in sales on a cost of $97.40, a profit of $152.60. You would know that word 2 resulted in sales of $50 with a cost of $157.41, a loss of $107.41. You would also know that word 3 resulted in sales of $50 with a cost of $5.22, a profit of $44.78.

With this information at your fingertips you would instantly know that word # 2 is a loser while words 1 and 3 a re-performing great for you. Word 2 is generating hits, but not enough sales to justify the cost. If you eliminate word 2 completely you would have increased your monthly profit from your Goto advertising to $197.38 as opposed to $89.97 if you were bidding on word 2.

I know you're probably saying that this is a fictitious example, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that a LOT of people are making this very mistake, and in many cases there are no profits at all. It is simply throwing money away.

Hits are not sales and unless you have a tracking system in place I can almost guarantee that you are spending far more money than you should be and earning a lot less on pay per click engines.

Sure, it takes some effort to set up a tracking system, especially if you bid on a lot of words, but the reality is the more words you bid on, the more you need a tracking system, unless of course you enjoy wasting money which I'm certain very few of you do.

Roibot (or similar systems) requires a very small investment yet I hear people telling me they can't afford it, yet these same folks are throwing money away in triple digit figures each and every month at pay per click engines by having no idea which words are performing poorly.

If you're going to dive into the pay per click search engines, just make sure you are as prepared as you can be because their interest is not served by saving you money. Think about it.