Clicksharp Marketing

If you’re paying several dollars per click to your website, make sure you’re not mistaken for another comparison shopping website.

Would you rather pay to get in front of overwhelmed comparison shoppers — or someone already reaching for their wallet? (Photo by ralphjbiker)

In Part 1 of this post, we got our arms around the concept that not all clicks are created equal. But when push comes to shove, what can we do about it?

There’s a better way to phrase this question: Just who do you want to PREVENT from coming to your site?

You might say, “No one!” On the internet, there’s a tendency to think that anyone and everyone should be treated as a customer. In abstract, this is fine — but for someone dealing with the reality of marketing budgets and other finite resources, it simply doesn’t hold up. Even if you’re not advertising on Pay-Per-Click, you’re still paying for every click.

Comparison shoppers

These folks are the so-called “tire kickers” who tend to lie on the early side of the buying cycle. They are trying to find out everything they can about the product or service, but there are still many steps ahead of them before they decide to make a purchase. That means there are many reasons for why they might abandon the process all together, including:

1. They no longer need the product or service.
2. A word-of-mouth solution presents a better alternative.
3. A competitor with a bigger sales force reaches the consumer by phone — or in person.
4. They got distracted and forgot to bookmark the site.
5. The consumer simply changed his or her mind!

There really are many other reasons that could be added this list, but the bottom line is, visits from comparison shoppers are just fine — if they’re driven as referral traffic from comparison shopping sites. If you’re paying for those visits, at the very least you’ll leave yourself exposed to low conversion rates.

What could be even worse? Imagine if your customer learns everything they need to know about the product category from your site, and then buys from a competitor. Now you’re not only foregoing return on investment (ROI), but you’ve just paid for a competitor to eat into your market share.

What negative keywords can potentially help filter out comparison shoppers?

• compare
• comparison(s)
• review(s)
• price(s)
• pricing
• deal(s)

(Yes, you should treat the singular and plural as individual keywords.)

In Part 3, we’ll look at another group of searchers who tend not to pay up: researchers.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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Don’t pay for bad clicks! - Part 1: Introduction A variety of scenarios can drive bad clicks to your site. With a little attention to detail, you can nip these in the bud before they chew up your pay-per-click...

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 @ 4:58 am on the category Pay-per-click advertising, SEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Both comments and pings are currently closed.


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