Clicksharp Marketing

There are a lot of people out there looking to research your business, market or industry. It’s a fact of life, but don’t let them empty your bank account in the process.

That’s a lot of computers. What if every single one of them was researching your business, and clicked your ads? (Photo by berbercarpet)

What happens when a business spends a whole lot of money attracting people to their website, only to find out the visitors are just there to glean some quick info and be on their merry way? This can happen easier than you think.

The service industry has more examples than we’d know what to do with. If you run a consulting business and you promote your services online, chances are you use your website to document a lot of your best practices. Your mission statement probably articulates core competencies learned over decades of hard work. Maybe you’ve even published a few case studies.

This kind of content is intended to help groom visitors into qualified prospects — but it’s also the kind of thing that an MBA student might be digging around for, just to tuck in one more footnote into a term paper. Or it could be a competitor, looking to see what other firms are offering, or who they’ve been working with.

If someone is using a search engine to read up on specific industries or business functions, chances are they won’t discriminate between an organic listing and a sponsored listing. So if you’re running ads for a bunch of broad-matched keywords (what exactly do we mean by this? See Google’s matching options), failure to take this into account could result in a lot of clicks from parties who have no intention to pad your income statement.

Now, with respect to competitors, don’t go jumping to conclusions. There’s no harm in having the information up there in the first place. Every business that puts up a website knows they do so despite the risk of competitors learning more about their business. It’s a reality of doing business in this day and age.

But please — don’t let them empty your bank account in the process.

What negative keywords can potentially help filter out comparison shoppers?

• list(s) of
• company(ies)
• industry
• example(s)
• definition(s)
• how to
• tutorial(s)

Again… it’s not like we’re afraid of these visitors. The act of uploading a website means you’ve got something to share with the world. They might even be an asset to your business — that’s why we have Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

(In Part 4, we’ll discuss how to steer clear of a particularly proactive lot of search engine users… the job seekers.)

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 @ 7:48 pm on the category Pay-per-click advertising, SEM, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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