Pay Per Click and Your Web Site:

Traffic is the key to a successful web site. The more traffic to your site, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines. As your relevance climbs, so will your site’s placement in the organic search results.

Pay per click campaigns are guaranteed traffic generators and will drive traffic to your web site to boost its rank/relevance in the search engines.

How it Works:

Mainstreet runs pay per click campaigns by region. To effectively market your web site across a large service area, multiple campaigns are created to target the different metro areas and/or regions within your service area. Each campaign is separated into at least two ad groups (i.e. “auto glass” and “windshield”).  These ad groups contain the keywords we are bidding on and at least three ads display when one of those keywords are searched.

The text of the ad is the key to generating traffic as this is what catches the attention of a potential customer. This is the reason each campaign is split into ad groups – to control what ad text is displayed for what keyword.  This also allows us to control what page on your website a visitor is taken to when they click the ad. Separating each campaign into ad groups also helps to lower the average cost per click for the campaign over time.

Measuring The Effectiveness of a Pay Per Click Campaign:

There are four statistics used to measure the effectiveness of a pay per click campaign:

1. The Click Through Rate or CTR – How many times your ad showed for a search (impressions) divided by how many times it was clicked (impressions ÷ clicks = CTR).
2. The Number of Impressions – How many searches were run for your keywords. A high CTR with low impressions tells us we are not bidding for keywords your potential customers are using to find your services.
3. The Keyword Quality Score – How well your keywords, your ads, and the content of your web site landing page relate to each other.  As an example: a search for “windshield repair” with a click on ad that mentions “windshield repair” that takes you to a page about “windshield repair” will build up a quality score around 9 or 10 out of 10.  That same ad and land page for a search on “windshield replacement” would never get a score above 7.  When a keyword in your campaign attains a quality score of 9 or better, that “keyword-ad-landing page” combination is considered more relevant and therefore the ad for that keyword search is displayed in a higher position in the search results without impacting the average cost per click. (A better position for the same cost or the same position for a lower cost.)
4. Average Time on Site – This final statistic tells us if our work in the pay per click campaigns is drawing in the type of traffic that will make your phones ring and your inbox fill up.  The longer a visitor stays on your site, the more likely it is that they are shopping for your services.  If visitors are leaving your site as soon as the landing page loads, either we are drawing in the wrong type of traffic or the page content is not keeping their attention.  (This statistic is more for our use in measuring effectiveness since we cannot hear your phones ringing or monitor your inbox.)

Mainstreet Pay Per Click Management:

Once your pay per click campaign is running, Mainstreet monitors everything on a daily basis. There are some days where no action is needed but for the most part, there is always a way to improve on a pay per click campaign.  Most changes affect the ads being displayed. While the campaign matures, adjustments to the keyword bids will have to be made as your quality score climbs or competition pushes up the average cost per click.

CTR is tracked for the ads for your pay per click as well as keywords. We use this CTR to measure the effectiveness of each ad and will make changes in an attempt to improve that CTR for each ad in each ad group. We have found that very slight changes to an ad such as using dashes in the phone number instead of parenthesis can double the CTR for an ad.

A Note on Fraudulent Clicks:

Pay per click ads WILL NOT display for every single search run for your target keywords. The reason for this is to prevent someone from running a search and clicking your ad for hours on end.  This would exhaust your monthly budget and give you no leads or contacts whatsoever.