Google Adwords is synonymous to paid campaigns, and is one of the most potent tools of Online Marketing. However there are other Paid Search Engines that are equally capable in delivering classified traffic to a website. While Google attracts large traffic, Yahoo, MSN and other smaller search engines have a better conversion ratio, since they tend to be more specialized and offer better productivity.

With two consecutive newsletters dedicated to the essentials of link building, we believe that the propensity to assimilate more information on link building would be low. To allow time for you to incorporate the Link Building best practices to generate traffic from your Link Building efforts, we would talk about another form of lead generation, in the meanwhile. While link building generates classified leads, as highlighted earlier, it has a significant incubation period, before the results come in. To combat this transient phase of low visitor count, a paid advertising campaign is a preferred recourse. However, for the paid campaign to deliver high ROI, detailed planning and research is mandatory. This assumes greater importance in view of the substantial costs involved in such pursuits.

For generating expected results, there is a need for a comprehensive paid campaign, spaced out across multiple search engines. These search engines may be short listed on the bases of various parameters like the allocated advertising budget, the targeted geographic region, the demographic profile of the target audience and the relative popularity of the search engine amongst the target audience. We will detail each of these parameters to enable you to develop an appropriate blend of the search engines to derive maximum bang out of your marketing bucks.

Budget

The overall marketing budget plays a crucial role while deciding on the search engines. Though Google allows flexibility in terms of the minimum bid (from $0.01-$100), often the bid is higher than other search engines. The bid price is interrelated to demand and supply phenomenon, and with more people bidding for competitive keywords, the bid price increases. Factors like the size of the search engine also escalate the price. In such case, a smaller search engine that drives classified audience may be a better alternative.

If the advertiser has a restricted budget, then it becomes imperative to consider spreading it judiciously amongst a selection of search engines. Investing all of it in an Adwords campaign may lead to the entire budget getting exhausted quickly. The recommended approach is often to begin a paid campaign with Yahoo, develop an ad and keyword strategy based on the target audience and their searching behavior, and then attempt the same on MSN. A combination of small and big search engines are advisable for better ROI.

Geographical Reach

Another factor of importance is the specific geographic reach of the search engine in question. Should the product or service be targeted to a specific geographic region, running the paid campaign on a regional search engine would be beneficial. Yahoo and some other search engine are targeting a new market that is still at its nascent stage and developing: the local advertising.

This type of advertising is setup on a Pay-Per-Click basis and is highly recommended for office locations looking to attract people offline or through service calls. For e.g. in AOL Local, you can select a location to search in by entering a city, state, zip code and also have the option of entering a street address. Likewise, Yahoo offers Local Enhanced Listings (costing about $9.95 per month) and Local Sponsored Search. The aim of this program is to target users in your area in a searchable online phone-book format. It is recommended if the advertisement is relevant to the local market only.

With the help of 'Yahoo Local Advertising program' the niche market could be tapped better.

Demographic Considerations

he demographic break up of the audience also assists in bidding more judiciously. MSN adspend has incredible features that offer a choice of bidding for keywords based on the demographic break up of the intended audience. E.g. If you have an MSN account and wanted to see demographic details for your chosen keyword. You would need to enter a keyword ("organic cat food" in our example), the result would display graph of users who search for those particular keywords with their corresponding age, sex, city, income, and so on. This information could then be used to bid by these criteria. In our example if the market for cat food is 80% women, then the firm could bid $2 for women searchers and 25c for male. Further if the specific target audience is women in the ages between 24-35 yrs old, then the firm could bid higher for such visitors and less for women above 55 years.

Language...!

Languages are an important factor that influences the selection of search engines. There are various search engines like www.baidu.com and www.zingu.com that cater to the China and Korea markets respectively. Firms targeting the South East Asia region would benefit by using these Language specific Search Engines. A language specific Search Engine would augment the reach of the services / products, while it would also help in reducing the costs in the form of lower bid costs.

Preference of the Target Audience

The next major influencing factor is the affinity of the targeted audience for a specific search engine. MarketingSherpa and Did-it.com Index conducted a research on this factor in the past, and found Google users to be from a higher income group, with high level of education. Hence, Google Adwords would be the preferred choice for promotion of a technical product. Similarly, Amazon Clickriver Ads can be a good alternative for technical products. According to Nielsen / Net Ratings: Amazon is used by some of the most sophisticated and influential consumers online and has a reach of 33% of U.S. internet users. This translates to more than 44 million visitors every month. Likewise for a consumer oriented product, like a low priced MP3 player with an incredible offer, the advertiser may have better success in shopper.com or shopzilla.com as compared to Google Adwords.

The Conclusion

For an effective Paid Campaign that generates leads, it is essential that the target audience be profiled, and the search engines to run the campaign be identified on the basis of their ability to tap the correct audience in the allocated budget. A prudent approach is to spread out the budget across different search engines to ensure that all the bases are covered. Thereafter, there would be a need to monitor the campaign closely for the initial few weeks, to track the results and use the conversion tracker extensively. This should be augmented by regular bid monitoring and keyword editing to weed out keywords that are under performing or too expensive. Doing this requires continuous efforts and commitment; however the efforts are usually their weight in Gold!!