Beat the Price Creep

Paid inclusion offers a possible answer to escalating CPC prices

July 2006 By Ben Perry

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• No technical limitations. One of the main obstacles to getting your site indexed and ranked highly in the natural search results is the way your site is built. Factors such as how the URLs are formed, keyword density in the copy, and the use of frames or Flash—among others—can limit your site’s ability to be located in the natural search results. Often these problems can be
time- and labor-intensive to fix, and the solution can substantially change the way your site looks and operates. Paid inclusion circumvents many of these issues by allowing a site owner to feed the content of the page directly to the search engine in a data feed. It’s still advisable to resolve site issues that impede natural search optimization, but paid inclusion at least offers a quick fix for the Yahoo! network.



• A fresh index. If you’ve optimized your site for natural search engine rankings, you probably know that natural search spiders can be slow to index your site and pick up new content. Sometimes, the process can take up to 60 days. Paid inclusion doesn’t encounter this problem. New content that’s submitted to a paid inclusion feed typically will show up in the search engines within 48 hours. This allows marketers to be more nimble in changing promotions or adding new products.



• No click fraud. The high price of a click in PPC programs, combined with the fact that the engines pay site owners to generate clicks, has produced an unattractive side effect—click fraud. Click fraud refers to paid clicks that have no chance of converting, usually because the perpetrator is a competitor or gains a revenue share from the click. This can seriously degrade the ROI of your program.

The good news is that click fraud is virtually non-existent within paid inclusion. Why? Two reasons: It’s very difficult to differentiate between paid inclusion and natural search listings. Additionally, there are far fewer beneficiaries of revenue sharing from the clicks. Given these factors, the motive is low and the difficulty high to game the system.



• Creative control. Have you ever gotten a No. 1 ranking in natural search, only to realize that the title and description of your listing looked like broken English? Another benefit of paid inclusion is that you have total control over the title and description that the user sees in the search results. There are general guidelines for length and content, but the advertiser is in control of what the user sees. This can be a distinct advantage in terms of enticing the user to click on your listing rather than a competitor’s.



• Tracking and testing. Yahoo!’s paid inclusion system has the ability to accept a destination URL that is separate from a tracking URL. This may seem esoteric, but it’s incredibly important. It allows advertisers to easily track paid inclusion separately from other paid and natural search efforts. It also enables testing initiatives to be tracked without difficulty. Paid inclusion is the only fast and relatively easy way to test different titles and descriptions within natural search results.



• Inclusion of low-level pages. For companies with thousands of pages of products or information, paid inclusion is a must. It’s unlikely that search engines would crawl all 10,000 product pages of a company’s site. However, it’s often very valuable to get consumers to the low-level pages that correspond to the specific product they are seeking. If someone searches for “red and green bowling shoes” and you have that product page in the search results, you have a highly qualified visitor who is very likely to convert by landing on precisely the page he or she is looking for.



• Keyword data. Paid inclusion also is a great source of keyword data that a site owner can use to improve its overall online marketing efforts. It can provide user query data that’s useful for expanding other paid search efforts or helping you focus your copy for natural search. Furthermore, paid inclusion can provide information on which of the URLs on your site convert the best.



Recognizing the Limitations
While the limitations to paid inclusion are few, they warrant attention. First, there is a finite supply of clicks available. So although the program scales well, and you can make the same profit margin on higher spending, you can’t buy an infinite amount of traffic.

As with all forms of SEM, the amount of traffic is driven by the quantity of searches on the engine in a given month. You can increase the traffic by optimizing your feed, but there are limits to the traffic volume. And the same factors that limit natural search traffic volume also are at play with paid inclusion, like the number of other sites linking to your site. For example, if you put a brand new page with no links to it in paid inclusion, it generally will yield few clicks. The best way to gauge your opportunity with paid inclusion is to look at what volume you currently receive via organic search and then shoot for a reasonable improvement on this number.

Another limitation of paid inclusion is that you could pay for traffic you’re already getting. You have complete control over which URLs go into the feed, so you could just submit the URLs that are not already indexed, although this takes some time and know-how. Even on pages that already are indexed, it’s sometimes worth it to include them, because the lift in traffic can outweigh the cost of paying for clicks you were getting for free. It’s a consideration, but not an insurmountable one.



The Bottom Line
Paid inclusion is suitable for just about anyone willing to pay for a click. It’s nearly always cheaper than paid search advertising, and is easier than optimizing for natural search. In addition, it’s especially well suited for those with very large sites, or advertisers who really need to control the messaging users see in the natural search results. Overall, paid inclusion is possibly the best deal in paid search. If you’re paying for clicks via PPC, you should probably consider paid inclusion.



Ben Perry, Ph.D., is paid search director at iProspect, a search engine marketing firm based in Watertown, Mass. He can be reached at b.perry@iprospect.com.

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