If you are advertising your practice with Pay per Click on the top search engines you may want to look at alternative options. Second-tier search engines may not be as popular or generate high numbers like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but places like Ask.com and Business.com can have some advantages.
Take your best performing PPC campaign. Put it on Ask.com or another second-tier search engine and let it run. Check your Analytics and see the results. You may have just picked up some traffic you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
You can reverse this and use second-tier search engines in preparation for larger campaigns as well. Because they are second-tier they are often less expensive places to experiment with new Pay per Click ads or new keyword groups you want to explore. Set up your new ads on the second-tier engines first and run, test and tweak them. Again, the numbers overall might not be as impressive as on Google or some of the other giants but you can look at click-thru rates, bounces and other Analytics in a less expensive but just as effective way. Then when you think you have a winning ad move it to the bigger search engines and run it again. If your ad produces the same percentages you should be getting more traffic just because of the size of scale. In the meantime you’ve saved some money.
Your goal in all of this is not necessarily to top the return of the leading search engines, but to make your ads more profitable. In the meantime you will hopefully pick up some traffic on your dental website you would not have otherwise.
Next week: Are your advertising on the right platform?