The first day of collecting data on my website with Crazyegg.com shows a clear trend. People are bypassing the YPN ads on my website. If I read the data right, there is a path users take through my website and I do not have any ads in their way. I’ll experiment with a design change over the weekend into next week to see if that can be changed.

I also like to point out another free service for the Internet Marketer. Check out Hittail.com. You’ll place a small JavaScript code snippet on your site and these guys track long tail keywords for you. What keywords? “Long tail keywords” that is. These are keyword phrases people type into search engines to find your website. Why are they of value for you (or me)? The longer a search term, the more targeted it can be. Now use those search terms as keywords in a pay per click marketing campaign with Google Adwords and you might be able to pay only a fraction of your normal advertising cost compared to using a broader search term.

Example:

Broad/Generic Search Term: Web Hosting

Long Tail Search Term: Looking for a web host with cpanel

Now if you use the second search term you can build a very targeted ad and have it displayed when the visitor types it into a search engine. The more detailed and targeted your ad is, the better are the chances to have the visitor click on your ad to visit your landing page (you use landing pages, do you?). And if you can do this for the fraction of a price compare to the very broad term “Web Hosting” it is even better. Yes, the term “web hosting” might be searched for thousands of times a day, while the long tail search term is only used 100 times a month, but your chances of converting a visitor to a paying customer are much higher.

Consider this: a visitor is looking for a web hosting tutorial and searches for

web hosting tutorial

The term “web hosting” would trigger your ad and eventually the visitor will click on it, but he is looking for tutorials and not for web hosting. You just wasted $1.50 for this useless click. Or you bid on the broad term web hosting and your ad is displayed thousands of times a day, but not clicked on once. This will lower your CTR (Click-thru Rate) and therefore will lower your quality score in Google Adwords. A lower quality score means higher bid prices for you. You do the math.

From this example you can see that long tail keywords can have a significant benefit to you when it comes to PPC marketing. You will see less impression, but you might see better conversions and better CTR values and therefore lower prices per click in return.