Optimizing Paid For Inclusion Search Engines

Optimizing Paid For Inclusion Search Engines

Paid for Inclusion is a paid per click mechanism often neglected by companies. It is, however, an extremely successful and cost effective way of driving qualified visitors to a website and through careful management can produce ROI figures in excess of 10 times the investment placed.
A quick look back at history shows that paid for inclusion was one of the first pay per click mechanisms that was available to a marketer. Pioneered most visibly by Inktomi, and then soon followed by engines such as AltaVista and FAST the PFI market really took off providing a welcome manageability to getting your site listed quickly and efficiently. The paid for inclusion market has not changed much since then, with the exception of submission method maybe, but the biggest challenge to a user is how best do I use it?
Whilst paid for placement (Overture, Google AdWords, FindWhat etc) offer simple procedures to getting a site listed, part of the ever increasing strength of the PFP market, the processes that are necessary for optimizing PFI are different. With no guarantee of a high placement and reliance on relevant submitted content, i.e. does Inktomi feel this is 100% relevant to a search or 1%, the challenge to the marketer is much greater. In order to demonstrate that the challenge is not as unfathomable as it may seem here are some guidelines on how to optimize your content.
1. Understand where paid inclusion data appears within the search network - The usual place for paid for inclusion data is within the 'web pages' results. These are pages that appear when the search term has either a) limited coverage within paid for placement or directory listings or b) exhausted all of the paid for placement or directory listings and appears there after! Here is a simple example to further explain this - If you search for 'credit cards online' on MSN you'll be presented with MSN's own paid for placement mechanism 'Featured Sites', then Overture's top 3 listings 'Sponsored Sites', then 100+ listings from LookSmart 'Directory Listings' and then once they are exhausted 'Web Pages' which are Inktomi.2. Understand what you are submitting - Following on from Point 1, if the listings that appear in paid for inclusion are so low in the pecking order you must be careful of which words, phrases, listings to submit. In the example above creating a PFI listing for 'credit cards online' wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, however, 'online credit card service' would have you appear on page 1 in 15th spot as all other sources were exhausted much sooner. But what is the catch? The simple answer is volume; the number of searches for 'online credit card service' is 5% of the number of searches for 'credit card online'. Your advantage is relevancy, those 5% of searches are going to traditionally have more relevant searchers as they've really pre qualified themselves with a longer more considered search term.
3. Don't submit too little - If the volume of traffic is lower then why should you bother going to all of the effort of submitting sites to PFI? The answer is volume again. The best content to submit to a PFI engine is large bulk amounts taken from sites with lots of data on their site. This lends itself extremely well to catalogue retailers (such as BestBuy or Amazon) or publishers (such as Consumer Reports or McGraw Hill). In many instances the effort needed for one listing in PFI is the same effort as 10,000 listings. The more listings you submit the less of an issue the smaller search volume becomes as you'll get a larger percentage of the more specific searches with a larger number of listings.
4. Understand 'how' to submit - There are many ways to submit to PFI engines, many of them will help you with the whole procedure, others will recommend third parties to assist you with it. The most important variable to understand here is relevancy. You listings are not guaranteed number 1 spot, even on the 'Web Pages' or equivalent section of the site. You must ensure that if you are submitting a listings for 'Sony 28" Widescreen TV Model' the entirety of your submission, title, description, supporting text, url, all contain the same information otherwise the engine will bump your listing down for being too vague. Understand the variables of PFI too, for example, Inktomi won't allow anything but a 1to1 listing to unique URL ratio. This further lends itself to bulk submissions from a catalogue or large listing site.
5. Don't submit too much - PFI have variable rate cards per industry and vertical. As with PFP the price is often dependant upon demand for the content for example, finance and legal services are more expensive than reference or computing. For this reason it is important to do research before you submit your content. Be sure that if you are considering putting your entire catalogue of products online that each and every product if sold justifies the cost per click. In many instances the best course of action is to skim the feed your are submitting to PFI up to the point where the AOV of the catalogue products or CPA of the online lead you are listings justifies your costs. NOTE: having a good tracking tool and understanding both your direct and deferred conversion rates really helps here.
6. Creative Management - A PFI listings, as with any other, appears within the search network with countless others. Make sure you don't neglect these listings by relying on the title and description from your catalogue or website listing. In many instances normal procedure to substitute the title that appears in the engine with the title that appears on the site. Include calls to action; add your unique selling proposition and if you have a strong brand name be sure to include it.
PFI management is an integral part of an overall search marketing campaign and if your industry lends itself to this form of submission then it is a must. Optimizing your site for spiders may work well for single submissions to PFI but ensuring that your website content is visible in the easiest possible way is the overall strength of this pay per click mechanism.
(by James Colborn : An Account Director for Inceptor Inc, taken from payperclickuniverse.com)