Local Florist Advertising Using PPC
As a local florist in today's very competitive market. We spend our days looking for ways to attract customers into our store. We look to the many advertising possibilities that are available and of course with the emergence of PPC (Pay Per Click) a whole new marketing area is now available to reach customers on the Internet
Its not an easy task to stand out from the lump of information, especially in places such as Yellow Page listings. Consumers daily look toward these resources more online when looking for business that offer the services and products that they are looking for. From Banners to multiple fake listings the yellow pages are becoming very difficult to find what you are looking for.
We have for sometime been participating in PPC to promote our website. To target consumers looking for the local florist that can provide the services they are looking for.
Some of these PPC programs have been introduced on two directories. The first one I would like to talk about is Super Pages. Super Pages has come up with a way for businesses to advertise their services and help them stand out with colored text, icons and links to the companies website. However these PPC programs have been put into place to make the customer do more then find a business, but to cause significant amount of cost to the advertiser with there PPC programs.
When you go to super pages and type in say florist in Tustin. The results that appear are not local business listing but paid sponsor d listings. What we had done to compete with these non local businesses is to place our banner within the sponsor listings with a clear link to our website. Their PPC program states that you pay for clicks only when a customer clicks on your ad. This is where the real cost can get very expensive. Usually when these banners are created you have options of showing your business address phone number email and a link to the map. What really happens is now you have up to four different possibilities for a customer to click on your banner. So when a customer clicks on your email tab a click is registered. Or when the customer clicks on the tab to show the phone number another click is registered. They have even gone as far as showing these banners on there "Search Partners Sites". So when a customer clicks on these ads a click is registered that takes them to a profile page at which then the customer can click the available tabs all along incurring more charges for each tab that is pressed.
City Search is another directory that provides a PPC program. Again ads may show up on Google sponsor listings as well as "Search Partner Listings" in which a consumer will click on the ad and register a click for the advertiser that will bring the consumer to a profile page. Then when the consumer clicks on the the profile page another click is registered before the consumer actually gets to the business website.
I am all for advertising our business on the Internet. But when companies began to take the customers in a circle to get them to find your business it becomes a problem not only for the unaware advertiser's cost but for the consumer that is forced to go through a maze of pages to actually get to the business they are looking for.
Its not an easy task to stand out from the lump of information, especially in places such as Yellow Page listings. Consumers daily look toward these resources more online when looking for business that offer the services and products that they are looking for. From Banners to multiple fake listings the yellow pages are becoming very difficult to find what you are looking for.
We have for sometime been participating in PPC to promote our website. To target consumers looking for the local florist that can provide the services they are looking for.
Some of these PPC programs have been introduced on two directories. The first one I would like to talk about is Super Pages. Super Pages has come up with a way for businesses to advertise their services and help them stand out with colored text, icons and links to the companies website. However these PPC programs have been put into place to make the customer do more then find a business, but to cause significant amount of cost to the advertiser with there PPC programs.
When you go to super pages and type in say florist in Tustin. The results that appear are not local business listing but paid sponsor d listings. What we had done to compete with these non local businesses is to place our banner within the sponsor listings with a clear link to our website. Their PPC program states that you pay for clicks only when a customer clicks on your ad. This is where the real cost can get very expensive. Usually when these banners are created you have options of showing your business address phone number email and a link to the map. What really happens is now you have up to four different possibilities for a customer to click on your banner. So when a customer clicks on your email tab a click is registered. Or when the customer clicks on the tab to show the phone number another click is registered. They have even gone as far as showing these banners on there "Search Partners Sites". So when a customer clicks on these ads a click is registered that takes them to a profile page at which then the customer can click the available tabs all along incurring more charges for each tab that is pressed.
City Search is another directory that provides a PPC program. Again ads may show up on Google sponsor listings as well as "Search Partner Listings" in which a consumer will click on the ad and register a click for the advertiser that will bring the consumer to a profile page. Then when the consumer clicks on the the profile page another click is registered before the consumer actually gets to the business website.
I am all for advertising our business on the Internet. But when companies began to take the customers in a circle to get them to find your business it becomes a problem not only for the unaware advertiser's cost but for the consumer that is forced to go through a maze of pages to actually get to the business they are looking for.
Labels: City Search Advertising, Pay Per Click Advertising, PPC Advertising, Superpages Advertising
posted by Everyday Flowers | 8:47 PM
2 Comments:
Nice insights. PPC is an effective tool, more so in case of online florists. To add to what you have noted, if a company is participating in any of the affiliate programmes, it has to keep an eye on how affiliates manage their PPC campaigns to drive up traffic to the site. Bidding on common key words could drive up costs for the company.
If you could control what words you wanted to bid on no problem. However these programs offered by Citysearch and Superpages lack in the options of controling specific keywords and where the ads actually appear. Disclosing the locations of where the ads may apear should be made an option on these accounts. When confronting both companies on these issues I was given the run around and both where trying to go out of thier way to confuse the issues. For instance last week I had requested that my ads be removed from their search partners. On Monday not only did I find one of my ads from City Search showing on another website but they still told me that it shouldn't be doing that. When I told them that the ad was showing on Superpages "Yep" They said well we do partner with them.
These two companies are working together and if they are not careful their sites are going to become lest relevent to consumers and advertisers.
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