The Clicks Add Up: Monitoring Web Downtime for Higher ROAS
Those responsible for a company's Internet marketing efforts
realize the loss of credibility that arises when users are
unable to access a website. Those responsible for paying the
online marketing department's bill, however, would be wise
to understand that in some instances there is even more to
risk than just credibility; and that something is pay per
click advertising dollars.
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7Search.com? Visit a leading resource for PPC Advertisers at
AdSupervision.com
Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on
websites, especially search engines. Pay per click advertisements
are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site
visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged
a set amount. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost
per click (CPC), pay for placement and pay for ranking.
Successful PPC advertisers are champions of measurement. They
know the optimum bid to place for each keyword, the ROI on
each keyword and can determine their exact ROAS (return on
advertising spend) for their overall pay per click campaign
with ease. What these online advertisers might not be realizing
when calculating their ROAS however are the clicks they pay for
that result only in a charge from the ad network without a
visitor being delivered.
A Practical Example: Shopping Website
Say for instance that your average bid price is .50 cents and
you receive 30 clicks every hour - resulting in 720 clicks
every day and a daily ad spend of $360. If your website is
unavailable just one percent of the time during the day, you
have lost $3.60 each day. Over the course of one month you
have lost $108.00. Over the course of one year, you have
lost $1,296.00.
Individual Internet advertisers and larger online advertising
agencies are finding that pausing pay per click campaigns when
websites are unavailable due to regular server outages,
catastrophic failures or hacking attempts is an undeniably smart
way to reduce costs associated with a bid for placement advertising
campaign. When advertiser websites are unreachable by web surfers,
systems such as that provided by InternetSupervision.com send
notification via email, SMS or voice contact. This could
essentially give you a "heads-up" and some lead time if you
need to pause a pay per click campaign. InternetSupervision
has taken its website monitoring a step further, enabling its
members to pause PPC campaigns associated with a particular
website when that website in unavailable. When the website
recovers, members receive two notifications; one indicating
website recovery and one noting the ad campaign reactivation
status.
Monitoring the availability of a Web presence enables you to
make sure that your advertising is doing what it should – bring
visitors to your website. Since pay per click search engines
charge you for clicks that their ad networks generate whether
your site is available to visitors or not, if your site is down
for any length of time you run the risk of draining your
advertising account very quickly.
About the Author: As an advocate for PPC advertisers, Pete
Prestipino suggests one way to avoid paying for clicks that
never arrive at your website is to be proactive about monitoring
website availability. Monitor One Website Free at
InternetSupervision.com (http://www.InternetSupervision.com).