When it comes to paid advertising on search engines, the tried and true methods always tout that more traffic equals more paying customers. But is that really true?

I’ve been doing Internet marketing since 2003. That’s 13 years of using my own hands to test, tweak, optimize, and learn what works. For a long time, I relied on Google to give me an idea of the most popular keywords to bid on to get to that coveted top position on SERPs (an acronym for the Search Engine Results Pages). After years of getting into bidding wars with marketers in my area leveraging the same data on Google traffic – and spending more money than I would’ve liked to in order to get my ad to that top spot – I had a revelation: often, the most popular keywords and the highest spot on the page weren’t the most desirable.

Think about it this way:

Let’s say I’m bidding $2 a click on a keyword, and that amount puts me in the 4th spot down on the SERP. Another bidder for that keyword might spend $10 a click to rank #1 on the SERP, and see double the clicks that I’m getting. In that scenarios it sounds like we lost, but when you crunch the numbers, our placement on the 4th spot down means we’re actually getting half the traffic of the top bidder for 1/5th of the price!

Situations like the example above are extremely common in any sort of competitive bidding environment, but it can be a serious risk to under-bid unless you know exactly what you’re doing. So how do you capitalize bidding less to win more?

THE POWER OF CLICK RANK TECHNOLOGY
Over 13 years ago, I started selling my marketing services as a consultant to local businesses in my area who couldn’t afford the bigger guys. I charged about $3,000 a month, offering one-on-one personal service for their businesses. But even with all of my attention focused on my handful of clients, I wasn’t able to provide the same level of success to my clients as Yodle does today at less than 10% of the cost. Why?

Well, it certainly wasn’t do to a lack of skill or care. The truth is, without an advanced method of assigning a good lead back to a click on an ad, even the best marketer can’t do their job effectively.

Think about it – if you aren’t able to tie your results back to the changes you’ve made, how could you make informed decisions on how to improve your marketing strategies?

Yodle can provide very effective marketing for local businesses thanks to our “ClickRank” bidding algorithm. We have historical data from over one hundred thousand small businesses for whom we have run SEM campaigns, and we apply advanced machine learning techniques to that data to learn exactly which traffic does and does not convert. Our bidding algorithm uses this information to make sure that we’re acquiring good traffic for our clients at a cost that makes sense. Our intelligent use of data allows us to bid the exact amount you need to get quality leads without overspending a penny.

You’ll never get this level of sophistication from any small agency or SEM consultant – while they may be experts in SEM, they neither have the data nor the advanced technology that relies on that data to run high-powered, high-performing campaigns.