Free Pay Per Click Advertising and Online Marketing Advice

Domain Names are Hugely Underrated in PPC

August 22nd, 2007 Posted in PPC Basics

What would you say if I told you that you could get another line of text in your display ad on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter results pages? As I was reading Todd Crawford’s article entitled “Web 0.1″ it dawned on me: domain names are highly underrated in pay-per-click marketing. Let me tell you why…

Your basic text ad displayed in pay-per-click campaigns are composed of a relatively short, catchy title, followed by two longer lines of ad text and completed with a single line for your display URL. What most people don’t realize is that if your domain name, and display URL string contains search query keywords, you are essentially getting another opportunity at increasing relevancy and therefore quality score.

Let’s go to an example.

Say you were a used car dealer (yet again, yes…) and you wanted to advertise that you just got a shipment of Toyota Tercels. (Let’s assume the words Toyota, and Tercel are not blocked by keyword trademark filters). You might write an ad that looks something like this:

Toyota Tercel from $500
Unbelievable selection of mint condition
used Toyota Tercels. Sale ends today!
www.UsedCars.com

Here are some of the keywords this ad would show decent ad quality for (in descending order):

  • Toyota Tercel
  • Used (cars)

Every other keyword in the ad only shows up once, and therefore would not help in increasing your quality score for those terms, meaning you’ll be paying more for the same position than some guy or gal running this ad:

Toyota Tercel from $500
Unbelievable selection of mint condition
used Toyota Tercels. Sale ends today!
www.UsedToyota.com/Toyota-Tercel

The guy or gal running this ad has the advantage for the same keywords because they appear in his domain name, and he or she is including a (real or imagined) subdirectory in his display URL. Perfectly legal, perfectly kosher in the search engine’s eyes. Again, the idea here is to increase the relevancy of your ads as much as possible.

Now that we’ve established the display URL line is a potential goldmine for higher quality PPC ads, we can talk a little bit about domain names. Domain names carry a bit more weight in terms of marketing importance because they are less liquid than subdirectories on your web site. What does this mean? You don’t have the freedom to go into your PPC campaign and make up domain names as easily as making up subdirectories. Picking a good domain name early in the game is extremely important.

If you can still find names with general keywords on a good top level domain (TLD) such as .COM, .NET, or .CA, my advice would be to buy them up and put them to use as PPC landing pages (alternate domains with strong keywords that feed main sites have less importance in SEO nowadays). For as little as $5 USD per domain, it makes sense to lock up your trademarks and variations of your trademarks in different TLD’s at the very least.

Beware the Black Hat SEO/PPC

One tactic that I’ve been skirting on but not mentioning is using your additional domain names as redirects. Don’t do it, it’s not worth it. If you get caught doing it in order to increase quality score, or worse yet run multiple separate PPC accounts, the big three search engines WILL ban you.

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