Online Marketing via Pay Per Click

I will elaborate on Optimalprint’s decision related to online marketing via Pay Per Click, a perfect complement to Direct Mailing. For Optimalprint’s commercial launch we evaluated costs and benefits related to Affiliate Online Marketing Programs versus setting up a Pay Per Click Campaign ourselves.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is the advertisement used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Your company pay when a potential customer clicks on your ad. You enter into an auction by bidding on the keywords promoting your ad, called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads". Such ads appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results. The placement you get depends on your bidding price.

Online Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. In short - you pay a middleman for assisting you in displaying your ads on the right websites for the type of traffic that you set out to reach.

Optimalprint’s Situation
Such affiliate marketing services usually have a payment model consisting of a non-refundable fixed fee for setting up the affiliate online marketing solution and then a pay per click cost. These two cost parameters vary widely between industry, country and competitors. Large markets and industries with more competitors typically render higher PPC cost. The affiliate online marketing tool evaluated by Optimalprint would cost € 2000 in a non-refundable set up fee per country, followed by a pay per click between € 1,5 - 4,5. On top of the PPC cost, the middleman added a 30% commission on all clicks.

Decisions and Benefits of Running our own PPC Campaigns
Optimalprint did not enter into an affiliate program. For Optimalprint, now launched in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with France and UK soon to follow, our set up fee for the affiliate marketing programs would be €10.000. In addition, implementing PPC by ourselves render a significantly lower PPC cost. We pay € 0.1 to € 1 per click, which is roughly 5-15% of the Internet affiliate marketing program. If your company have 1.000 clicks, executing the PPC campaign by yourself would render roughly €2.000-3.000 in lower PPC cost per month. Furthermore, by running our own PPC Campaigns we have full control over Click Through Rate (CTR), i.e. the % of people that actually click on your ad divided by the number of impressions that your ad gets. Tweaking and improving the structure and text of your ad depending on the CTR is very effective.

Considerations before implementing your own PPC-Campaigns

1. Time – Implementing your own PPC Campaigns for a country is very time consuming. In addition it requires a lot of tweaking related to structuring your ad and adapting text and keywords depending on how your customers interact. We spend more or less 5-7 hours per week and country performing follow-up and continuos adoption. An affiliate program would save us a lot of time.
2. Countries, Languages and website structure – Launching Optimalprint in France is a challenge for us since we do not know the local conditions and website structure. Meaning that the quality of the websites, how effective they are in terms of converting the traffic, and the quality of that traffic, is not known to us. With an online affiliate marketing program, that knowledge is accessible via the supplier. A business partner that knows the local market and the country’s websites. Knowing the local website landscape will give support to your online marketing campaigns.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Effective PPC Campaigns require that you also link your Keyword campaigns to your SEO activities. The most effective PPC Campaigns arise when your selected keywords are found both in the organic search result and the sponsored links / ads. An affiliate marketing program can provide powerful placement of your ad on websites that rank high in terms of CTR and conversion.

CONCLUSION: Limited financial resources required us to implement PPC Campaigns ourselves, rendering important learnings and understanding about conversion, CTR and PPC Campaign structure. As Optimalprint grows we will most likely enter into some Affiliate Internet Marketing Program. However, with the knowledge related to PPC activities that we have now pursued, Optimalprint's procurement of Affiliate Marketing Services will be performed with much more accuracy. I strongly recommend all of you to get started with your first PPC Campaign before entering into an Affiliate Marketing Program.

Good luck!