Some of the selected keywords will be more competitively bid on than others, driving the cost-per-click higher for those words. Your list of keywords can be adjusted as click-through rates begin to indicate which ones are performing best. Campaigns can be segmented and multiple ads deployed across selected search engines to extend your reach across the Internet. New visitors arriving at your organization’s conference website through PPC ads will be fairly well qualified. The path these new visitors take through your conference site should be analyzed and their conversion rates tracked. The event marketer must define, based on the nature of the event, conference or services they provide, what constitutes a conversion. Examples of conversions would be a new paid event registration, a request for more information or a newsletter subscription sign-up.

Through a strong link popularity strategy, you can build a relationship with complementary online communities. Overture will distribute your PPC ads to sites that are relevant to your keywords. Yahoo! has services where you can list events in a directory for a specific period of time.

Be aware that a link popularity strategy does not simply mean obtaining as many links as possible. The quality of the links is more important than the quantity of links. Quality, as always is the case with on-line marketing, means “clicks”. The more clicks through to your site, the better your long-term rankings will be with both the search engines and directories.

Advantages of SEM Programs

The advantages of SEM should be compelling to any event marketer. SEM offers a cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your dedicated conference website year-round that will help build awareness of an event or conference and of your organization’s services and values.

SEM programs take a little time and dedication to set up, but once going they are fairly easy to monitor. The key is to find the right vendor to help you get started. A good SEM vendor will provide keyword search ranking reports and can set up a bid management system for ads placed on Overture to make sure you are not overpaying for clicks to your site.

Once you are up and running, you can use your web traffic analysis program (NetTracker™, for example) to create custom reports on the pay-per-per-click traffic that arrives at your site. SEM marketing offers a flexible and adaptable solution for any organization. As you start to see results and analyze your reports, you can add more SEM activities to fine-tune a campaign as your budgets permit.

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