Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

One of my clients, SnapNames, is in the beginning of a Pay Per Click (PPC) program test cycle. We’ve worked with a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firm out of Chicago called IMI.

IMI always recommends starting slowly on a PPC program to test the best phrases without paying too much for them. And wow. Are they right! We started testing in mid-December for SnapNames.

In three short weeks, I’ve consistently seen something amazing: dropping an ’s’ from a typical two word phrase (for example: “domain names“) had remarkable results.

The first line shows results for the phrase without the “s” - e.g. domain name, and the second line shows results for the phrase with the “s” - e.g. domain names.

I should note, that SnapNames defined a conversion (Conv.) as a person who not only clicks through on the ad (CTR) but creates a search for a domain name on SnapNames’ site. So there can be many more ‘conversions’ than ‘clicks.‘ In this case, we see the effect of that phenomenon.

The phrase without the ’s’:

• Cost Per Click for the phrase without the ’s’ was half the price of the ad with ’s’
• Conversions were higher, at only 15% of the total ad spend
• Because there were fewer searches for the phrase without the ’s,’ this more esoteric search term yielded a Cost Per Action (CPA) rate of only 10% of the CPA of phrase with the ’s’

The point is, if you’re really serious about SEM, be prepared to test, test, test. Because the results of your testing can save you a lot of money in the short and longer term.