Lower Your Pay-Per-Click Costs with Customized Domain Names

April 28, 2007

Edit: Google put the squash on this one, as of April 2008, your display URL must match your destination URL. Of course, you could get around this by using domain pointers, so long as these other URLs don’t get indexed (duplicate content issues). In other words, if you want to try this, be sure you have someone on your team who really knows their stuff on the SEO side.

We have a client in the highly competitive and saturated real estate market who just wasn’t getting the response from his ads as our other clients. To be honest, the ads were roughly the same, and we were scratching our heads as to what we could do to improve their anemic response rate.

As an experiment, we purchased an entirely new domain name that was specific to the area of town that matched his ads.

Old domain name: joeblowrealty.com

New domain name: Specificareaoftownhomes.com

The domain name only cost $6 per year, so we figured it was a pretty good gamble. How did the experiment turn out?

Results of the PPC Domain Name Experiment

This client increased the click-through rate, or ratio of customers that saw the ad to those that clicked on it to learn more, by 50%. Google rewards advertisers who get better response rates by making them pay less per ad, so this client’s cost per ad dropped 25%. Since they had a set ad budget, that means we could show their ad 25% more times and get them 25% more customers for the same price. All for the low, low price of $6 per year.

Lessons for Your Company

Some companies get all wrapped up in the branding, and won’t use multiple domain names because of assumptions that customers will be confused about the domain name not matching the company.

However, In most cases we have been able to test with hard data, the consumer really doesn’t either notice or care. Seriously, they don’t care about your or my company name for the most part until we already have a relationship and prove ourselves to be invaluable to their life. Branding takes time unless our company name is seriously memorable. The customer is primarily looking for answers to the question that got them searching online in the first place. They then look for elements of trust on a website before making a decision to start a relationship, but that step is near the end of the purchasing process.

Therein lies the value of a specific domain name for an ad in Pay per click. The customer sees this very specific ad. The question you may be asking which I didn’t address, is “Does this mean I have to create multiple websites?”

The answer is no – but there are some technical tricks to properly implement this technique so the major search engines will show your ads. That’s where the expertise of a Search Engine Marketing Professional comes in. Avalanche Internet Marketing specializes in custom pay per click advertising programs if your company has a minimum monthly spend of $2500. Contact us today at (843) 557-1400, or via email to discuss how our custom PPC campaigns can boost your company’s sales, and slash your current online ad costs.

Looking for Quality Ophthalmic Exam Chairs? The global leader in professional eye care equipment is right here in the United States.