It’s no secret that effective ads and landing pages are crucial to the success of your search engine marketing efforts. Perhaps you’ve already created compelling copy relevant to your keywords, achieved top positions on the search results pages, and optimized the design and usability of your landing pages. All of this may have increased your site’s traffic and conversions, but do you still want more? Try offering an incentive.

Appealing incentives are proven to persuade searchers to not only click on your ads but also convert once they arrive at your landing page. Depending on the nature of your business, you can offer a free white paper or book, discount, web special, complementary product or accessory, gift, or free shipping to boost conversions. According to an article in Practical eCommerce, 84% of online shoppers surveyed during last year’s holiday season said they were most influenced by free shipping offers, while 77% cited sales and specials as their strongest motivators.

However, when it comes to determining the ideal incentive for your site, it’s best to test. Remember that while an incentive is a value-add for your customers, it’s also an incremental cost to you. That’s why it’s important to consider how it affects your bottom line. A recent study in Marketing Experiments Journal confirms that conversion rate alone cannot indicate which incentive has the most positive impact on net profit. Instead, the journal recommends using Return-On-Incentive, or ROIc, to measure this. Simply stated, the ROIc is the net cost of the incentive subtracted from its net profit. For instance, a free shipping offer might result in more conversions, but a free gift might be a better incentive because it yields a higher ROIc. Check out the study to learn more about calculating ROIc and using it to test two or more incentives.

Are you utilizing incentives to your advantage today?

Yahoo has recently added a new feature to their engine that is changing the way we search. The feature is called “Search Assist” and it predicts what you’re searching for and offers suggestions as you type. While this is a new feature for Yahoo, this system has been around for sometime in the Google Toolbar and on Ask.

Search Assist is a great tool and makes life easier for those who use it. It allows you to get results by typing fewer keystrokes and helps you find what you are looking for when you don’t know the exact words to use. However, search assistance brings some new implications for search engine marketing.

Anytime new search features are introduced, people’s search patterns are usually altered. This means that search engine marketers have to understand and adapt. One of the effects of search assistance is that people will create longer searches. Long tail searches will become more common and this will mean more traffic for those keywords.

Another interesting effect is on branding. When typing a brand or company name in the search engine, popular results are suggested as relevant news articles or related keywords. It is interesting what is suggested when you type in the names of certain products. For example, when you type “diet coke” into Yahoo, the first suggestion on the list is for “diet coke and mentos”. Adding mentos to diet coke leads to a major eruption that makes for a cool science experiment. However, marketers at the Coca-Cola Company might not want that to be the first thing suggested to people who type in their product.

Search suggestions are just one of the many ways we’ll see our search behavior change in the next few years. The effect of the suggestions will be even bigger when Google launches search suggestions on its main search page. Little changes, like a list of suggested queries will have some profound effects. Search engines play such a major role in the internet that it doesn’t take a drastic change to cause a serious impact on organizations.

Lately I’ve been hearing the same question from a lot of my clients, “What do you do to optimize my paid placement campaign?” Well at this point of my career, I don’t feel I’m ready to give away the formula to the secret sauce, but I would like to give our readers some pointers. This will be part of a five-part blog, that will give tips on things to look for when making tweaks and “cutting the fat” from your campaigns. The best way to get top performance from your campaign is to start optimizing when you first launch. The first data you see is a great way to predict where the campaign is headed.

#1 Make Sure Your keyword Avg. Position is where you want to be.

When first launching your new PPC campaign, give your campaign a few hours before going in and making any changes. If you’re bidding at $0.50, you can then go in and see where your ads are showing up based on the keywords you chose to run and begin to get an idea of how competitive your keywords are. If the average position for your keywords is higher then ten, you’re probably not getting many clicks or impressions. If your goal is to sell your products, generate leads or get users to sign up for a newsletter, you need more searchers to see your ads to give your ad more chances to be clicked on. The best thing would be to raise your keyword bids to $1.00, but only for those keywords that are over an avg. position of six. This should raise your average positions which will provide you more impressions and more clicks. To keep from overspending, you may want to lower your daily spend.

My second recommendation will be posted in my next blog which should be up in early November