Can your domain name (your website address or URL) impact your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? You’ve probably heard that your domain is important when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and your natural or organic rankings, but it can affect your pay per click advertising too.

There’s a couple of reasons why:

• Your domain name tells people what you do and what you are about: Consider the following two (made-up) domains: www.BuyBlueWidgets.com or www.BuyBWOnline.com. If you were an ecommerce site that sold blue widgets, which would be the better domain? You probably guessed it, it’s the first one. If someone sees this domain name, they know that they can purchase blue widgets. Do you get that from the second? You know you can buy something, but not what that something is.
• It makes good use of the limited ad real estate that you get: You get a very limited amount of space to get your point across, and your Display URL, if it makes sense based on your keywords, can be an added line to use.
• It can be “bolded” in an ad: if you use your main keyword in your domain, and someone uses it in a search term (i.e. – your domain is www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, and someone searches on “Blue Widgets Sale”), than the words that they used in the search will be “bolded” in your Display URL. The display URL for our above example would look like www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, making it stand out more.

One thing that you do need to keep in mind, when choosing a domain name, is to beware of trademark infringement. If someone owned the trademark to Blue Widgets, and you own the URL www.BlueWidgets.com, it’s very likely that the trademark owner will be able to legally acquire that domain from you. I’m not a trademark attorney, but I’ve seen several instances of clients who have had to give up domains that they’ve owned for years and years to the trademark owner.

Domains are important in how they affect your identity, so think carefully about them. When in doubt, buy several variations and test them out. Domains can be bought for under $10 now, so it’s not a hardship on the pocketbook. When creating your online identity, there are many critical things to consider, but don’t overlook the importance of choosing a domain name that is going to best represent and benefit your business.

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Preparation is one of the cornerstones of successful PPC advertising. The effort you put into researching keywords, building the account structure and writing ads is as important as ongoing care and maintenance of the account.

The account managers at JumpFly spend time with the client before they ever do a thing for them, going through the account goals, discussing metrics and explaining the process of what we do. I think many new clients are surprised at the amount of work that we do before an account or new campaign is ever built, but I think they are pleasantly surprised to hear that we’re not going to slap a dozen or so keywords into one AdGroup and call it a day.

It may take us a good three or four days of in-depth keyword research to find a solid list of viable key terms for a client. That list includes all variations of search terms, including plurals and word order. It’s categorized into AdGroups, so like terms are together, and a comprehensive list of negative terms are also included. We then send that list off to the client for approval before we start building their new account or new campaigns. This ensures we’re both on the same page as to where the client’s ads will be shown. Once a build starts, how long it will take to go live depends on the number of AdGroups that we need to create and how varied the ads need to be to make sure that each AdGroup is targeted in the best way. We’ve had builds take an hour and we’ve had builds take days.

The bottom line is that we don’t hurry the process – we’d rather spend time “sharpening the ax” so we do it right and give our clients the best possible service right from the start.

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