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How does it work? The major search engines offer bidding for the placement of your ad based on keywords. You bid on keywords that you want to place your ads on, related to your product. If you bid the highest, your ad goes first. When someone does a search for that keyword, your ad is available to them to click on. If they do, you are charged whatever you bid. For example, if you bid $.30 for a keyword to get top spot, and 100 people click on your ad in a day, you pay $30.00. Multiply that times 30 days and you can see how quickly your advertising budget gets expended. If it is a keyword that is very popular, and thousands of people click on your ad, it really costs you big.
But, you might ask, isn't a lot of click throughs what you are looking for? Isn't that a good thing? It depends. If those clickthroughs result in sales, yes, it is great. But, if sales don't result for a good percentage of those clickthroughs, then it is not a good thing at all.
One of the disadvantages to pay per click marketing is that your cost per click remains the same, regardless of traffic. Your overall costs go up in proportion to your clicks. But, in the normal search engine optimization, as your traffic increases, your costs go down. You spend a particular amount of time and money to optimize your site, and increased traffic doesn't raise your overall expenditure.
Is pay per click all bad? Not at all. It can profitably increase your search engine traffic, which increases your website traffic, if it is managed well. With some programs, such as Google Adwords, it can immediately increase your website traffic. If you are at the top of a popular keyword, you will get instant clickthroughs, and potentially, customers. Also, you can adjust your ad campaigns to match marketing trends a lot easier than you can rework your web content to draw search engine traffic.
What are some management tips? The most basic is to focus your efforts and to be well aware of what you are spending, your conversion rate, and your number of clickthroughs. Like any advertising method, you have to stay on top of what is going on or you can spend many wasted dollars in ineffective advertising.
When is pay per click a good idea? There are three major areas where pay per click advertising is beneficial.
Campaign and advertising testing issues. If you are introducing a new product, or if you want to test drive an advertising campaign, you can expect immediate traffic and can test ads by changing in mid-campaign and watching results.
Direct response sales – if you sell something that the customer can buy immediately, pay per click advertising may be beneficial. You know that each click through may be a sale.
When using a niche phrase – when a certain keyword might be expensive, a keyword phrase with that word combined with another one might be a real bargain and generate a lot of traffic.
Pay per click advertising is not the solution for everyone or every situation. But, managed well and used effectively, it can very efficiently drive website traffic and resulting sales.
PPC in a Nutshell:
When you search for something online and see a sponsored ad, this ad is being paid for by someone who wants it displayed when certain keywords are searched upon. If you're an internet marketer who targets the right keywords and writes a great ad, you are half way to making a sale.
The other half of the process happens when people get to your actual sales landing page. Writing great copy and converting browsers into buyers is something all internet marketers continually strive to improve upon. But the biggest battle, according to many, is getting the right traffic to the landing page in the first place.
By paying for your ad to be displayed at the right moments, you'll have the potential to capture the attention of the people surfing the net who are interested in what you're selling. Here are some helpful tips to make the most of your PPC campaign
PPC Software
There are several software tools on the market that can help you manage your ad campaigns. Timesaving tools like SpeedPPC can make a big difference in how much time you spend managing your campaigns. These tools can also help you extract reporting that helps you identify what's working and what's not so that you can fine-tune your campaign.
Learn about SEO
While PPC is different from organic SEO, knowing why it works and how it works can help you. Also, if you're dominating the search engines organically and you have pay per click adverts as well, you've got a better chance of your prospects clicking through to your websites instead of your competitors.
Keyword Research
Part of what can make or break a successful payperclick campaign is the use of keywords. Go for the long tail instead of the short tail and spend time researching buying words versus browsing words. The right keywords can help you in a big way in terms of saving money and attracting targeted buyers
Writing the Ad
A good ad can be compelling to click. There are a lot of different techniques to help you find the right ad writing strategy. You might go for shock, you might go for curiosity, you might go for features and benefits. Whatever approach you take, you've got a small amount of space so being succinct is important.
Can you get rich from pay per click advertising?
Some do. Many don't. What probably separates the winners from those who walk away lighter in the pocket and dismayed is research and tools. Learn all you can about what successful pay per click marketers do in their campaigns and try to think like a customer in terms of choosing keywords, writing ads, and writing landing page copy / sales letters. The more you know, the more successful you can be. Some pay a lot of money before achieving that coveted first sale but there are tips, resources, tools, and software packages that can shorten the learning curve and increase your success rate.