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[P126]Pay Per Click Costs

by Hooshmand Moslemi, Hoo

If you have found your Pay Per Click marketing a very stressful, costly and useless process, if you think it would be impossible to make a profit through PPC advertising, if you are a bit tired of the game especially when it comes to more competitive markets; then you are not alone. Hopefully, your problem could be solved!

If you really want to save your business and make your marketing efforts more effective to bring you tons of profit, then you should think about reducing your PPC costs. Period!

Instead of selecting expensive products to increase your profit margins, you can simply lower your bids and avoid wasting a lot of money. That way, you would be able to increase your Return Of Investment (ROI) which means more profit. So, here is the question:

How To Reduce Your PPC Costs

In order to solve the problem, you will need to do the following steps. Trust me, it may seem complicated at the beginning, but once you get it, you will be able to lower your pay per click costs. Here you go:

1. Selecting Long-Tail Search Keywords:

There are two reasons behind selecting long tail keywords that may help you succeed in online marketing. First, the competition would not be too high which means lower minimum bids. Secondly, your Conversion Rate would be better because long-tail keywords are more targeted. So, avoid bidding on too broad or general keywords! It would not work.

2. Creating Keyword-Centric Ad Groups:

Creating relevant Ad Groups based on each keyword is the second step of building a successful advertising campaign. It may seem too time-consuming, but you would better create one Ad Group for each and every keyword.

That way, you would have a better control over your advert by using the specific keyword in the body of your ads. The results are amazing. You will get higher Click Through Rates (CTR) and better Quality Score which both will reduce your costs.

3. Writing Attention-Grabbing Headlines:

Believe it or not, an attractive headline would get more attention and entices the visitor to click through and see your offer. So, not only will you get a curious visitor to your landing page, but also will you achieve a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) which means pretty reduced costs. So, spend more time and write highly relevant and attention-grabbing headlines!

4. Using Landing Pages Focused On Each Keyword:

Again, it may look like a demanding job, but if you build your landing pages more relevant to your keywords, you will achieve two benefits. One is getting a higher Quality Score meaning lower costs and the other one is gaining better Conversion Rates meaning more profits for your business.

If people land on pages and see what they are searching for, they would simply take the needed action and convert to a customer. So, the users would be happy finding the thing they were looking for and you would be happy getting a customer and making a sale. But, it is the search engine that would become much happier than both of users and advertisers.

Since the customers will most likely come back again and use the search engine to get relevant results and advertisers will be willing to pay money for buying more sponsored ads, the search engines such as Google AdWords are willing to reward smart advertisers, people who can bring relevant results to customers. This reward can be translated as lower PPC costs for them. So, using a relevant landing page will always pay off.

5. Reducing Your Maximum Bids Manually:

Once you get a good CTR (normally more than 1%) and Great Quality Score after a few days, manually reduce your Maximum Bids for each keyword by 15% daily. That way, your costs will be lowered while you don´t lose your ad position and CTR. After a while, you have considerably reduced your advertising expenses.

Pay Per Click Advertising through search engines could bring you a lot of targeted traffic and if done properly, it could become a very cost-effective marketing method. While there are a lot of people losing a fortune on PPC media, you can be among the smart and winner marketers.

So, in order to increase your profit margins, you don´t need to sell highly-priced items on your landing pages. Instead, you have to find out how to reduce your Pay Per Click costs.

I will just come out and say it. Pay-per-click is the most frustrating, pointless, bone-headed form of internet marketing known to man . Most websites use at least some pay-per-click to attract traffic to their site. Other sites use nothing but pay-per-click to attract traffic to their site. I, on the other hand, detest it. I hate paying for clicks and I have modified my internet marketing strategy accordingly.

What is pay-per-click (PPC), you ask? Well, go to Google, and then type in a keyword or phrase that you want to search for. Then, at the top of the search results, you will see a section for what is called sponsored links or sponsored results. These sponsored links are paying a certain cost per click to be listed in this special section at the top of the listings. Each one of these websites pays a certain fee to Google each time someone clicks through to their site.

Each website that uses PPC has to place a bid on how much they are willing to spend per click for a certain keyword. The highest bidder is placed in the number one position, the second highest bidder is placed in the number two position, and so forth. Also, each bidder specifies how much they are willing to spend per day. Once their daily budget has been exhausted, the clicks stop until more money is added to the account.

Google is not the only search engine that has a PPC service available. Overture also has a service, as does Miva, and several others. Each service is tied to different search engines. If you go with Google, your website will be listed on Google, AOL Search, and Ask Jeeves. If you sign up for Overture, you will be listed on engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, and several others. Miva is tied to approximately 6 different search engines.

The costs are expensive, especially if you are bidding on a highly sought after keyword or phrase. Keywords related to auto insurance, or mortgage quotes, can cost anywhere between $1 - $20 per click or even more if you want to be ranked in the top position. If the keyword you want to advertise for is not too popular, the click costs will be much less. Usually, doing pay-per-click will boost your Google PageRank by 1 (PageRank is scored on a scale of 1 to 10), but it certainly has never actually helped me get anywhere near the first page of Google.

It is possible to spend thousands dollars on clicks and make zero sales of the product or service you are selling. Conversion rates are usually 1%-3%, meaning that only 1%-3% of the people who come to your website will actually order what you are selling. So, you need to take that into account when developing your marketing strategy.

The problem with PPC advertising is that most people using a search engine are only looking for information, and are not planning on buying any products or services. So, you can spend tons of money to get clicks, but you will likely only convert 1% - 3% of those clicks into sales, and sometimes you will get absolutely zero sales.

I am not saying that the search engines do not bring business to your site. They absolutely do. That is why it is good to achieve a high ranking on the search engines within the free part of the listings. Even though you will still only convert a small fraction of your visitors into paying customers, at least you are not wasting money on every single click. So, getting to the top of the search engine listings without having to pay for each click is paramount for your online business.

PPC advertising is not necessarily inappropriate for every online business. If you are selling an expensive item ($100 or more), you can turn a profit as long as your per-click costs are somewhat modest. But generally speaking, you will spend more than you will make.

The only time PPC is truly helpful is for businesses that sell a service where a recurring fee is involved. For example, dating websites charge their customers a recurring monthly fee to be a member of their site. So, if you own an online dating service, it makes sense to use PPC and not worry about losing money on attracting new customers, because if they stay members for the second month, you will be able to charge them again, thus making your website profitable. If they stay members for a year or more, then you really come out ahead.

You need to have a lot of cash to burn in order to compete with the bigger businesses who are spending thousands of dollars per month for their clicks. If you are operating a small business, you need to diversify your internet marketing efforts by optimizing your website and increasing your link popularity so you can climb to the top of the search engines without having to pay for every click you receive.

Also, you should consider having an affiliate program so that other websites will promote your business for free as long as you pay them a commission for any referrals they produce. The best way to approach internet marketing is to use several different methods that when put together result in an optimal cost situation for your business and attract a significant amount of targeted traffic to your website.

Article Source : Pg. 12

About Author

Both Hooshmand Moslemi & Jim Pretin are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Hooshmand Moslemi has sinced written about articles on various topics from PPC Advertising. . Hooshmand Moslemi's top article generates over 590 views. to your Favourites.

Jim Pretin has sinced written about articles on various topics from Insurance, Medicine and Homeopathic Remedies. Jim Pretin is the owner of , a service that helps programmers make an HTML form. Jim Pretin's top article generates over 33100 views. to your Favourites.