What is Pay Per Click Advertising?
You have designed your website and everyone thinks it looks great! Indeed, compared to your competitors you consider it the best looking web site in the world and you are promoting a fantastic product as well. However, if your potential customers don’t know about it, you won’t get any traffic or sales and all this effort will go totally wasted.
The above scenario is the biggest problem facing all internet marketers all over the world. This is especially so for newbies who frequently get discouraged and give up their attempts to make money online.
Now, you can try several wonderful SEO strategies to show higher up in the search engine rankings for your chosen keywords (e.g. Backlinking and Article Marketing). However, it may take some time to drive your “SEO stake in the ground” with these methods. In the meantime potential customers may go elsewhere.
However, do not despair as there is a “knight in shining armour” ready to save the day. His name is Pay Per Click, also known as PPC.
PPC is an extremely powerful method that will drive targeted customers to your website. It is not for the faint hearted though as it can sometimes be expensive but the rewards in return can be considerable.
Is Pay Per Click Right For You?
As I said, this is one of the more expensive methods of generating traffic, but provides an instant stream of visitors to your site. There are a number of companies offering pay per click advertising, the largest being Google, of course, but Yahoo and Bing are two other ones.
Google’s PPC brainchild is known as “Google Adwords”. If you go into Google.com and type in a keyword phrase such as “Accountants” you will see some adverts down the right hand side of the organic search results. There are also usually 2 or 3 adverts on the top of the organic search results as well. All these adverts are sponsored by companies that use PPC through Google Adwords.
You will also come across these ads when you visit certain websites where the webmaster has opted to display ads on their site. These ads are known as contextual ads because they are displayed on pages where the content is closely related to the keywords associated with the ad. The same principle applies and the theme / topic of the page matches the keywords associated with the ad. In this instance, the webmaster will receive a payment from Google for displaying their ads. This program is known as Adsense.
How does PPC work? – The Basics :
In essence you place an Ad with Google Adwords (after signing up) and pay for every click that takes a visitor to your site. The price per click is determined by the popularity of the keyword and its position in the list.
Other factors that cause prices to vary can be how competitive your market is at a particular time of the year and how relevant Google determines your adverts to be. Prices can vary anything between 1 cent to tens of dollars.
The sheer beauty of this system is that you only pay Google when someone clicks on your advert. This is somewhat of a revolution in Advertising as most other forms (e.g. newspaper adverts) force you to pay regardless as to whether customers read and/or take action.
There is no fixed price for a specific keyword or the position where it’s displayed on the page. The advertiser has to stipulate the maximum amount they are prepared to pay per click (max bid) and then Google uses this and other information from all the other advertisers to work out the position of each advert. You need to be very careful with what you bid and what you set as a budget if your keywords are expensive, as it could run up your credit card bill very quickly.
There are many advanced strategies that can be used with PPC and Google Adwords so that you can improve your chance of success. These include testing your adverts out against each other and choosing the strongest (known as split testing), using negative keywords to increase your click through rate, using the Google content network and geographical targeting, to name but a few. We will cover these strategies in articles to come.
The best place to start a a newbie is go to Google and search Google Adwords. They offer some great help in the form of step by step instructions and coaching videos designed specifically for beginners.
By Marco Lombardo