3 Key Questions About PPC Advertising
You've heard the term pay-per-click advertising but you aren't
really sure what it means and how it applies to you?
In order to better understand PPC advertising there are three
key questions that need to be answered:
~ What Is It?
~ Why Use It?
~ How Do You Get Started?
Pay per click advertising, often known simply as PPC, is the
fastest and easiest way to gain targeted traffic for your web
site.
What exactly is PPC advertising?
It is very much as it sounds. You place a bid (sometimes mere
pennies ranging up to many dollars) on a key word or key phrase.
Your bid guarantees you a place in the search or ad listings for
that particular key word or phrase.
Your anchor text and link (sometimes accompanied by descriptive
ad copy) then appears in search engine results relative to the
price of the bid. If you are the highest bidder, your webpage
appears at the absolute top of many search engines.
Every click on your ad will cost you the agreed upon amount (or
bid) and your ad will be displayed until you have generated that
number of clicks.
Why would you use PPC advertising?
There are several advantages to PPC advertising.
Probably the single greatest advantage that PPC offers over
other forms of advertising is that you only pay for performance.
In other words, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
PPC advertising also offers a great deal of flexibility to you
as an advertiser. You can continually change and tweak your
campaign or even run different campaigns at the same time to
test performance for different key words, descriptions, and
sales pages.
PPC advertising also gives you a great deal of control over when
your ad campaign will start and stop as well as the exact
phrasing of your displayed ad text and the target sales page.
Timing is another key reason why many people seek out a PPC
campaign. While it may take weeks or months to achieve a listing
for a new site (or to change the listing status of an existing
site). With PPC you can achieve top ranking literally overnight
and see a dramatic jump in your traffic.
How do you get started with PPC advertising?
Your choices for arranging a PPC ad campaign are many. The top
players are Google and Overture, recently purchased by Yahoo.
Microsoft has added MSN Search and there are many smaller
engines out there as well.
It is important that you have an idea how much your visitors are
worth to you and that you watch your conversion rate (the
percentage of visitors who become customers) closely. You need
to do this so that the PPC rate you are paying is worthwhile for
you.
PPC advertising requires planning and careful management. You
should do a lot of homework and testing before embarking on a
PPC campaign. Test out your sales copy and optimize your
conversion ration before you put money into a PPC campaign.
You need to know your target audience and have a pretty good
idea what search terms they are likely to use.
Most PPC engines, certainly the big ones, offer this calculation
and tracking for you so it is fairly painless, but you should
always double-check it before adding more funds to a campaign.
Most engines let you know what placement your bid will give you
so you can jockey for the best position at the lowest price.
They often will also often give you an idea of how many clicks
to expect at various rankings.
The more specific your key phrase can be to your product then
the higher your conversion rate is likely to be. Often the PPC
rates for select key words is high but you can quickly find
phrases that are actually more apt for your product and cost you
a lot less.
PPC advertising can be tremendously powerful and profitable, but
it can also be very costly and confusing. Start small, test all
the angles, and then build on your success. Unless you are
experienced and knowledgeable you can easily lose a lot of money
with PPC advertising, but carefuly management and cautious
planning can help you achieve the success you desire.