Pay Per Click - Is it for You?

What is Pay Per Click? Pay Per Click Advertising is an online advertising format that enables you to place your advertisements at or near the top of search engines for your keywords based on the amount you bid. Imagine that you have built a great website with relevant keywords, excellent keyword density, perfect anchor text, and good links back to your site. You now look on the search engines for your keywords and your site doesn't show up? What do you do? Your best bet is to advertise. You could advertise on television, on the radio, and in news papers but that could be beyond your budget and it might not be cost effective. An alternative could be Pay Per Click Advertising. How to Use Pay Per Click Advertising You must follow the guidelines for each of the PPC search engines to format your ads correctly. That is not difficult to do but it does limit how many words and what kind of words you may use. It requires you to make your ad well written with short headlines and limited ad content. Here are recommendations for making good PPC ads: Use relevant keywords in your title. You only get a second or two to catch the searchers attention. Write your ad specifically for the target audience. They are the people you want to click through and take some kind of action. You do not want people clicking your ad that have no interest in what you are "selling", because they will just cost you money with no hope of return on your investment. Point the ad to a specific page on your site where the information is relevant to the searcher. Otherwise they will hit the back key and move on to another site. Many PPC advertisers just send their viewers to their home page and wonder why they get poor results. You want the page they land on to get them to take some kind of action. That may be to buy something, sign up for your newsletter, or make a yes or no decision. Do not use all capitalizations or use exclamation points in your title. The search engines specifically state not to do this. They use human editors and your ad can be rejected. Try to get somewhere in the top five positions so your ad will show up on the first page of the buyers' search. Often times there is a great difference in the cost between the first position and the second position and between the second position and third position. After you have gained experience with PPC ads, start experimenting with changes to your ads and test them to see if you can get a better return. The big PPC adsvertisers split test their ads by rotating them to see if small changes in the wording affect the click throughs. Where to advertise The two top places to advertise are Google Adwords and Yahoo's Overture. MSN appears to be gearing up for a PPC system similar to Google and Yahoo. Right now they get their ads from Yahoo. The Dark Side of PPC There is, unfortunately, a problem going on with the Pay Per Click search engines. It is called PPC fraud. PPC fraud can break your bank account. PPC fraud is when someone or some group decides to click on your ad multiple times with no intention except to cost you money. These can be in the hundreds or thousands of clicks. They typically use click bots that mimic human click throughs from various IP Addresses making it hard for the search engines to recognize what is happening. Who would do this? It could be a competitor trying to bankrupt you. It could be an individual or groups trying to make money from systems similar to Google Adsense. It could be internet vandals just doing it for kicks. It doesn't matter who is doing it. It matters that you can find yourself in a heap of financial trouble. What you should do is monitor your ads. You should do that anyway to determine how your campaign is going i.e. are you getting the return on investment you need, and you should do it for ad testing. If you sense that click fraud is happening, immediately suspend your campaign and contact your PPC engine and let them know about it. You may be able to get your PPC engine to refund the fraudulent amounts. Google has stated in their annual report that they may have to refund PPC fraud and they don't know how much it will cost them. This is not meant to scare you away from using PPC. It is meant to make you aware that it is happening so that you can approach it prudently. Conclusion Pay Per Click when done right can be an effective and low cost means to draw live paying customers to your web pages and be a strong tool in your arsenal for making money on the internet.