PPC – What is it?

PPC or Pay Per Click Advertising is a great way to very quickly get visitors to your website. Within a few hours of starting your Advertising campaign you can be driving qualified traffic to your site, where other Internet Marketing strategies like Search Engine Optimization could take months to generate results.

Added advantages of PPC are that you can target a specific geographic area, advertise only on days or specific times that your target audience are looking for your products and services. You can also limit your daily advertising budget so there’s no surprises at the end of the month.

This is GREAT for testing new products, running promotions or targeting a new customer base.

Handled properly PPC Advertising is probably the most cost effective way to promote your business today. Compared to traditional marketing efforts like the Yellow Pages, Direct Mail, Newspaper Ads etc its cheaper, measurable and can be tweaked in an instant.

If not done right however you can spend a lot of money with limited results.

Check out the following tips on PPC:

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Definition:

Pay Per Click is a marketing system on Web in which the advertiser pays to the site owner when the user clicks on it and it takes to the main source page. This is a more interactive, results-oriented method compared to paying for just the placement of a banner ad on a Web page apart from if anyone clicks on it.

PPC Search engines, such as Yahoo! Google Search and 7Search.com, are search engines that return the results of a search based on how much the advertiser bid for placement. The one that bid the most gets its offering to appear first in the results list; the second-highest appears second, and so on. After all paid advertisers are displayed; all the other results appear just like regular search engines. If the user clicks on a paid advertiser’s offering to go to its Web site, the pay-per-click search engine charges the advertiser’s account for the bid amount.

Tips:

Instead of jumping into a pay-per-click campaign and immediately blowing a ton of cash, keep these pay per click tips in mind:

1. Check your ego at the door! Sometimes it’s tempting to get into a bidding battle, just for the pure competitions…don’t do it! It’s not worth it.
2. Calculate your profit on the items you are advertising. If you only make a dollar or two per sale, it may not be worth starting a pay-per-click campaign.
3. Calculate your conversion rate. Check your website statistics and find out how many clicks it takes to make a sale. This will help you determine how much you can afford to pay per click. Let’s say you have an item that gives you $15 profit. It takes you 100 clicks to get a sale. This means you could bid 15 cents per click to break even. Of course, a targeted pay-per-click campaign will likely give you a better conversion rate, so keep that in mind.
4. Make a budget and stick with it. If you can’t afford more than 7 cents per click, don’t bid higher. There are always more targeted keywords to be found. And remember, even if you aren’t on the first page, you will still get clicks. Perhaps, not as often…but you will still get clicks even if you are 3 pages in, especially on frequently searched phrases.
5. Make or use special landing pages for your campaigns. If you have an online gift shop with a variety of items and you are bidding on “blueberry scented candles”, don’t send them to your home page. They may not be able to find the blueberry scented candles and that’s what they are looking for.
6. Write different ads for different products. If you are bidding on the terms “Spongebob Toy” and “Blue’s Clue’s Toy”, write separate ads that will capture the attention of the searcher. Imagine if you were searching for “SpongeBob toy” yourself and you saw and ad that said: “SpongeBob Discount Toys….” And then you saw another that said: “Nick Toys on Sale” Wouldn’t you more likely click on the SpongeBob ad?
7. Target your keywords. This is so critical. If you don’t target, you’ll waste your money. You want each person who clicks through to do something when they get to your website, right? Whether it be:
   Subscribe to your newsletter, Buy your product, Fill out a lead form, Always keep it in mind. Put yourself in the mind of the searcher.
8. Use the keyword research tools provided. Most pay-per-clicks will show you related phrases that are searched for. You can also do searches with Word Tracker which will give you even more keyword possibilities.
9. Use negative keywords where possible. Google AdWords allows you to specify which word should NOT be included in your campaign. For example, if you are bidding on: Crystal bracelet, Crystal and pearl pin, Flower pins
10. And you sell them at retail. You may want to use the negative keywords of “free” and “wholesale” for example. That way, your ad wouldn’t show up when people are looking for “free crystal bracelet” or “wholesale flower pins”.
11. Use phrase match and exact match, where possible. Google AdWords allows you to ensure that your ads appear only when you want them to. You can specify if you only want your ad to appear when the exact phrase is entered without any extra words (exact match) or the exact phrase with extra words allowed (phrase match).

Source: http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/seo/pay-per-click-tips.html